The Fiction Bookshelf #3

Zoli - Colum McMcan

I first heard of Zoli and its author Colum McCann on Bookworm, a weekly podcast that I religiously listen to. I was convinced early into the half hour show that I needed to read this book partly because of my long fascination with all things Eastern European and partly for the insight that McCann expounded upon host Michael Sliverblatt’s always unique questions. The Irish author gives an original take on the Roma and a not too far flung connection I sense is the common history of persecution between the Irish by the English and later Americans, and the not so subtle discrimination of the Roma by most of central and eastern Europe. Add to this McCann’s talents with prose and the loose fictionalization of Bronisława Wajs, a Polish Romani woman known as Papusza in her culture, and one has the novel Zoli.

The book starts in 1930’s Czechoslovakia with the childhood of Marienka “Zoli” Novotna and her Grandfather witnessing the deaths of their gypsy family by the fascist Hlinka Guard. McCann brings us into the post WW1 years of Eastern Europe where political chaos and instability are rampant. The Roma live on the outskirts of the societies they orbit by constantly traveling in close communities that share a culture that extends beyond national boundaries and tongues of the land. Gypsies are known as thieves and tricksters that live on the backs of hard working people, wandering the shadows with little of their own and nothing to offer contemporary life. While rival governments like socialists and fascists wrestle for power, the Roma keep to themselves and away from the centers of power that equally threaten their existence. And so a six year old girl and her grandfather watch in hiding as their kumpania (clan or extended tripe) including horses and wagons are forced onto an iced lake and soldiers set fire to the brush around the shore. The ice starts to crack, then break and the reader stands with the old man and girl watching a history and culture drown.

So begins the life of Zoli. Through this early lens she will become a prominent Romani woman that’s over flowing with talent as a singer and poet, and later as a kind of underground cultural icon inhabiting the imaginations of all kinds in post Soviet Europe.

Stephen Swan, a young journalist character of English and Slovakian descent that is a champion, lover, admirer, and unbeknownst exploiter of Zoli, soliloquizes;

There are those of us who haven’t yet told our stories, or refuse to tell them, and so we become them: we hide away inside the memory until we can no longer stand the shell or the shock – perhaps that’s me, or perhaps I must tell it before it’s forgotten or becomes, like everything else, something else.

Colum McCann brings together a European history of diversity and atrocity while giving his characters personalities that reflect both. In a story that spans her birth to death, Zoli is filled with love and drive but is constrained by the times she inhabits be it the war years or the cold war years spent in seclusion, and even the new found freedom of modern Slovakia. McCann’s Zoli is an image of repression bearing the lost gifts of humanity’s darkest days.

As a child Zoli’s grandfather gives her books and teaches her to read which is taboo in the Romani culture of the day. It’s a verbal, extremely insular culture that frowns upon education from the outside. Until the second half of the 20th century gypsy heritage and history have largely been past down by word of mouth and in so doing, inadvertently helped to perpetuate some of the urban myths of the Roma that are so often used against them. Zoli’s grandfather notices this and secretly teaches his daughter to be literate in the hopes of preserving their culture. All the while Zoli flourishes in the Romani traditions of music, and later as a singer commands local crowds of Roma eventually being noticed by intellectuals that subsequently translate her songs into books of poetry and finally the post WWII communist government of Czechoslovakia. The new government wants to bring the Roma out of the forest and into the cities by simultaneously embracing and assimilating them into modern society. Zoli is the heart and tool of this movement and ultimately becomes a kind of gypsy martyr that falls from the graces of her people and is eventually exiled from the traditions she cherishes to live a life of poverty on the run from the law and her people.

There is an old Romani song that says we share little pieces of our hearts with people and the further we go along, the less we have for ourselves until there is not enough left to go around and that’s called traveling, and it’s also called death, and since it happens to us all there’s nothing more ordinary than that.

Zoli becomes a ghost that ironically lives the true gypsy life. She comes close to death many times as she escapes angry locals, experiences sickness and starvation, gun wielding soldiers, and the intense cold of Eastern Europe. The lens she sees through becomes tarnished by her trust in no one. McCann shows all of her through the lives of many, making stylistic shifts in his writing that confuse and intrigue the reader while guiding us through the breadth of 20th and early 21st century Europe. And finally we are left at the end with a clandestine allegory that makes this novel spectacular.