Tags: Central Europe | culture | Roma

On a summer afternoon, one can find congregations of Roma - Gypsies - in the park in front of Prague's main train station, having picnics and playing songs. . .

Sometimes you can witness the moving, musical performance surrounding a celebration or funeral. Or maybe you've just noticed the shanty towns along the railroad tracks. Such scenes are familiar to anyone who has traveled Central Eastern Europe, and like most East Europeans the traveler's exposure is rarely matched by understanding.

You accompany a 13 year-old Roma girl for an abortion at a dingy clinic, observe a trial at a Roma kangaroo court - then sit down for lectures on the origins of Roma rootlessness or a linguistic deconstruction of the Roma language. This is fascinating stuff. Roma arrived in Eastern Europe via India and Persia sometime in the fourteenth century, and since then have been reviled for their alien ways and treasured for their unique skills.

But mostly they have just been reviled by their host cultures. Shunned, called the "children of Ham", persecuted, Roma were slaves as late as the middle of the 19th century in what is now Hungary. Nor has the modern era changed much.

Fonseca describes how the Communists attempted to forcibly settle and integrate the Roma, but instead merely created ghettoes and further isolation by causing the loss of craft skills by which they had traditionally made a living. In the last ten years the situation of the Roma has deteriorated badly, which the author documents unsentimentally, as she does the oft forgotten fate of Roma during the Holocaust.

A culture with its own community structures, nationless history, language, mores, and beliefs, the Roma constitute a sort of shadow civilization in the region, one that Fonseca knows well and translates admirably. As the fate of this people gets ever more precarious - between an East that sanctions their murder and a West that just wants them kept out - it is a story we ought to know.