Book Reviews

Bury Me Standing, The Gypsies and Their Journey

by Isabel Fonseca
Chatto & Windus, 1995.
Review by Sam Beale

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pg. 58.

Isabel Fonseca’s book about her stays with Central and Eastern European Gypsies is delicately and intelligently written. It is a very personal account and that is its strength. She tackles the major issues concerning Gypsies: race, nomadism, poverty, sexual politics, crime and so on, and does so from an outsider’s perspective, from notes she made whilst staying with Gypsy families during the six years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Her accounts are raw and honest. She is not frightened of the taboos of this complex, marginalised and greatly misunderstood people and thus her insights offer a contribution to greater understanding of Roma rather than a romantic gloss-over.

The book becomes extraordinary when Fonseca is directly involved in the story she is telling. Particularly moving were her accounts of visiting a village in Romania shortly after a racist attack and of her attempts to help one family cross the Polish border into Germany. As well as recounting the story of the Gypsies’ journey Bury Me Standing is the story of her own journey through intense cultural differences and unlikely relationships. Ranging from intimate studies of the lives of some of Europe’s poorest people to fascinating, often disturbing, historical information (including the shamefully forgotten details of the treatment of Gypsy people by the Nazis) and the current rise in racist attacks and political developments within the international Gypsy community, this book is an impressive achievement. It’s expensive and still in hardback but the library should have a copy by now.