Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey [Hardcover]

Isabel Fonseca (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1995

With 50 illustrations and 3 maps.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

They travel endlessly and seem to appear almost everywhere, yet they are the world's most mysterious people: Gypsies. Isabel Fonseca has done the impossible, entering into their world, living and traveling with Gypsies during several long trips to Eastern Europe, and she has brought back an insightful, highly personal, and very readable account of who the Gypsies are and how they live. The Gypsies have a legendary aversion to "gadje," or outsiders, but Fonseca has lifted the curtain and written gracefully about their lives on the edge of society.

From Publishers Weekly

In numerous visits to east central Europe, London-based journalist Fonseca has produced an intriguing and affecting portrait of the continent's largest minority. Her first-person narrative meanders, but not inappropriately: the Gypsies are homeless, and they lie zestfully, challenging the author, who remains skeptical despite her sympathy for her subjects. After recounting a summer in the Gypsy quarter of Tirana, Albania, she explores Gypsy history, then profiles women in the deracinated Bulgarian Gypsy culture. The book acquires urgency when Fonseca shows how antipathy toward, and violence against, Gypsies has escalated since the revolutions of 1989; the raw hatred she records is chilling. Meanwhile, western European countries implement harsh policies regarding refugees and "settling" the nomadic Gypsies. Unlike Jews, the Gypsies "have made an art of forgetting" their persecution (in the Holocaust, etc.); Fonseca sees a glimmer of hope in the fact that Gypsies are beginning to acquire a new collective identity as "Roma." This book gives a vital voice to a group long persecuted and misunderstood. Photos.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 322 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st ed edition (October 17, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679406786
• ISBN-13: 978-0679406785
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #651,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good description for Muslim Roma, but not all Roma, March 10, 2000

By 

"baranja2428" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (Paperback)

My husband and myself are from one of the largest Rom villages in the former Yugoslavia. While we found Isabel Fonseca's book entertaining, some the information was inadequate. Most of the rituals and superstions she describes are not adheared to in our village at all. American Rom sometimes cling to these beliefs because they do not want to become assimilated into society. In our country that will never be the case. We will never be seen as equals, or as Slovenes,nor would we be treated as Slovenes. Our village is known for its celebration of Rom culture and its independence. We have our own stores, bars, disco, drama club, folklore dance group and are members of the International Romani Union. We speak only Romani in the home. While we do not adhear to the stringent codes of behavior that Fonseca's Rom subscibe to, we still remain a separate minority in society - and we are proud to be Roma!

93 of 101 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond stereotypes, December 23, 2001

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (Paperback)

This book opens with a chapter on the great Romany poet, Papusza (born as Bronislawa Wajs), which appeared earlier in The New Yorker. As Fonseca tells us, Papusza wrote a long autobiographical ballad about hiding in the forests during World War II--"Bloody Tears: What We Went Through Under the Germans in Volhynia in the Years 43 and 44." Discovered by the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski in 1949, Papusza also wrote of the Jewish experience and "the vague threat of the gadjikane" (non-Gypsy) world." But her 1987 death in Poland, where she had lived most of her life, went unnoticed.

That is an appropriate beginning, for this book is not academic anthropology--and it more than admirably explains, from the Roma point of view, what it means to live in a world that remains largely threatening to the Roma. The book is not uniformly complimentary. But Fonseca lived for a period with Roma families, learned their separate and distinct Romany language, traveled across Eastern Europe with them, observed the poverty-stricken ghettos and mud hovels in which the poorest made their beds. And one finds in her closeness to them a sympathy altogether lacking in many other works.

Fonseca writes of her own extensive experience, of course, but also refers to more than 140 scholars, including the fine work of Rom professor Ian Hancock and Jan Yoors. The latter likewise lived among Roma, albeit during the pre-war and World War II eras. She recounts the likely path that the Roma traveled from India to Europe, their centuries of enslavement, their high rate of illiteracy (and cultural reasons for it), their experience during the Holocaust, which the Roma appropriately term the Devouring--and the new generation of Rom leaders who hope to lead their people to a more productive and accepted role in European and world society.

For anyone who has ever wondered about the Rom--especially those wanting a portrait that moves beyond the stereotypes of literature and music like Carmen--this is a fine place to begin. Alyssa A. Lappen

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ambitious but unevenly focused & paced, June 5, 2005

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (Paperback)

Fonseca writes inteliigently, integrating many sources and personal observations, but this book remains rather too narrowly intent upon rather journalistic glimpses of Roma life throughout 1990s East-Central Europe. She combines her own interviews and reading with reflections upon how "gypsies" and Jews coexist and play off each other's stereotypes in the eyes of the dominant culture that illuminate from her own perspective (her mother's Jewish) how marginalised peoples have to survive often on the less respectable fringes of a world that both inflates and diminishes the power of "the Other." Especially revealing is her exploration of "the Devouring," the Roma cataclysm during WWII.

Others have commented on the fact that she only delves in-depth into one Albanian family, and I agree that this concentration lessens the impact of the rest of her book, which follows in a more general survey Roma in Bulgaria, Romania, Germany with glimpses in the Czech lands, Poland, and the Balkans. She refers to other "gypsies" in the West and India, and I realise that publication pressures may have limited her ability to give all the detail she may have wanted to, or, on the other hand, that she chose a few representative places and events to stand for the whole panorama.

But, I did feel that she sensed an exhaustion of the topic by the last chapter, a weary recountal of conferences and rather fruitless statements of purpose by "professional Gypsies" and the academic and public policy specialists who follow the Roma. She writes from an American identity but her prose uses Britishisms to arrive at a expat, mid-Atlantic style that makes her seem more detached from her subject than she may have meant. (Perhaps the influence of her now-partner, Martin Amis, in assistance when she worked on this book can partially account?) While Fonseca has done her reading and strives mightily at giving us an popularised introduction to the Roma, her chapters vary widely in interest and verve, and the book took me much longer to read as a result.

Lively depictions of a train trip from Poland to Germany vie with desultory recitals of conversations with countless individuals who have little of interest to relate. Careful crafting of her sentences collides with boilerplate renderings of findings reminiscent of anthropological term papers. This may have been Fonseca working as best she could with the interviews she had, but a more severe editor could've pushed her to do more with what she compiled, or to cut to the best portions for a much smaller but more energetic account.