SHE WAS A GYPSY WOMAN

By John Elson

GYPSIES HAVE TRADITIONALLY been the untouchables of Europe, lowest of the low. In medieval Romania, a Gypsy could be bought and sold as chattel, often for the price of a pig. In 18th century Prussia, Gypsies over 18 could be hanged without trial solely on the ground that their itinerant life-style was illegal. The Nazis targeted Gypsies for elimination as congenitally criminal, and more than 500,000 died in Hitler's death camps.

With that kind of sorrow-laden past, it is little wonder that these "quintessential strangers," as author Isabel Fonseca calls them, remain wary of all gadje (non-Gypsies.) An American of Hispanic and Hungarian-Jewish parentage who lives in London, Fonseca used her painstakingly acquired knowledge of Romany, the Gypsy language, to gain insight into a scattered nation of 12 million people without a homeland. Bury Me Standing (Knopf; 322 pages; $25) is both a history of the tribe and an account of the author's personal quest to uncover its secrets.

Because of their Semitic looks, Gypsies were often thought by Europeans to be Arabs (the word Gypsy is itself a corruption of Egyptian). Fonseca accepts the scholarly consensus that the Gypsies left their original homeland in northern India for Persia and points west in the 10th century, probably as captives. Contrary to popular conception, the majority of Gypsies are not itinerant, except when uprooted by local prejudice or intimidation. Despite the external squalor of their compounds, Gypsies, Fonseca writes, are almost ritualistically fanatical about cleanliness. She describes living in a Gypsy family's home in Albania, where she was considered unfit, as a mere gadja, to wash herself. Proper scrubbing was performed by two teenage girls.

Sadly, the ancient hatred of Gypsies for their supposed deviousness has revived since communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. In Romania and the Czech Republic, mobs have burned Gypsies' homes and beaten their occupants, sometimes to death. Police and legal authorities have generally condoned these atrocities. In desperation, thousands of East European Gypsies--500,000 in 1991 alone--have applied for asylum in the West. Rather than accept repatriation after a 1992 pact between Germany and Romania, Romanian Gypsies in German relocation camps destroyed their identity cards. They were deported anyway.

Bury Me Standing is written with compelling passion and aphoristic grace, though its narrative of Gypsy history is unfortunately strewn through several chapters (perhaps the author felt that this scattershot approach was appropriate for a people whose tragic story is as meandering as the trail of a caravan). Fonseca certainly succeeds in her effort to draw attention to these often invisible people. She ends by noting that an emerging Gypsy elite has entered mainstream politics in Europe. Self-assertion, these leaders believe, is essential for Gypsy survival. Ironically, many whom they seek to help consider them traitors for abandoning the stealth that helped Gypsies survive a millennium of hatred.