Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey by Isabel Fonseca. 

This was another slow read for me because I needed to take the misery in smaller doses.  Roma and Sinti continue to face blindingly terrible discrimination throughout Europe.  I don’t think discrimination is even the word for it: discrimination alone doesn’t seem quite strong enough to burn entire Rom communities out of their villages. 

Fonseca traveled amidst and around Rom and Sinti communities in Europe in the early 1990s, a time when the constraints of Eastern-European dictatorships were falling away, leaving old ethnic hatreds to bubble forth and explode all over the region.  We all know about the great injustices perpetrated by one ethnic group against another in Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania.  We have heard far lass about the centuries-long use of Rom as the scapegoats of Europe.  Fonseca peers into a culture most in the West know little about, examines the truth and exaggerations behind romipen or "Gypsyness", and documents myriad abuses of Rom communities by their governments, their neighbors, and their cousin-tribes. 

The author also explores the Nazi attacks against Rom and Sinti and current reactions by historians to the plight of Gypsies during the holocaust.  The ongoing unwillingness to recognize that Rom and Sinti were truly victims of genocide seems to stem from many ancient hatreds.  Whatever its cause, the refusal to weigh the Gypsy holocaust experience is wrong-headed and dangerous. 

Fonseca closes with a look at attempts to organize and unite Rom and Sinti within the UN, the EU, and as an inter-state body in Europe.  Unfortunately, little additional progress seems to have been made since the book was originally published, though the European Roma Rights Center continues to press European governments to prosecute those who attack Roma. 

In hindsight, I am a bit disappointed that the author paid relatively little attention to Traveller and Gypsy communities in the UK and Ireland.   But there are only so many pages in the book.  Overall, the writing is quite good, the tone is engaging enough for the book to be enjoyable for non-academics, and the photographs are gorgeous.

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