Forgetting Is the Best Revenge

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"BURY me standing," a Romanian gypsy leader once said to Isabel Fonseca, "I've been on my knees all my life."

It's an affecting remark, but not an especially characteristic one. To judge from the rest of Isabel Fonseca's fascinating account, most gypsies haven't felt on their knees: aggrieved self-pity doesn't seem to be a dominant emotion. They are standing now - they've won the right to call themselves a people and to have representatives at UN meetings of minority groups. There are Roma congresses, packed with full-time professional gypsies. Gypsy lexicographers, musicologists and historians are busy setting an oral culture in the stone of the written word. Amid the …