The search for a Gypsy Bible

CHILDREN OF THE RAINBOW BY MORIS FARHI SAQI BOOKS, pounds 15.99

THE JEWS have the Old Testament; the Christians the New. Muslims have the Koran. Only the Romanies have no holy book and, according to this novel, the lack of a Gypsy Bible has allowed the Romanies to be marginalised as a hated people, wrongly accused of having no culture.

Moris Farhi's impressive book starts in Auschwitz-Birkenau as the Gypsies await their terrible deaths. On the hearth of the gas ovens, the baby Branko is born. In the Gypsy camp, his birth is greeted with the seemingly absurd prophecy that he will save his people. Meanwhile, in another part of the concentration camp, another Gypsy called Branko is writing the Gypsy Bible.

The bulk of the novel is dominated by the search for this lost Gypsy holy book. Farhi, a Turkish Jew living in London, has created a modern Romany Moses who also never lives to see the Promised Land. Interspersing his narrative with fragments of the Gypsy Bible, Farhi runs several story lines simultaneously. He moves skilfully from the horrors of Gypsy persecution in Ceausescu's Romania to internecine struggles in the Balkans while concurrently evoking the fantasy world of Gypsy mythology.

Farhi has created a complex central character. The young Branko is both a Moses and a Ulysses, who fights with bears, attacks Romanians who kill and rape Gypsies, and searches in the ashes of Auschwitz for the Gypsy Bible. Surprisingly, Farhi also explores the little-charted fear of male sterility, juxtaposing it with the fertility of the imagination. The elder Branko, author of the holy book, has been castrated by Josef Mengele's Nazi doctors. Branko the Gypsy messiah, his spiritual son, is also haunted by his own sterility.

Fiercely contemporary, Farhi uses news stories to deepen understanding of the European Gypsy experience. The child Branko has been housed in a Swiss orphanage run by the Swiss equivalent of Barnardos, Pro Juventute. Here doctors blow out Gypsy identity with regular blasts of ECT to create "good Swiss citizens". (Pro Juventute, now disbanded, was accused of abducting Gypsy children, and several cases still await court decisions.)

Growing up with the despised Gypsy colouring damages Branko's sense of self until he rebels against "gadjo" (non-Gypsy) society. Ridding himself of his loveless gadjo marriage, he plunges into Romany history and searches for the truth about his birth. Little is known about the Gypsy Holocaust. Branko seeks help from a Jewish doctor, another survivor who has read fragments from the Gypsy Bible in Auschwitz. From Dr Kalderon, Branko learns that the crazy words spoken at his birth are directly related to the finding of the Gypsy Bible and the realisation of a Gypsy Zion.

The action moves to modern Yugoslavia and Romania in an exciting mixture of history, reportage and dream. As the Gypsies finally do realise their floating homeland, and face possible destruction at sea, Farhi cannot resist a satirical jibe at the West. The Gypsy exiles, like today's Kosovars, face imminent destruction. Farhi allows Le Monde to reveal each country's refugee quota. Canada admits 100,000, the US 60,000 and the UK 250!

What I found particularly strong was Branko's journey from damaged Gypsy to nationalist zealot. I also admired Farhi's depiction of the struggle between nationalist and assimilationist Gypsy intellectuals. This, of course, has a horrible resonance in the Kosovan crisis. The hero Branko epitomises the nationalist leader, seeking independence and sanctuary for his persecuted people. His former friend, Leo, opposes him, trying to smash the nationalist dream so that Gypsies may integrate into the host community. Farhi characterises this late-20th-century struggle as a war between two men, each passionately in love with the same community. Is Leo a Gypsy Uncle Tom or a pragmatist? Farhi leaves the question open although his sympathies are clearly with Branko, his Gypsy Herzl.

Farhi's Gypsy prophet is finally cast out by the people he has led to freedom. He loses his wife to a man who can fertilise her, and his people to the same man. Unwilling to romanticise Gypsy stereotypes, Farhi moves the world he creates towards a Greek or Hebrew classicism. This is an absorbing read and a stimulating fantasy of what might happen in a utopian dream, built out of the smoke of the Romany Holocaust.

Julia Pascal