Isabel Fonesca: Bury me Standing. The Gypsies and their Journey

Fabled, Feared, romanticized, and reviled, the Gypsies-the Roma-are perhaps the least understood people on earth. They have survived for a millennium, yet their history is obscure; their "nation" is a worldwide diaspora of twelve million, but their language remains unwritten and their culture largely mute. After the revolutions of 1989, Isabel Fonseca lived and traveled with the Gypsies of Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania-listening to their stories and recording their attempts to become something more than despised outsiders. In Bury Me Standing, alongside unforgettable portraits of individuals-the poet, the politician, the child prostitute-are vivid insights into the wit, language, wisdom, and taboos of the Roma. In a compelling narrative account of this large and landless minority, Fonseca also traces their long-ago exodus out of India and their history of relentless persecution: enslaved by the princes of medieval Romania; massacred by the Nazis in what the Roma call "the Devouring"; forcibly assimilated by the communist regime; and, most recently, evicted from their settlements by nationalistic mobs in the new "democracies" of the East, and under violent attack in the Western countries to which many have fled. Whether as handy scapegoats or figments of the romantic imagination, the Gypsies have always been with us. But never before have they been brought so vividly to life.