Gypsies are a visible metaphor for rejected otherness.

I am Transylvanian of mixed blood, mostly Hungarian, but also German, Romanian and Gypsy. In my adolescence I found out about my Gypsy great grandfather and was told to keep it secret. My ex-husband was raised in the same way concerning his Gypsy grand-father.

As a journalist, I started research on the Gypsies in Hungary, and became acquainted with them. I have made a lot of connections in the Gypsy community, from intellectuals and artists to street workers and garlic sellers.

On March 20-24,1995 while being the presenter at the Sixth International Folklore Festival organized by Kalyi Jag Roma Artistic Association, I met two Swedish journalists, and their interest started me working on this project. It seemed to me that in order to produce interviews of the quality the interviewees deserved, more time was needed than the journalists had dedicated to it. They didn t have at all the necessary feeling of the local atmosphere. I thought I could do a better job than them and also do it more economically. I started to gather material for a book of interviews with ethnic minority intellectuals and artists. Then the idea expanded as I talked to people of all professions who gave extraordinarily relevant comments and insights.

In the summer of 1995, while traveling around the U.S.A. on a research trip sponsored by the organizations People to People International, The Circle, and by helpful friends, I interviewed around 25 people interested in minority issues. This resulted in a further expansion of the theme of my book. The situation there is in many ways similar to ours here though with interesting cultural differences so now I was dealing with a global theme. It seems that everywhere people are not only at war with each other, but also with themselves.

After more meditation I saw how my own fiction writing fits in with the whole material and conceived the idea of putting them together in a book which is a combination of memoir, fiction and journalism. Its message is that oppression works all over the world in the same way, under different names - be it sexism, homophobia, bigotry, classism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism or imperialism - and most of the time all these forms combine only too well. That something is wrong with those who in order to feel safe need to consider other people inferior to them because of their differences. That something has to change since the world has become a global village. That our children have to be taught to enjoy diversity, if we can t manage to do so ourselves. That in a strange way endurance strengthens, and it is a kind of victory to find an expression for it through creativity.

The book describes a woman coming to Hungary from Transylvania who is told by most of her new acquaintances that she has a heavy atmosphere about her. At first she thinks her friends are superficial hedonists, but then she realizes that this heavy atmosphere does exist, and that it s the past entangling her, like weeds. Gradually, half unconsciously, half deliberately, she opens the trunks of the past.

She realizes that being Hungarian with Gypsy ancestry wasn t so rosy for her parents. So she spiritually goes back to her roots. Tries to find out more things about Gypsy culture, about being Hungarian in Romania. Even more she tries to find a way of educating her son so that he shouldn t be ashamed of his heritage.

People expect her to be inquisitive because she s a journalist, so she meets people in similar situations to hers and asks them about everything that might give her a clue to what happened to her at home in Romania during the 60s, 70s and 80s, that had made her so frustrated.

She even starts to work with Gypsy organizations, but she doesn't have any sense of being useful, on the contrary the male chauvinism she encounters makes her feel even more frustrated and confused. She realizes she doesn t belong to the Gypsy community either, that her status is that of an absolute outsider.

She travels to the United States, the dream of her adolescence, and asks and asks, and comes back home and asks and asks, and in the end she puts together what people have told her with the memories of her own past that they have triggered in her in a book, as an invitation to other people to join in a march for self-respect. And even more a warning that intolerance can bring a Sarajevo to every place.

This book is not a journalistic book. She doesn t go around asking always the same questions, as though taking a poll.

Her conclusions are emotional. The book is composed of vignettes of life with its horrors like madness, aggression, from rape to psychologically induced self-hatred. Life with its humor, tenderness and grace of childhood. Life with hopeful dreams turned into nightmares, or the absurd nightmare of reality turned into a book, which is for her a dream fulfilled.