The Color of Smoke

A semiautobiographical tale set in World War II era Hungary, The Color of Smoke is the first-person account of a nameless Romani boy torn between the shantytown community of his birth and the mainstream village society that both entices him and rejects him. From his rise in school to his first sexual encounters, from the travails of hunger and cold to being harassed by gendarmes, his is a life steeped in misery, violence, and persecution. But it is also a life passed in the fold of a close-knit community--a life that, with its rituals and superstitions, its stories told around campfires, exudes a deep sense of freedom. Closing as the Holocaust casts its shadow upon the Romanies, The Color of Smoke opens a fascinating new window on one of the world's most dispossessed minority populations. Told as a series of seamlessly interwoven episodes that come together as a cruel and yet magical cosmos of a people left behind by history, it evokes works by such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Toni Morrison.