Word: fonseca
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...take the little restaurant on the beach at Xia Xia, a great sweep of sand running for miles north of Maputo. Nuno Fonseca and his second wife Paola spent the war years in Maputo but came back to her largely destroyed hometown in early 1994. Once there were swank hotels along the strand for tourists. "When we got here there was nothing, nothing," says Nuno...
DIED. GONZALO FONSECA, 74, Uruguayan sculptor whose cryptic carvings, punctuated by unexpected hollows and totemic objects, were influenced by his excavations of pre-Columbian ruins; of a stroke; in Seravezza, Italy...
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...
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...
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...