The Color of Smoke: A Novel - Softcover

Lakatos, Menyhert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0985062347 ISBN 13: 9780985062347

Publisher: New Europe Books, 2015

Synopsis

The first major novel about Eastern Europe's Roma, or Travelers (Gypsies), by a Romani author, The Color of Smoke is both a work of passion chronicling one young man's rise to manhood and an epic work that conjures up a dark era of world history. It is an undiscovered classic that has been published in several languages since its 1975 appearance in Hungary--but never before in English.

Inspired by the author's own boyhood in World War II-era Hungary, it is a beautifully written coming-of-age story of a Romani boy torn between the community of his birth and the mainstream society that both entices him and rejects him.

About this title

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Menyhért Lakatos (1926–2007) was the prizewinning author of many books. His magnum opus, The Color of Smoke⎯inspired by his own youth in a Romani settlement, and first published in Hungarian in 1975⎯has been translated into more than half a dozen languages.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Ann Major (1928–) has brought several Hungarian books to English, including Paul Lendvai's The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (Princeton University Press), and also translates from German. The author of a memoir, A Carpet of Jacaranda (Sydney Jewish Museum, 2013), she lives in Lane Cove, Australia.

From the Back Cover

“After appearing in various European languages, The Color of Smoke has at last been made available in English. Based loosely on Lakatos Menyhért’s own life, it skillfully and imaginatively portrays the challenges facing the journey from boyhood to manhood of its central figure. As a Romani (Gypsy) adolescent he has to deal with the cultural barriers that separate his own world from the non-Gypsy world as all Roma must do--but he does so surrounded by the terrors of the Second World War, when the Romani people in Hungary were being herded into labor camps, some destined for Auschwitz. Written by an insider, this long-overdue and realistically harsh book opens a window into Romani life at that time and adds to our growing awareness of the Romani experience in Nazi-occupied Europe.” ⎯Ian Hancock, Director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center, University of Texas, and author of We Are the Romani People 



“Hailed as the crowning achievement of the late Menyhért Lakatos, Hungary’s foremost Romani (Gypsy) author of the twentieth century, The Color of Smoke has finally appeared in an English translation. Its vivid characters and background illustrate the pathos and resilience of the Roma in Hungary during World War II, when that country was first an ally and then a victim of Nazi Germany. The author has drawn upon his boyhood experiences in this bildungsroman to show how his people, the Roma, denied their basic human rights and forced to scrounge an existence on the margins of society, were part of this society, but never fully accepted by the greater majority nor given equality of status. Finally they became the innocent victims of hatred and genocide along with the Jews when they were engulfed by the Nazi Holocaust.” ⎯Ronald Lee, LLD, Romani Canadian writer, linguist, and activist 



From the Inside Flap

After appearing in various European languages, The Color of Smoke has at last been made available in English. Based loosely on Lakatos Menyhérts own life, it skillfully and imaginatively portrays the challenges facing the journey from boyhood to manhood of its central figure. As a Romani (Gypsy) adolescent he has to deal with the cultural barriers that separate his own world from the non-Gypsy world as all Roma must do--but he does so surrounded by the terrors of the Second World War, when the Romani people in Hungary were being herded into labor camps, some destined for Auschwitz. Written by an insider, this long-overdue and realistically harsh book opens a window into Romani life at that time and adds to our growing awareness of the Romani experience in Nazi-occupied Europe. ?Ian Hancock, Director of the Romani Archives and Documentation Center, University of Texas, and author of We Are the Romani People ??

Hailed as the crowning achievement of the late Menyhért Lakatos, Hungarys foremost Romani (Gypsy) author of the twentieth century, The Color of Smoke has finally appeared in an English translation. Its vivid characters and background illustrate the pathos and resilience of the Roma in Hungary during World War II, when that country was first an ally and then a victim of Nazi Germany. The author has drawn upon his boyhood experiences in this bildungsroman to show how his people, the Roma, denied their basic human rights and forced to scrounge an existence on the margins of society, were part of this society, but never fully accepted by the greater majority nor given equality of status. Finally they became the innocent victims of hatred and genocide along with the Jews when they were engulfed by the Nazi Holocaust. ?Ronald Lee, LLD, Romani Canadian writer, linguist, and activist ??

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Color of Smoke

An Epic Novel of the Roma

By Menyhért Lakatos, Ann Major

Steerforth Press

Copyright © 2015 The Estate of Menyhert Lakatos
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9850623-4-7

CHAPTER 1

One more barely noticeable sigh, then his eyes became fixed into an eternal gaze. Time froze on his stone-brown face, and Tsino Petro became but a memory — a lasting memory of which Tsino Petro's daughter, Old Liza, or Grandma, to me, told stories during seemingly endless nights. Her stories conjured up old memories when time was measured not in months and days, but in the flowers that blossomed and the leaves that fell a hundred and one times under and over her father, as she used to say.

We were the people in whose blood life had lit a fire; neither the winds nor the winters — be they ever so fierce — could extinguish its flame. I knew Grandma as a small, wizened old woman, who sat only on the floor. When talking, she rested her chin on her knees, her stemless pipe clasped between her palms. She was a perfect custodian of bygone centuries. The world we lived in was alien to her; being confined to one place was, to her, servitude. Grandma was just too old to change her ways; the twelve years she had spent among us could not dislodge those earlier times. She felt cold even on the hottest of days. With her long outer skirt thrown upward over her shoulders, and squatting with her feet tucked under her, she smoked relentlessly. In the winter she often slept on the porch, since she couldn't bear the hut's stifling air.

This embarrassed Papa, her son, but if he complained about it, she just waved her hand dismissively.

"Don't take any notice son, let those Romungros talk all they like, they've gotten used to this robiyd but I get coughing fits indoors, and the children can't sleep properly on account of me."

We never once heard Grandma coughing outside.

Sometimes she would crouch in front of the wood-fired cob oven, which, in the kitchen adjoining the main room, was topped off by an old tin can that served as the chimney. There she would feed green acacia twigs through the large opening and stare as they frothed and whistled and curled up amid the flames. The wind often blew its thick, acrid smoke right at us, stinging our eyes.

Grandma could hardly wait for spring. She swept our tiny yard each evening, picking up anything that would burn, like rags and dried horse dung. For a while we thought she did so to keep it clean.

When Papa settled down by the oven and stared into the flames, especially when the air was thick with wood smoke, his face became transfigured as if in prayer.

This feeling wasn't the same for me; all the smoke did was to make my tears mingle with my dripping nose, which Grandma kept wiping with the hem of her skirt.

Later I got used to it and, after cavorting all day, I would rest in front of the oven. Grumpy-looking old folks also gathered round, their skin shiny and dark, like May beetles, and they chased away children who disturbed their thoughts or conversations. They were always telling stories, it seemed. They conjured up their memories from such a distant past that only they could make sense of them. Their deep roots were nourished from a world that to others was by now only history.

Like yellowed sheets of parchment, they bore witness to the history of centuries past. Time did not rush past them; the youthful stories of their fathers and grandfathers lived on in them, faithfully preserving the traditions of ages long gone.

Their mute, wrinkled mouths spoke of the past as their eyes stared at the small leaping flames, flames that perhaps reminded them of the stomping of their long-gone wild horses. Their eyes, akin to the moonlight, at times became swathed in a cloud or else lit up with happy, wonderful purity when they reached a cherished memory along the muddy, dusty highways of time. Scents of forests and mountains emanated from their thoughts, blood bubbled up in their veins, and they could hear the sound of the brisk rivulets on whose banks they had rested long ago.

We went from big water to big water. Grandma didn't use the word "sea," perhaps because she didn't even know it; all she said was ban pani. I never did find out whether that passage she spoke of was from the Black Sea to the Adriatic or from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Grandma burnished even the foggiest youthful memory to a luster. She reminisced about her ancestors as if they had been the personification of courage and brains. Chache Roma, she used to say about them. To her the later generations of Gypsies were too yellow-bellied, too soft, to endure danger and hardship.

"The road was hazardous in winter but our carts never broke down; the horses we used were of the best. Sure, anyone lagging behind perished. Life in Ungriko Them was like being in robiya, but that's where we found the best horses and light carts with iron axles.

"Had a hundred dragons guarded them," Grandma continued, "we still would have taken them. Tsino Petro was molded where fear was unknown. He didn't let anyone into his space, and any person doing so had to pay with his life. All could do as they pleased, but anyone trespassing on another was put on krisb Tsino Petro got his nickname, Little Peter, for his build, but he certainly wasn't a scaredy-cat, why, he'd spit right into a snake's mouth.

"Once, long ago," she said as she always did when starting one of her stories, "in late fall, we were in Serbia when a group of red-capped Gypsies showed up at our camp. Real steeds were prancing about in front of their rickety carts, but there was no sign of women and children. They helped a gray-bearded old man off one of the carts. He looked awfully sick. They asked us politely to let him sit next to our fire. 'Sit down, old man,' our people said. 'Tell us, what brought you here?' These strangers all wore dappled kerchiefs under their caps. We wondered who they were, these people who spoke our language so well.

"Well, the old man then took off his cap and his kerchief, ever so slowly. First he bent one side of his face toward the fire, and then the other. In place of both his ears were gaping wounds, and his eyes were watery, like black grapes. The others then also removed their kerchiefs; not a single one of them had ears. They couldn't get a word out for all their sobbing. Our women burned mushroom veils and spread the ashes on their wounds. It took the newcomers quite a while to tell their story.

"'A bunch of soldiers surrounded us,' the old man began. 'What could we do? We couldn't try to run off, not with the women and kids still there. The soldiers then beat the men into a group and drove them into the woods. Their commander spoke, but we didn't understand. What he was saying was that they would cut off our ears, kill the women and children, and let us go.

"'That was when God took our good sense away.' The old man tried to swallow his tears, but his lips trembled with silent sobs nonetheless. 'We thought he was saying that if we let them cut our ears off, we could leave. That if we didn't, they'd kill the children and women. What else could we do? We endured it without letting out a peep. Bloodied and ashamed we headed back toward camp. The soldiers were still there, but we found ourselves wading knee-deep in the blood of our women, children, and horses.

"'They hadn't left a single creature alive, only us without ears for everyone to see what befalls those who dare trespass on their territory. When we saw the bodies, we attacked the soldiers with our bare hands, our bare teeth — they killed many of us, but in the end it was them who had to flee. These here are army horses, but what good are they to us? We'd rather be dead ourselves. They destroyed our dulmuta, leaving us doomed to be the Gypsies' outcasts. No one will believe that it wasn't our own people who did this to us for some treachery.'

"Tsino Petro now spoke," Grandma said. "'Unhitch your horses,' he said, 'and sit closer to the fire. Tomorrow is another day.' By next morning the old man was dead from grief. They didn't give him a big funeral. They just broke his cart shaft in two, then peacefully smoothed down his grave. The rest of them stayed behind, orphaned, waiting for our father to invite them into his dulmuta.

"That same afternoon," she recounted, "he gave them the widows and marriageable girls and sent them on their way."

Tsino Petro's dulmuta changed its direction, gradually moving across Hungary and Romania up toward Russia, but the harsh weather, shaggy little horses, and wretched villages they found in Russia held out little hope. It was there that Grandma first got married, and as a souvenir, she brought back-for back they came — a little boy named Ivan. He was her first child.

Only around 1870, in southern Hungary, did they again cross paths with the earless folk, who having gone on to multiply greatly, now called themselves "Petro's People" after Tsino Petro, from whose dulmuta they had been reborn.

The old folks in our settlement would sometimes refer to the phiript? in telling their tales, and for a long time I wasn't sure just what they were talking about. What I did know was that most Gypsies in Europe had migrated north, from the Balkans; of those that had split into two branches in Bulgaria — one moving north along eastern Romania, the other across Serbia-both passed through Hungary.

The tribes had then split into smaller units, each of which called itself a dulmuta. Not that they had broken up, exactly; no, it was like in the army, where a company is made up of platoons and the platoons of squadrons. True, the term dulmuta had previously signified a tribe, whereas each of these small groups was but a fragment of the whole that once existed.

You might think all these small groups would nonetheless have still belonged to something larger, something that bound them, kept order, and provided guidance. Each dulmuta was, after all, bound by a set of tribal values. But did these values end where the dulmuta did? Was an overarching "tribal law" — whose details were indeed lost on so many people, if they recognized them at all — no longer binding on each separate group? In fact it was! Everyone was obliged to uphold every unwritten law that regulated their lives regardless of which dulmuta they happened to belong to. This is shown, among other things, by the fact that no dulmuta could use the place another dulmuta traveled in — namely, its phiripe.

On several occasions I quizzed Papa about matters concerning the phiripe even though he was reluctant to let me in on Gypsy secrets I couldn't figure out on my own. All too often his only answer was that I'd find out once I got older. His silence only made me more curious.

As for Grandma, she pretended not to understand me to begin with, and it was obvious that not even she wanted to talk about the phiripe. It seemed that this word, too, was secret. And so I kept pestering Papa about it, and he bawled me out more than once for being nosy. But, in the end, he tired of resisting sooner than I did of persisting.

The dulmutas, he at last explained, had divvied up among themselves the phiripes in the countries they passed through. But just how they went about it, no one could say exactly. Not by conquering those lands, that much was certain. No, insisted Papa, they never had territorial disputes. No matter how tiny a dulmuta was — even if nothing more than a family on a single horse-drawn cart-not even the oldest folks among us could recall a case in which a bigger, mightier dulmuta had stolen the territory of a smaller, weaker one. But as the generations came and went, and as the past gave way to the present day, the desire for material wealth — and for the possession of territory that held its promise-stirred ever more in Gypsies, too.

"The phiripe had to be respected by all," Papa said, meaning that if some Gypsies violated it, other dulmutas came swiftly together to take collective action against them. The phiripes were, in short, "hunting grounds" in both the good and bad sense of the term — ensuring that the Gypsies who passed through them could continue their nomadic ways.

All this was a bit beyond me. Wandering like nomads still required something to get by on, did it not? As for tools and other possessions, well, once they wore out, they had to be replaced. If wandering was the main aim in life, then the phiripes must indeed simply have been hunting grounds. But if wandering wasn't so much a matter of instinct, but more a means of acquiring goods illicitly, then why hadn't the dulmutas sought to take away one anothers' territories?

Papa only cast me an impatient stare when I pressed him with such questions, and he didn't say another word. At times like that, I got back at him by not taking his horses to pasture for days.

"Why don't you ask Grandma instead?" he said, fuming. "I will tell you one thing, though, and get it through your head: if you go prattling on a lot, the Gypsies will cut out your tongue." Maybe this is what helped me figure out the meaning of words that seemed to be a secret. I didn't say anything more about the phiripe.

Cutting out tongues had a lot to do with the real essence of that word, I suspected. In giving me that warning, Papa hadn't simply brushed me off; behind his silence was genuine worry. Although it had been a long time since settled Gypsies had meted out such cruel and wild punishments, it wasn't easy for Papa to get beyond his conditioned responses to these ancient traditions, for he himself had left the world of the dulmutas only at the age of twenty.

Afterward Papa wavered for a long time until he had his own children and his new ways were set in stone. Then he finally gave up being nomadic once and for all.

As for myself, I knew almost nothing of that bygone world; only through the old folks' stories could I conjure it up in my imagination. But what I'd heard was enough for me to decide that Grandma was right, and I practically held it as a grudge against Papa for having given up his free life for the wretched servitude of life in a hut. As if I'd been cheated and robbed, I grieved over my lot. Yes, this was my future, and I couldn't do a thing about it.

I felt the effects each and every morning, too, when Mama roused me from sleep saying I had to go to school. Sometimes things worked themselves out, though, in a way — Papa was locked up in jail for a bit in lieu of the fine that would otherwise have been imposed on us for me going neither to school nor to Levente Youth meetings.

But Papa wasn't annoyed about that. No, all in all, he was happier to undertake a bit of jail time than I was to undertake studying. Mama was the real challenge; she knew how to use a whip. Sometimes she'd shout at me, "Son, you're Papa's kind, a kind without a country or a home! No wonder you were born on the road!"

Mama never let me forget that fact, as if it, too, had been my fault. A kid spends nine months taking shape inside his mom, and then doesn't wait until she gets home from the village next door. So I was born; Mama took me home in her skirt.

That's how Papa was born, too, Grandma told me. She had given birth sixteen times and didn't need a midwife once. On one occasion Grandma consoled me though. "If those people, the Zhidos, come, son, we'll head off with them on the road and leave this misery behind."

She dreamt of little else but sitting one more time on a horse-drawn cart.

"Grandma, why do people get their tongues cut out?" I asked in an attempt to take advantage of our intimate conversation.

"They won't cut yours out, son," she said, stroking my hair. "They'll love you, they will, on account of you knowing how to read and write. When you grow up, everyone will listen to you. Our kind like smart people."

"Grandma, what is a phiripe?

"Why, that's a dulmuta's territory, where the dulmuta filches gold, horses, and clothing."

"Do your people have a territory like that?"

"We do, but we don't go that way anymore."

"Why don't we go there to live?"

"Those whose territory it is never live there."

"And if others take it over?" I asked.

"Why would they do that? We never went on others' territories, either. Just let them try; they'd go before a kris and soon find out what Gypsy law is really about."

She tried reassuring me. I knew the Gypsies' respect for the law all too well for her words to be convincing.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Color of Smoke by Menyhért Lakatos, Ann Major. Copyright © 2015 The Estate of Menyhert Lakatos. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Europe Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0985062347
• ISBN 13: 9780985062347
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480