"The Doll" ~ Papusza

"Not far from us lived a Jewish shopkeeper. I stole a chicken and took it to her, and she taught me how to read in return. And then I began to read various books and newspapers. I can read well, but my writing is awful because I read a lot and didn't write much." Papusza

Sometimes when you are researching you come across something that breaks your heart.

We, of a generation that saw the genocide of WWII, of Stalinist Russia & Mao's China, Vietnam & Pol Pot, are inured to mass tragedy. It is simply impossible to individually mourn so many. It is individual tragedy that still has the power to shatter carefully constructed barriers & strip the heart raw.

Ditz has missed it. She borrowed the book Bury Me Standing from the library & tossed it aside as being too difficult & not to her purposes. I opened it & the first thing I read was the story of Papusza. Even when I tell Ditz she won't be impressed but Papusza will haunt me now all my days.

Papusza was Polish Rom. She was a gorgeous looking woman, smart, sensitive, ambitious but she was Rom at a time when most Roms were illiterate, Her desire for an education, to be able to read & write, was frowned upon & she was beaten for it. Her desire was so strong she stole to achieve her ambition. She was also female. The Roms married their girls off at 13 or so & Papusza was married off to a much older man, a renowned harpist, & was deeply, deeply unhappy. For a Romany woman there was no way out. A man could leave; a woman could not. Children might have helped but she did not have children. Instead she sang.

Soon Papusza began writing her own songs. Not unusual. The Romany have always been renowned for their music & like many illiterate peoples can commit huge amounts of information to memory. Like generations of Rom before her her songs would have lasted for as long as it took to sing them & dispersed amongst the stars & fire smoke but that was not to be her fate. She was heard by a Polish poet who mentored her, got her published, advocated for the settlement of the Rom & inadvertently destroyed Papusza.

The Rom considered her a traitor for divulging Rom secrets to the gadj & shunned her. Her distress landed her in a mental asylum & quenched her creativity. Except for one brief period she never wrote again living isolated from all that made her who she was: her people, the long road of the Rom, her music. Nobody noticed when she died in 1978 but she is celebrated as one of the most brilliant & evocative of Romany singer/poets.

From: Tears of Blood.

So much snow fell,
it covered the road.
One could only see the Milky Way in the sky.

On such night of frost
a little daughter dies,
and in four days
mothers bury in the snow
four little sons.
Sun, without you,
see how a little Gypsy is dying from cold
in the big forest.

She survived the persecution of the Germans but not that of her own people. I cannot imagine her suffering. I hope that God has had mercy on her soul & she has found in the afterlife more grace & mercy than she received in this world.