Any time I made a post on Facebook about how belly dancers shouldn’t call themselves gypsies or present whatever they were doing as “gypsy dance”, someone would invariably suggest that I read Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca. So I finally purchased it and started reading it, and I’m not going to lie… It took me about 8 months to get through this book.
Bury Me Standing might be the single most depressing thing I’ve ever read. It talks a lot about poverty and persecution. There’s a whole long chapter about the Holocaust. It paints a pretty grim picture of the lives of Romani people in Europe in the 90s. It took me forever to read because I could rarely handle more than 20-30 minutes at a time, and sometimes I’d take weeks or even months off.
If you are looking for a lot of information on Romani culture, you will not find it in this book. You’ll get a bit, especially in the first chapter, but mainly it seems to focus on their history, the persecution they’ve faced, a bit about activists within the community… But all of this is also about 20 years out of date. It’s good reading if you want to understand how wrong the “carefree gypsy” stereotype is, but I don’t think it will give you a complete picture of the lives they live.
This book did answer some of the questions I had about why most discussions about the Holocaust don’t include the Romani people. So I did learn some things beyond just getting a snapshot of life in the 90s.
If anyone has recommendations for more modern books that cover similar topics, I’d love to hear about them. Please let me know in the comments!