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Fonseca: Thanks for asking me onto your show.

Capen: Well, I've always had a real fascination for gypsy life. And, uh, have too many tendencies toward it --

Fonseca: (Laughs.)

Capen; -- myself, and not in the greatest of senses either. But one of my all-time favorite movies is "King of the Gypsies" (1986) with Sterling Hayden and Susan Sarandon as the girl he stole to be his son's wife.

Fonseca: I don't know that. Is it based on the Peter Maas novel?

Capen: Yes! Exactly.

Fonseca: I never saw the film, but I read the book. Which I thought was pretty good. Have you seen, "Time of the Gypsies"? That is really excellent. It was made by a Yugoslavian filmmaker called Emile Kustoricza . And it's beautiful, and a very good story. I recommend it.

Capen: Did you also happen to see "Latcho Drome" [Safe Journey]?

Fonseca: No, I haven't seen that, 'cause I live in London, and it seemed not to have come there. I forget. It flew by. By a French gypsy, I guess?

Capen: Yeah, another heartbreaker -- any story of the chingana is a heartbreaker, isn't it?

Fonseca: Yeah, well, it's a sad story. I don't know. Do you think my book is sad? Have you had a chance to look at it?

Capen: It's heartwrenching. There's no question about it. The cover photo alone...

Fonseca: I know.

Capen: What is happening in that cover photo? What is going on there? What is burning there?

Fonseca: That's a factory in the background. I think that was a factory...as shocking as that is -- it looks like a fire, right? I love that picture because it's so Eastern European. You have the rural, kind of pre-modern transportation: horses. And then this ghastly pollution, and wires. And that boy, I met him. Guess how old that kid is.

Capen: I couldn't begin to.

Fonseca: He's fourteen.

Capen: He's fourteen?

Fonseca: He looks about sixty, right?

Capen: Exactly right.

Fonseca: And the girl. You can tell that she's married, because she's wearing a scarf, the way it's tied behind her hair. It's an indication that the girl's married.

Capen: There's a concept in America these days that I think is used frequently, has been brought to the public for -- by people like Noam Chomsky and Jonathan Kozol, called "marginalizing" people.
Or, "superfluous" sectors of society. It seems like the gypsies are right at the peak of that, that they are--always have been--marginalized.

Fonseca: That's right. I mean, I was just downstairs at this office, looking through the magazines and the greeting cards, and there was a greeting card there -- and I think that in the United States, the very last group who could still be ridiculed in this P.C.- euphemistic world we live in...and there was a picture: of a thieving, hook-nosed, gypsy crone. I mean, Christ, can you imagine any other group, what response that would be? But it's still okay. I mean, no one questions saying that you get "gypped," and all that.

The whole business of being marginalized is a complex issue, though. I mean, it served gypsies well, in some ways, in their past. You know I do think that, not to blame the victim, but if they have been partially responsible for the image that they have it's because they haven't wanted merely to be victims of that image. It has invisibility, has had its uses. I mean, some observers say gypsy life can take it too far. But, for example, there's an English anthropologist -- Judith Oakley is her name -- who did some great research on gypsies, but thought that an Indian origin, giving that attribute, was a way of exoticizing and marginalizing them even further, because they were long resident in European populations.

So, well I guess it depends who's doing the marginalizing. Hmmm. I think at the moment -- it's a very interesting moment -- that I -- there was a time I was looking at them, because there's a real ambivalence about what direction to take. And there's some gypsies that have seen the uses of ethnicity, and are actively creating an image of themselves for public consumption. That's new.

Capen: In what way? I'm not sure I -- Just the romanticization of the gypsy?

Fonseca: No. But I mean if you think of over a thousand years, since their original exodus from India, all through the centuries they've been tracked by a kind of unmitigated history of persecution. And if you think that the outsiders who've been most interested in gypsies have been, oh, say immigration authorities and police and ethnographers of a nefarious kind, I mean, the Nazis were fantastic ethnographers; they took some 30,000 genealogies. And what happened to those genealogies, I mean instead of being turned over after the war to some place of commemoration, like Yav Ve Shem they were turned over to the Bavarian criminal police department. And, there was not a single gypsy called as a witness to the Nürnberg trials, and only 1982, the then-chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, recognized genocide in their case. And they were the only group, apart from the Jews, who were proscribed for purely racial reasons. So, I mean if that's your history, or one element of your history, not to mention four hundred years of slavery in Romania, you would probably seek not to attract attention to yourself. It's not that they're innately kind of dodgy or shifty.

But now that solution hasn't helped them. I mean if you're not that kind of monolithic visible group, it's very easy to be abused. So they're kind of ready scapegoats to blame for all the ills of these Communist societies in transition. Because they're not organized to protest. And some of them --their elite-- has noticed that, and now they're suddenly interested in wanting to commemorate the holocaust and wanting to publish their history in their own language, and others. That's new.

Capen: It's amazing to me that the world's population seems to have conspired to blame whatever has gone wrong on this group of people. When it was handy. They're blamed for everything from creating the nails to nail Christ to the cross, there are fantastic stories in your book about cannibalism --

Fonseca: Yeah, I mean it started a long time ago. Since they first arrived in Europe. And it's a good question: Why gypsies in particular? Partly, as I say, because they have -- because they don't have the kind of organization of a parent country, say, to stick up for them. And there are various reasons, particular to them, in Eastern Europe, they're dark-skinned and they're in great numbers and they're the blacks of Eastern Europe. There's some straightforward racism.

Also, I would say, that even though only about 5% of gypsies now are nomadic, or nomadic for more than the summer, say, that association with traveling is attached to them. So they would have been perceived as people with no allegiances to anyone. And indeed throughout their history they were called "spies." Of course in the pay of the Turks or other enemies of Christendom. And, also their association with the occult, and magic. On the one hand, it's fascinating and fortune-telling is still an incredibly lucrative business. On the other hand, it's frightening.

So, an interesting reason, which is perhaps hard to credit right now, but is certainly the case, I thought, in Eastern Europe, is that a lot of the other "natives" are very jealous of gypsies. I bet that's surprising to hear, but there it is. And the reason for that is that in Eastern Europe most people grew up in jobs which were theirs as a birthright. Gypsies were never really co-opted into that kind of regimented wage-labor, and it's one thing that you could say is universal about them -- that they try to avoid that type of work. And so they've always had to be flexible in reinventing themself and working in the margins -- and like the Jews before them who were also in Eastern Europe in great numbers -- The result now is that it's the gypsies who are going to, for example, Turkey and buying blue jeans and bringing them back to Bucharest and selling them at a mark-up. The response is what's surprising, not that activity. And in Romania, or Bulgaria, you meet people who otherwise, you know, are totally liberal friends. When it comes to gypsies, there's this violence, and violent response, and they'll say -- in Romania, this is actually called Jew-business, or the black market, which is a kind of euphemism for the gypsy market.

And you say: hang on, that's capitalism. Isn't that one of the reasons you had your revolutions? But, I mean. one doesn't want to be too hard on the other Eastern Europeans: it takes a very long time to develop a political -- a democratic culture. And one thing that's been happening, that gypsies have been a victim of, ifs that these places have the structures of democracy, without the culture. And so for example, in the press, or -- freedom of speech, freedom of the press, which for the time being still means the freedom to say whatever, whatever the hell you like, including "death to gypsies" in the press.

So, there's no self-censorship which comes in its later stage of -- a kind of civil society.

Capen: I'm curious about what originally motivated you to start this study.

Fonseca: Well, I became fascinated in Spain. It was around 1992, around the time of the Olympics in Barcelona. And it was a moment -- well I became fascinated with what appeared to be alarming contradictions, and confusion, in the general perception about gypsies. So, Spain at that time -- that country was very self-consciously giving an image of itself -- the Olympics was coming.

And everywhere you would see beckoning from tourist-board posters, pictures of this quintessential Spanish beauty, who was of course none other than Carmen, you know, a stereotypical gypsy in a tight, polka-dot dress.

At the same time -- the word for "gypsy" in Spanish, gitano or gitana is a kind of synonym for scum, "dark dealer," or low-life. Prostitute. And really the pits. And that seems to be true everywhere. I mean we use gypsies -- "Gypsy" has the same connotation for us, we've already talked about that, to get "gypped" and all that. But it did strike me that -- I mean, the same in Hungary, I've been discovering, you know, the violent, playing gypsy was as emblematic of Hungarian national culture as goulash. At the same time in that country, you know, there were pogroms going on. So, this seemed to be true everywhere, I mean not pogroms, of course, but I mean that there are only two things on the menu: you can have the kind of rather silly, romantic figure, and a lusty one, too, or, on the other side, something dark and parasitic, and threatening. You know? I wanted to find out what was going on here. I mean, part of everyone's mythology, and there's very little information. So I just, I got sucked into that question.

Capen: Did you feel at times that you were at risk yourself?

Fonseca: I fully expected to feel that way, but like many of my preconceptions, it didn't come about that way. I mean I -- I never felt safer in my life than with staying with gypsies. (Laughs.) Possibly --

Capen: Really?

Fonseca: Yeah! I think that the reason that gypsies are successful fortune-tellers is that they're very good readers of the human face, and could pretty much size up what kind of interests you had in them. And, also I made an effort to learn the Romi language, and I learned some -- it's very difficult, not 'cause it's such a hard language, but it's because there's so many dialects.

But still, the important thing about trying to learn their language was the effort, not the result. I mean, my effort, and that was taken you know as a source of incredible astonishment to gypsies, you know, once again, most people aren't interested in them for that reason. And it showed good will. And -- I mean, very quickly people size you up, and -- especially when you don't have a common language. I mean, you, yourself, become sensitive to many other nuances of appearance, and body language, and -- you can feel what people mean towards you.

And so, I was really -- I was welcomed everywhere I went, and not just by gypsies, with a kind of host-bankrupting kind of generosity -- also, that was the luck of being in those places just after the revolutions. I mean, outsiders were a source of real curiosity and Americans especially of status, I think. So there was some -- some element of that. While I was welcomed everywhere, I wouldn't go so far to say that I was accepted, I mean, there was always a barrier.

Capen: Do you feel like you're still somewhat -- It's interesting, the similarity of this word gadjo to the Japanese gaijin which means "outsider" as well.

Fonseca: I didn't know that. I wonder -- That's interesting because, well, I mean Romany is a Sanskrit-based language. So maybe -- from the other side.

Capen: Somehow the same root.

Fonseca: Yeah. How languages, I mean, at some point all intersect, pretty much, into European Languages. Of course, Japanese is not one of them, but -- that's interesting.

Capen: This reviewer, his name is Wladyslaw Pleszczynski (Executive Editor of The American Spectator) sounds like --

Fonseca: In the Wall Street Journal? Harrumph.

Capen: (Laughs.) Is it better than that in his review?

Fonseca: Well, I never felt so misrepresented, but anyway, go on.
No, actually he raises some interesting points. But I'll let you pick them.

Capen: Well, the one that drew my attention -- would draw anybody's attention, really is: are we going to like these people who are so eminently dislikable and, apparently, can't get along with -- with themselves? And in a -- the reference he makes, he says "to be fair it's not always clear that Miss Fonseca likes the people she so much wants to help." That kind of cuts to the heart of this ambivalence that people feel toward gypsies, toward homeless, toward anybody who is in need and who isn't exactly a welcome individual. How do you respond to that?

Fonseca: Well, I think that, I try to be very honest in my book, and it's not a "PC" kind of pamphlet. And I think that one does have ambivalent feelings and great frustrations along the way. But my own feeling is that, just as a healthy culture shouldn't and needn't be monolithic, nor need one's own responses be uncomplicated. And so -- first pointing to the idea that there's a lot of in-fighting among gypsies -- well, there's a lot of in-fighting among all leaders in that part of the world. The Balkans is famous for it. Balkanization is the result.

But in the end I wonder if that more organic, fractured federalist approach to politics and life isn't more healthy. We know what happened to the monolithic cultures of Eastern Europe. And they didn't represent anybody -- except for a desperate attempt to defend themselves. And -- I made particular friends, and I had other frustrations, but in the end I certainly had a lot of admiration for a kind of unflagging spirit. I didn't feel called on to judge personally, in the way that that has been asked you in that review, but -- yeah, the ambiguity's what's interesting!

Capen: Right. The closest parallel I can draw in my own experience are the many different Apache tribes. The San Carlos Apaches, unlike the Navajos, refuse to bow to the white government in any way, shape or form. The Navajos became known as "the white man's Indian." And have become economically very, very successful.

Fonseca: Right.

Capen: Not true for the other Apaches, because they really are similar-- it's very gypsy in nature, their activities.

Fonseca: Well, it is very similar. There are many similarities there. Part of the fascination of observing the birth of a political culture and these people articulating their identities in a public arena for the very first time, and their long history among us, everywhere, was fascinating. There's one of every type of imaginable political person then -- so there's a kind of, you know, strident Black Power, Eldridge Cleaver type, and there was -- they were conciliatory, semi-assimilated types, wanting to work within a white framework, and thinking it would change from within is more appropriate, and then it's kind of like Bible-thumping, religious types.

I thought that was fantastic! Isn't it great that there's such a rainbow of responses? You know -- In some ways, it's part of a historical process. You see that there's some group called the "RNC" that Roma National Congress, or the World Roma Congress. I mean you can see where they -- these are modeled on, and we have the kind of mimicry that goes on, which is a way of discovering how you're going to work.

But it's not something new for gypsies, this, I mean they're -- in their history, as you're pointing out with American Indian tribes, there have always been tribal differences, and the diaspora is not just a scattering of people, it's an elaborately complicated and organic network of clans and tribes who keep in touch and help each other out. And there's some more dynamic than others. And their values are different. And so, in Bulgaria, one kind of tribe with more traditional -- have more recently been nomadic -- and had greater kind of distaste for mixing with outsiders, really shunned the gypsies among them who went in for local politics. Instead of being proud of having the first MPs, they were horrified, and they thought he should be lynched. You know, how can you engage with the white man, exactly as you're saying.

I think it's frustrating for outsiders, for journalists, or human rights workers, that there isn't something that's easy to describe: what do these people represent, and what do they want? And then, let's get on to the next group. But in the long run, I think it's a sign of health. I hope.

Capen: Yes, certainly. And there are eight to twelve million gypsies on this planet, you say?

Fonseca: There are about twelve, I mean that's a pretty big gap, but that's a kind of generally accepted figure. It's very hard to know, because gypsies are not on the census, in most places.

Capen: Yeah, but that seems like an extraordinary number of people!

Fonseca: It does. I mean if you think that there's some thirteen million Jews in the world, and that's it.

Capen: Um-hmmm.

Fonseca: It's a lot of people. But there they are. And this is another reason they threaten Eastern Europe, I mean in Europe, it's the largest minority, and they are also reproducing--in one count they are expected to double their population in seventeen years. Well, that's fast. This is in areas of static, or even negative growth, population growth. And so they represent this threat. To some people. (laughs) A lot of people.

Capen: I'm sure. The book seems to be catching on. It sort of simmered there for a bit, then all of a sudden, there seems to be quite a bit of interest.

Fonseca: Yes. Last night I had a reading in Manhattan and the most gratifying thing for me, really, just so exciting, was a man came up to me afterwards and he had a couple books to sign -- that was good too. But he said, "I'm 1/16 gypsy, and all my life I've been so ambivalent about that, and very ashamed, and I read your book, and I just -- it's really changed my life and I feel really excited about it. Will you sign this book for my aunt and my uncle and my grandmother?" And that was, like, terrific, when something makes sense to someone in a personal way. I mean, I'm not any part gypsy and I got very engaged. I mean I think everyone must be interested in people who are determined to live in a different way. It seems to be harder and harder to do that.

Capen: This may be premature, but are you working, or have an idea of what you will create next?

Fonseca: Hmm. I'm -- I'm really not sure, and I'm tinkering with a few ideas. But, until something's more kind of fully formed -- I'm not superstitious, I'm just -- you know, I'm not really sure. Fiddling. So I don't feel good to tell you.

Capen: Would it be something on the order of "Bury Me Standing"?

Fonseca: Well, I've certainly -- am attracted to stories where I feel that I have something to bring to it in the sense that maybe they're stories that are not going to be told by people themselves. Or haven't been told sympathetically, or that are really interesting and not well-known. I don't know what.

Capen: Would that include Area 51 in Nevada? Do you know about this?

Fonseca: No.

Capen: This is the allegedly secret government testing lab in Nevada, and the subject of their tests are extraterrestrials. (Laughs.)

Fonseca: God!

Capen: My twelve year old son knew about this. I hadn't heard of it, but --

Fonseca: Is that really true? This is what our money is going to?

Capen: Well, uh, I thought it was amusing. And it would pop up in amusing, alternative magazines like High Times and such, and --
apparently, the Russian secret service has provided videotape and photographs of exactly that, so I don't know.

A quick question about your mentors, Isabel. I wonder who they are: writers, authors, thinkers?

Fonseca: Well, I certainly didn't have an exact model for this book. I mean, there was nothing that I had under my arm. And it evolved in a funny way, you know -- I was in it more than I planned to be. But then I found that I needed to give it a voice. And I wasn't a scholar. I didn't want to pretend to be a kind of dry academic. I became a sort of amateur historian -- because I had to tell the history. An anthropologist in the same way. So I mean, I like all those books about the Arctic and the Indians --

Who are my great heros? I don't know. I'm not coming up with the goods, am I?

Capen: Does Oriana Fallacci figure in there at all?

Fonseca: Not at all, I mean I've never read her, so --

Capen: You're very similar, similar in a very gutsy, probing, straightforward sort of journalism, certainly. I mean her interviews of people like Henry Kissinger and Moamar Khadaffi were outrageous. And in that sense, very similar.

Fonseca: Well, I like the sound of that comparison. Well, I must say I don't, on the whole, read that many books like the ones I'm writing now, you know?

Isabel Fonseca spoke with us from her family home in New York.

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