The Color of Smoke: An Epic Novel of the Roma

A semiautobiographical tale set in World War II era Hungary, The Color of Smoke is the first-person account of a nameless Romani boy torn between the shantytown community of his birth and the mainstream village society that both entices him and rejects him. From his rise in school to his first sexual encounters, from the travails of hunger and cold to being harassed by gendarmes, his is a life steeped in misery, violence, and persecution. But it is also a life passed in the fold of a close-knit community--a life that, with its rituals and superstitions, its stories told around campfires, exudes a deep sense of freedom. Closing as the Holocaust casts its shadow upon the Romanies, The Color of Smoke opens a fascinating new window on one of the world's most dispossessed minority populations. Told as a series of seamlessly interwoven episodes that come together as a cruel and yet magical cosmos of a people left behind by history, it evokes works by such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ENGLISH a timeless tribute to one of the world's most marginalized peoples and the riveting tale of one boy's journey to manhood Sweeping us into the world of the roma as fascism gathers force and the Holocaust looms on the horizon, The Color of Smoke is a thoroughly absorbing story that abounds in unforgettable characters. There is the adolescent narrator, torn between his people and a society that both entices him and rejects him. From his rise in school to his first sexual encounters, from hunger to police harassment, he treads a precarious path--one marked by moments of beauty and poignancy along with bawdiness, violence, and high adventure. And we come to know a people bound as much by a rich moral fabric as by the land and by the horses they love. By an author who himself came of age in a Romani settlement during World War II, The Color of Smoke is a must read for anyone seeking a stunningly new,...