Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II ed. by Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova and Aleksandar G. Marinov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II ed. by Raluca Bianca Roman, Sofiya Zahova and Aleksandar G. Marinov Tomasz Kamusella Roman, Raluca Bianca; Zahova, Sofiya and Marinov, Aleksandar G. (eds). Roma Writings: Romani Literature and Press in Central, South-Eastern and Eastern Europe from the 19th Century until World War II. Brill | Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, 2021. xiii + 276 pp. Tables. Figures. Refences. Annexes. £91.82: €109.00: $124.00: open access e-book. The Roma are Europe’s largest stateless minority. Numbering today up to twelve million people, they live across the entire continent, but especially in its eastern half, with most concentrated in the Balkans. Despite having been [End Page 530] part and parcel of European history and culture for a millennium, until the turn of the twenty-first century, the Roma were typically disregarded and marginalized as a ‘non-people’ or a people ‘without culture or history’. In the modern period the Roma have become a target of a variety of state-sponsored ‘civilizing missions’. As a result, they were thoroughly othered and made into paradigmatic ‘foreigners’, ‘non-Europeans’, in essence a ‘colonial population’ that happens to have been ‘misplaced’ in the midst of Europe. Unsurprisingly, the racist sentiment of antitsiganism (antiromism) became the staple of the continent’s politics, on a par with antisemitism. However, this marginalization of the Roma and the erasure of their presence from European history and politics have been more thorough than of the Jews. For instance, it is rarely remembered that Nazi Germany intended to exterminate in their entirety only two peoples, namely, the Jews and Roma. The voluminous Nuremberg Trials proceedings devote just a quarter of a page to the Roma, though during World War Two the Nazis exterminated half of them. Continuing prejudices and stereotypes not only prevent the integration of the Roma, but also hamper rigorous research on them as a European nation. For instance, one would not be able to pass as a legitimate scholar of German history and culture without a working command of German. Yet, this is still a sorry ‘standard’ among specialists of Romani studies. At times, this attitude leads to tragicomic situations. The volume under review is a fruit of the ERC (European Research Council) project, ‘RomaInterbellum: Roma Civic Emancipation Between the Two World Wars’. The project’s leaders, Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov, count among the world’s most renowned researchers in the field of Romani studies. Yet, some scholars opined on an early draft of this project that it should be rejected, because the Roma are illiterate and have no interest in books and writing, so there is nothing to be found in the archives or in the form of publications. The project’s first volume, Roma Voices in History: A Sourcebook (Leiden and Boston, MA, 2021), at over one thousand pages, gives the lie to this widespread prejudice, showcasing a mere tenth of the archival documents that were found during the past five years. As members of the RomaInterbellum team, the three editors of Roma Writings represent a new generation of Romani studies scholars. Following Marushiakova and Popov’s inspiring example, they apply these standards and methods of research that are the norm in other fields of Europe’s social sciences. Just as Roma Voices shows that Roma history is part and parcel of European history, so now Roma Writings proves that the development and uses of Roma literature are in synch with their European counterparts. The volume appropriately and inclusively defines Roma literature as the body of writings by Roma authors in Romani and other European languages, including translations into Romani (p. 4). This broad church approach allows them to show that, as in the case of many other Central, Southeastern and Eastern European (CSEEE) [End Page 531] literatures, Roma literature commenced in the mid-nineteenth century (p. 11). The development is in line with the ‘Herderian turn’ that especially after 1918 yielded the region’s ethnolinguistic nation-states. In 1985, the Czechoslovak historian Miroslav Hroch proposed the now widely accepted phase model of the rise of ethnolinguistic national movements. The editors...