Zoli by Colum McCann

What do we know about Gypsies? For starters, most prefer to be called Roma. They likely wandered into Europe from northern India 600 years ago and not from Egypt as previously supposed. Also, somewhere between 200,000 and 1.5 million died in the Holocaust. Their historically nomadic lifestyle makes it difficult to pinpoint a more exact number.

Admittedly, most us of rely on stereotypes to inform our opinions of Roma, but for anyone interested in learning about their 20th-century struggles, Colum McCann's novel Zoli offers some insight through the story of one Roma woman who outlasted fascism.

McCann lets readers experience her story from various perspectives by using multiple narrators: the title character, who, for her daughter's sake, writes of her life spanning prewar youth in Czechoslovakia to old age seven decades and several countries later; Swann, an English-born half-Slovak, half-Irish intellectual who falls in love with Zoli; and a third-person narrator, who describes a contemporary journalist's search for Zoli, a once-popular Roma poet who has all but vanished from Slovakian culture.

When we first meet six-year-old Zoli, she and her grandfather have returned to their caravan to find that the Hlinka Guard, the vicious state police, has drowned their entire family. They travel for days until finally meeting up with a camp of distant relatives, where Zoli discovers her passion for music and words, eventually blossoming into a talented singer and marrying an older man chosen by her grandfather.

Traditionally, Roma culture is strict and patriarchal, full of rules and rituals, many of which McCann describes with authenticity, revealing Zoli's attempts to follow them even when they are utterly impractical. Although the culture had long forbidden the education of girls, Zoli's grandfather lets her briefly attend school, making her one of the few literate members of the tribe and setting the course for her future. Eventually, the famous poet Swann discovers Zoli's talent and records her work for posterity, which goes on to create a literary revolution.

Inevitably, Swann and Zoli gravitate toward each other, but their love is no match for the political forces at work. After surviving the Hlinka Guard and World War II, Soviet communism rips Zoli from her Roma community, forcing her to leave both Czechoslovakia and Swann.     

McCann based the character of Zoli on real-life Polish poet Papusza and even composes a six-page poem inspired by Papusza's writing. Zoli's masterpiece reflects Roma suffering at the hands of fascists while also revealing how much the wandering Roma are rooted in nature: “Who could tell the time from the stars/If the roof was an inch from their eyes?”

McCann's prose is just as poetic as the lyrics he puts in Zoli's mouth, exploring the depths of human emotion at a time when breathing seems the closest one can get to autonomy. Every sentence burns a stunning image on the brain: red skirts, pocketed braids, wolf footprints, glass beads, brown arms. McCann captures historical, communal, and personal moments so fully that it is a wonder he did not live this story himself.

At once a breathtaking work of art and a powerful history lesson, Zoli will likely motivate readers to further explore this neglected subject and finally shed Gypsy stereotypes.