Zoli (review)

Loosely based on the life of the Polish Gypsy poet and singer Papusza, Zoli is both a thrilling success and a crushing disappointment. McCann, not an adherent of the creative-writing-program adage "write what you know," believes in "writing toward what you want to know," and this well-researched, wonderfully vivid chronicle vindicates his authorial chutzpah. We experience the brute nomadic existence of Central Europe's Roma: we spit, curse, sew pebbles into the hems of our skirts, gorge on roasted hedgehog, and wash it all down with large quantities of slivovitz. This fictional dream is so dazzling that when the postwar communist government tries to herd the Roma community into Soviet-style apartment towers, the very idea of four walls and a roof strikes the reader as an abomination. So how is such a novel disappointing? Because McCann takes us to the edge of darkness, tribalism, us-against-the-world mentality—and does it so successfully, we would happily hurl ourselves over—but then he draws back from the abyss and serves up soap-opera redemption. The real Papusza died voiceless, alone, banished by her tribe for the crime of associating with gadzi (non-Gypsies). The fictional Zoli, also banished, finds solace in the bourgeois comforts of marriage, procreation, creativity (writing a memoir!), and even Western-style travel (as opposed to Roma wandering). Today, when the defiant, clan-oriented, non-assimilating Gypsy paradigm could stand as a metaphor for what the enlightened (and baffled) West faces in many corners of the world, it seems a sin to bring us so close to empathy and then toss us the meatless bone of a happy ending. Give me roasted hedgehog any day!