In a Gypsy poet's life, borders are painful

Zoli
By Colum McCann
RANDOM HOUSE; 333 Pages; $24.95

They call her Zoli, although her birth name is Marienka. She is a Gypsy, a poet and a singer.

Colum McCann's tale begins in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, when 6-year-old Zoli Novotna and her grandfather, members of a roving Gypsy (or Romany) family, escape from the violence of the pro-Nazi Hlinka guards in the days before World War II. Forced onto a frozen lake at gunpoint, her mother, siblings and cousins drown when the ice breaks.

When we first meet Zoli, she is writing to her as-yet unborn daughter, Francesca. She recalls how she and her grandfather ate whatever they could find in the woods: boiled leaves, pinecones, wild garlic grass as well as rabbit and hare and hedgehog -- anything to survive. But always the image of her now-lost family was seared into her mind. "My days were spent still staring backwards," she remembers, "for my dead family to catch up, though of course I knew then that they never would."

It was her grandfather who gave her the name of Zoli, a boy's name, after his first son. It was also her grandfather who taught her to read and write (he carries a dog-eared and tobacco-stained copy of Marx's "Das Kapital"). She learned at an early age that she had the touch of the poet within her, or, as she puts it, "the feel of a pencil between my fingers."

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