The story of Zoli was suggested to me after reading the extraordinary study Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, by Isabel Fonseca. Zoli is loosely inspired by the life of Papusza, the Polish poet who lived from 1910 to 1987. Zoli's poem in this novel is original, though it takes some of its form from the poetry of Papusza and others. Despite published reports to the contrary (including some statements attributed to characters in this novel), there have been many Roma poets in Europe down through the years-their work has been careful and loving, even if consistently ignored.
I would like to give very special thanks to Laco Oravec and Martin Fotta and everyone else at the Milan Simecka Foundation in Bratislava who, over the course of two months, helped me negotiate the contemporary Romani experience. The novel would have been impossible without their help. I can think of no better guides, nor no better hosts than the people of the settlements that I visited in eastern and western Slovakia. The following know their own role; I only wish I could give them deeper thanks: Richard Jurst, Robert Renk, Valerie Besl, Michal Hvorecky, Jana Belisova, Anna Jurovä, Daniela Hivesovä-Silanovä, Zuzanna Boselovä, Mark Slouka, Zdenek Slouka, Thomas Ueberhoff, Dirk Van Gunsteren, Thomas Böhm, Manfred Heid, Tom Kraushaar, Francoise Triffaux, Brigitte Semler, Martin Koffler, Barbara Stelzl-Marx, and the various people of the Roma camps and housing estates that I visited.
In New York I want to give sincere thanks to Lorcan Otway for all his advice and scholarship. Thanks to Hunter College and the Hertog fellowship program. A deep bow to Emily Stone, my research assistant. Gratitude also to Roz Bernstein, Frank McCourt, Terry Cooper, Gerard Donovan, Chris Barrett Kelly, Tom Kelly, Jeff Talarigo, Jim Harrison, Aleksandar Hemon (for the music!), Bill Cobert, and all at the American Irish Historical Society. The book is dedicated to all at the New York Public Library, including the scholars at the Cullman Center, but a specific thanks goes to Marzena Ermler and Woj-ciech Siemaszkiewicz, and of course to Jean Strouse, Pamela Leo, Adriana Nova, and Amy Aazarito.
Amongst the many, many authors whose writings I have found very helpful are Will Guy, Eva Davidovä, Emilia Horväthovä, Michael Stewart, Alaina Lemon, David Crowe, Donald Kenrick, Tera Fabianovä, Cecilia Woloch, Jan Yoors, Margriet de Moor, Louise Doughty, Vaclav Havel, and Walter Starkie, to name but a few.
Last, but never least, my thanks to Allison Hawke, Daniel Menaker, Kirsty Dunseath, and Sarah Chalfant.
A Conversation with Golum McCann and Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt: I was saddled with the quintessential miserable Irish childhood. You enjoyed the opposite, didn't you? What sort of life does a writer need these days in order to carve out a career in novels?
Colum McCann: That's where I envy you, Frank! You had something to write about from the beginning! I had to carve stories out of nothing! Seriously, though, you're right. There's advantages and disadvantages to both. I grew up in a safe, suburban Dublin household. My father didn't drink. My mother stayed at home. I remember when I came home from school at lunchtime, she would be waiting for me. She used to cut the crusts off my lettuce-and-tomato sandwiches. It was a tiny gesture, but representative. I was blessed in so many ways. They looked after us well. We ate together at the family table. We went for walks on Sunday afternoons. And we were surrounded by books. When I think about it, there were thousand of stories in our house. Of course it wasn't all simple and hunky-dory. It never can be. But it was close and it will always be home.
It's interesting to contemplate the notion that writers are not necessarily born, but that they make themselves-from the stuff of desire, of community, of the need to listen. There's never just one way to tell a story. That would be acutely boring. But for me I have no desire to write about my upbringing. Two hundred blank pages. What is it they say? Happiness writes white.
FM: You make these wild imaginative leaps. For This Side of Brightness it was a homeless man living in the subway tunnels. For Dancer it was a gay, Muslim-born ballet icon. Anyone can tell from a quick glance that you're not homeless and, let's face it, neither of us really look like dancers, so where do these stories come from?
CM: My stories come from images and then I end up building worlds around them. The story of Rudolph Nureyev stemmed from a story I heard that took place in the flats of Ballymun, where a young boy caught a glimpse of Nureyev on his family's first television, out on the balcony of a high-rise project. He was holding the TV, and I was awestruck by the notion that a seven-year-old Dublin boy was carrying the world's greatest dancer in his arms. I wanted to explore the idea that we all have stories, that stories are the ultimate human democracy. It doesn't matter how white you are, how poor you are, how straight you are, how far-flung you are, we all have stories and the deep need to tell them. That's the door Fve been knocking on for quite a while now. That's my current obsession-the thought that stories are the only true human currency.
FM: Zoli is in some ways your most “foreign” character, a woman, a poet, a Rom, an exile, an Eastern European. How did you discover and maintain her voice?
CM: Zoli broke my heart a number of times. It certainly was the biggest leap I had ever made. But I'm interested in compassion and clarity and making new worlds available. Or at least, making old worlds visible-I mean visible in literary terms. To do that I had to try to be honest to her voice. There were occasions when I would have to sit for a long time-weeks on end-waiting for her voice to come. She was elusive. Strangely enough, though, now that I've finished the book I can call back her voice in an instant. I can close my eyes and she's right there. Many people have written to me to say that they can still hear her echo in their heads.
FM: Growing up around Limerick, we always had our tinkers, our travelers, our Gypsies. I know they're ethnically different to the Roma, but they seem to share some similarities.
CM: Yes, we had our travelers in Dublin too. They always seemed to embrace mystery. And we had so many cliches in place. You know, when we were growing up, my mother used to say to us: “You be good now or the Gypsies'll come take you away.” Years later I was in a settlement in Slovakia where I heard a mother berating her son. I turned to my translator and asked what was going on. He said: “Oh, she's giving her son a hard time. She's telling him that if he doesn't behave the White Man will come take him away.”
I thought I had suddenly come some full strange and lovely circle. We doubt one another. We distrust. We have the same stories.
The travelers are Ireland's oldest minority group. There's been a long history of anti-traveler prejudice. There's about
30,000 travelers in Ireland. Around the world there are something like twelve million Roma. But the hatred is often the same. And the tarring brush paints both groups as secretive, immoral, dishonest, filthy, uncouth, nomadic, predatory-the list is endless. You repeat something long enough, it becomes the truth. Let me tell you this: In all my time with the Roma I was never hassled, never robbed, never pushed away. I suppose in the end I was the one who was robbing from them. I went there with all the prejudices intact and came away a changed person. That's what I want the book to do too. It's a lofty aim, but why not aim high, since most of our flights of desire fall short, anyway? I believe in the social novel. People ask me why I didn't write about the travelers. I don't know. It wasn't the right time for me. It wasn't the story I wanted to tell. I had found this Polish poet, Papusza, and she took my breath away. It was her story that Zoli was modelled on. It probably would have been easier to tell the story of the travelers. At least I would have had some geography in place. As it was, I had a mad time just researching this book. I started from point blank nothing. And I had to build from there.