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what i'm reading wednesday 5/3/2025
What I finished:
Bury Me Standing: The [Roma] and Their Journey by Isabel Fonesca. I'd been meaning to read this one for years and finally got around to it because the bright yellowy cover caught my eye on the stacks at the public library.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It's less a history of the Roma in Europe than it is a portrait of them at a particular time and place. There is some historical background provided, but really the book is based on fieldwork that Fonesca did in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of various communist regimes. The book is an interesting sketch of how various Roma communities were adapting to the immense changes of the time and how the larger communities they lived in were reacting to them.
Things I learned that I'm really glad I learned:
+ Roma were actually held as slaves in Romania for centuries. I had no idea. In fact, the Romanian word for Roma was used for all slaves, so some people who were enslaved who have no connection to what we think of as the Roma people ended up becoming Roma of sorts because that's what they were called.
+ After the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, there were a bunch of pogroms against Roma people, which for the most part were never prosecuted--those who committed them got away with it.
+ The sense that Europeans think (or thought, at the writing of this book, I don't know how much changed) that it's 100% okay to hate Roma for being Roma, though the more self-aware couch it as "We don't hate Roma, we hate criminals." Of course the implication is that all Roma are criminals, so it amounts to the same thing. I had some idea of this, but not a deeper understanding of it.
+ There was a strong sense in this book that the Roma purposefully hold themselves aloof from any sense of history as a survival tactic. Most communities until very recently only paid attention as far back as the memory of the oldest members of their communities. They had no real interest in where they came from (a perpetual obsession of gadje--non-Roma people) and would happily create narratives that served them in the moment (see: them embracing claims that their origins were in Egypt, a place that the people they lived among at least had some sense of, unlike India). This resulted in subsequent generations post-Holocaust (called "the Devouring" among Roma) having no real idea that they were even targeted for extermination. I think this has changed quite a bit in the last thirty years as a real sense of Roma solidarity and pan-national community has emerged, but it was the case when the book was written.
+ Because of their disinterest in history and their oral culture, it's really hard to have any sense of Roma history except through a) their interactions with local authorities, which due to the nature of record-keeping are most frequently about crimes (real or alleged) and b) linguistic developments. We know that the Roma came from India because their language has a basis in an Indian language. We know they stopped over in, like, Persia and stuff because of words they picked up there. But we don't know why they moved around, how they made decisions, how their culture has changed, etc. and we never will.
+ There are interesting ways in which it's useful to compare the social position of Roma in Europe to Ashkenazi Jews; there are other ways in which a better comparison is Black Americans; and there are some ways in which they seem completely unique.
Despite all this learning, I sometimes got a bad feeling in my mouth about this book. For one thing, like the Amish, the Roma don't seem to want gadje to have any sense of their culture, so in that sense it felt kind of gross reading it. Also, while the author is very definitely supportive of rights and justice for the Roma, some of her writing had a tinge of condescension or even antipathy that at times felt uncomfortable to read. Her physical descriptions of people in particular kind of put me off.
I also came away with a heavy sense of hopelessness. In the world in which we currently live, there doesn't seem to be a way for the Roma to continue their traditional way of life in a healthy way. Their options seem to be continued persecution and poverty or assimilation. In this sense, I think Jews, who otherwise have a lot in common with Roma, actually have it slightly better--Jewish culture is foreign to Christian/post-Christian Western culture, but it's not alien. Jews mostly want to be sedentary and invest in the place where they live; when we move, it's because we have to. And Jews have a strong sense of history, of education, of texts, all of which make it easier to live among non-Jews. Roma don't have any of these advantages. They're an oral culture, one that is built around very young marriages and only interacting with gadje in the context of business. If you emphasize education, literacy, or further interaction with gadje, you're only going to erode the very foundations of Roma culture.
HOWEVER. This book was written from the perspective of a gadje, albeit one who lived among Roma for several years and formed relationships with them. There is every possibility that if I looked into resources published by Roma in the past few decades, they would have their own ideas about how to survive and thrive and balance adaptation and continuity. So I need to seek some of those out!
The book also stirred up a lot of feelings in me about the tension between loving your culture and your people but not becoming xenophobic. I think that's a really hard line to walk. I tend towards the universal, cosmopolitan stance: people are people! Our differences are glorious but we should share all the beautiful things we make whether that's art or food or ideas! Nationalism of any kind is bad!
And yet, I don't want those differences to disappear into a muddy sameness, and in order for distinctiveness to continue, there does have to be some kind of lines of demarcation.
I'm only just beginning to really dig into this tension, which is no surprise--when I was just your average white USAmerican, it wasn't something I had to think about. Now that I'm a Jew...well, it's something to think about all the time! (The intermarriage debate is a thing for a reason!)
A note about terminology: there's an afterward by the author that was written in the mid-2000s that talks about how, when she was writing the book, Gypsy was still the preferred word for Roma, even amongst themselves, but since that time, they've started to reject it as a slur and embraced the term Roma. I appreciated this context and her acknowledgement.
What I'm currently reading:
I picked up Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian again. I'm still not sure whether this book is good or bad, but the vibes are immaculate.
Bury Me Standing: The [Roma] and Their Journey by Isabel Fonesca. I'd been meaning to read this one for years and finally got around to it because the bright yellowy cover caught my eye on the stacks at the public library.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It's less a history of the Roma in Europe than it is a portrait of them at a particular time and place. There is some historical background provided, but really the book is based on fieldwork that Fonesca did in Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of various communist regimes. The book is an interesting sketch of how various Roma communities were adapting to the immense changes of the time and how the larger communities they lived in were reacting to them.
Things I learned that I'm really glad I learned:
+ Roma were actually held as slaves in Romania for centuries. I had no idea. In fact, the Romanian word for Roma was used for all slaves, so some people who were enslaved who have no connection to what we think of as the Roma people ended up becoming Roma of sorts because that's what they were called.
+ After the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe, there were a bunch of pogroms against Roma people, which for the most part were never prosecuted--those who committed them got away with it.
+ The sense that Europeans think (or thought, at the writing of this book, I don't know how much changed) that it's 100% okay to hate Roma for being Roma, though the more self-aware couch it as "We don't hate Roma, we hate criminals." Of course the implication is that all Roma are criminals, so it amounts to the same thing. I had some idea of this, but not a deeper understanding of it.
+ There was a strong sense in this book that the Roma purposefully hold themselves aloof from any sense of history as a survival tactic. Most communities until very recently only paid attention as far back as the memory of the oldest members of their communities. They had no real interest in where they came from (a perpetual obsession of gadje--non-Roma people) and would happily create narratives that served them in the moment (see: them embracing claims that their origins were in Egypt, a place that the people they lived among at least had some sense of, unlike India). This resulted in subsequent generations post-Holocaust (called "the Devouring" among Roma) having no real idea that they were even targeted for extermination. I think this has changed quite a bit in the last thirty years as a real sense of Roma solidarity and pan-national community has emerged, but it was the case when the book was written.
+ Because of their disinterest in history and their oral culture, it's really hard to have any sense of Roma history except through a) their interactions with local authorities, which due to the nature of record-keeping are most frequently about crimes (real or alleged) and b) linguistic developments. We know that the Roma came from India because their language has a basis in an Indian language. We know they stopped over in, like, Persia and stuff because of words they picked up there. But we don't know why they moved around, how they made decisions, how their culture has changed, etc. and we never will.
+ There are interesting ways in which it's useful to compare the social position of Roma in Europe to Ashkenazi Jews; there are other ways in which a better comparison is Black Americans; and there are some ways in which they seem completely unique.
Despite all this learning, I sometimes got a bad feeling in my mouth about this book. For one thing, like the Amish, the Roma don't seem to want gadje to have any sense of their culture, so in that sense it felt kind of gross reading it. Also, while the author is very definitely supportive of rights and justice for the Roma, some of her writing had a tinge of condescension or even antipathy that at times felt uncomfortable to read. Her physical descriptions of people in particular kind of put me off.
I also came away with a heavy sense of hopelessness. In the world in which we currently live, there doesn't seem to be a way for the Roma to continue their traditional way of life in a healthy way. Their options seem to be continued persecution and poverty or assimilation. In this sense, I think Jews, who otherwise have a lot in common with Roma, actually have it slightly better--Jewish culture is foreign to Christian/post-Christian Western culture, but it's not alien. Jews mostly want to be sedentary and invest in the place where they live; when we move, it's because we have to. And Jews have a strong sense of history, of education, of texts, all of which make it easier to live among non-Jews. Roma don't have any of these advantages. They're an oral culture, one that is built around very young marriages and only interacting with gadje in the context of business. If you emphasize education, literacy, or further interaction with gadje, you're only going to erode the very foundations of Roma culture.
HOWEVER. This book was written from the perspective of a gadje, albeit one who lived among Roma for several years and formed relationships with them. There is every possibility that if I looked into resources published by Roma in the past few decades, they would have their own ideas about how to survive and thrive and balance adaptation and continuity. So I need to seek some of those out!
The book also stirred up a lot of feelings in me about the tension between loving your culture and your people but not becoming xenophobic. I think that's a really hard line to walk. I tend towards the universal, cosmopolitan stance: people are people! Our differences are glorious but we should share all the beautiful things we make whether that's art or food or ideas! Nationalism of any kind is bad!
And yet, I don't want those differences to disappear into a muddy sameness, and in order for distinctiveness to continue, there does have to be some kind of lines of demarcation.
I'm only just beginning to really dig into this tension, which is no surprise--when I was just your average white USAmerican, it wasn't something I had to think about. Now that I'm a Jew...well, it's something to think about all the time! (The intermarriage debate is a thing for a reason!)
A note about terminology: there's an afterward by the author that was written in the mid-2000s that talks about how, when she was writing the book, Gypsy was still the preferred word for Roma, even amongst themselves, but since that time, they've started to reject it as a slur and embraced the term Roma. I appreciated this context and her acknowledgement.
What I'm currently reading:
I picked up Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian again. I'm still not sure whether this book is good or bad, but the vibes are immaculate.
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I would be really interested in hearing more about this, if you're up for it!
Ooooof. Yeah. Something I grapple with too.
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On the other hand, Jews have always had a strong sense of Jewish peoplehood, whereas until recently, Roma had no real sense of Roma peoplehood--they were attached to their clans/tribes. Also, Jews are bound by a devotion to specific texts and a common origin story, whereas Roma are not. There's also the sedentary vs. nomadic thing.
With Black Americans, the similarities are the history of enslavement, a greater visual difference from the majority population, ideas about sub-standard intelligence and inherent criminality, and a history of their music being culturally appropriated.
The uniqueness is the oral culture (I don't think there are many other groups in Europe that stayed illiterate for so long), the choice to be nomadic, the lack of a sense of history, and the lack of any kind of formal religion--Roma identify as Christian or Muslim, but it's very much a cultural thing, and their religious beliefs tend to look like superstition to gadje because there's no formality to them.
Those are just off the top of my head!
Something I grapple with too.
I did not know how much mental bandwidth this would take up for me before I converted, so that was a surprise, but it's helpful that I know that lots of other people are grappling with it too!
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Why can't I spend my life reading???
I KNOW!
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I think this is VERY relevant to the Roma. I suspect that even now that they're developing a pan-Roma identity and are becoming more interested in their own history, they probably still view it very differently than most Westerners do.
If I find anything, I'll let you know!
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Reading this, to be honest what this reminds me of is the queer community, though this is because the constant churn of people in the community means that institutional memory is either extremely short, nonexistent, or actively destroyed. It seems like in every generation there's a new explanation for "where queer people come from" and some choose to embrace it and some rebel against it and a lot use it as a convenient way to get people to leave them alone.
Like on my first readthrough I was surprised at this
but considering the aforementioned similarities, the quick turnaround in vocabulary is unsurprising.
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but considering the aforementioned similarities, the quick turnaround in vocabulary is unsurprising.
Yeah!
Thank you for sharing this thought!
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And there is Swedish Travellers that largely came to Sweden in the 16-18th century. They are mostly integrated, and though they probably are at least partly Roma, they have a differnt language and customs. I never met anyone from the bigger cities who have prejudices against them, thougt there still are in more rural areas.
I’ve no idea if she’s translated, but Katarina Taikon was a Roma activist in Sweden who wrote a series of biographical children’s books about growing up in Sweden in the 30s and 40s. They’re very good. She wrote a biography directed towards adults too. It's fair to say that she and her sister Rosa was hugely the reason perjuides against Roma has dimiished as much as it has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katarina_Taikon
I love the Historian so much, but I can understand why it it's for everyone. My husband found it dead boring...
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And there is Swedish Travellers that largely came to Sweden in the 16-18th century. They are mostly integrated, and though they probably are at least partly Roma, they have a differnt language and customs.
Ah, like the Travelers in the British isles!
My husband found it dead boring...
I totally get this! I keep going, "This is a whole lot of words for very little that is actually happening." And yet I am not bored!