On 30 September the author Andrej Giňa passed away at the age of 79 after a difficult illness.
News server Romea.cz ran the following review of his collected works previously:
It is no exaggeration to say that without Andrej Giňa (born 1936) there would be no Romani literature. At the very least it would be deprived not only of a number of excellent texts that can absolutely be compared to the better works of Czech literature, but also of a distinctive author who has brought to Romani writing an irreplaceable variety of styles, themes and topics.
Giňa’s life essentially spanned the complete story of the Romani minority in that part of the world during the dramatic 20th century: The author was born in a Romani settlement in eastern Slovakia, experienced harassment and threats from the Hlinka Guard there during the war, and lived with his parents during the postwar years as some of the first Romani settlers in the industrial areas of Bohemia – specifically, in Rokycany. He was one of the leading figures active at the end of the 1960s in the Union of Gypsies-Roma (Svaz Cikánů-Romů – SCR) and made his debut on the pages of its bulletin, Romano ľil, with his transcription of a traditional fairytale "About the Roma and the Black Lady" (O Romovi a černé paní).
Giňa remained active in the Romani movement even after the SCR was banned, and during the 1980s his home was one of the central places where the Romani intelligentsia gathered, some of whose meetings were even reported on in the mainstream press. After the Velvet Revolution, Giňa was an active member of the Roma Civic Initiative (Romská občanská iniciativa – ROI) and also published a great deal in the emerging Romani press while dedicating himself to music at the same time.
He remained in business until an advanced age, selling Romani people the animal intestines, onions and potatoes needed to make "goja", as viewers of the biographical film portrait of Giňa made by Jaroslova Hovorka ("Goja jedou" – 2006) already know; those who have seen the relevant 1999 episode of the television series "I’m Still Here" ("Ještě jsem tady") by Tereza Brdečková and Zdeněk Tyc will have learned this about him as well. He has also been a direct witness to this most recent, contemporary chapter in Romani history, one of exclusion, pauperization, and social decline.
The bilingual Czech-Romanes anthology Pat’iv, which has been complied from Giňa’s works by Romani studies scholars Karolína Ryvolová and Helena Sadílková, is intentionally organized so that the reader experiences all of these twists and turns of history through the author’s texts. The introductory trio of stories – "Phuro" (Dědek – Old Man), "Pal o Škiparis" (O Škypárovi – About Škypár) and "Bijav" (Svatba – Wedding) – describe the years just before and during WWII in Slovakia, showing Romani society during the final moments of its integration into rural Slovak society.
Other pieces here represent the genre of open-ended narrative memoir, capturing moments from wartime – for example, the stories "Sar mušinďam te rozčhivel o khera" (Jak jsme si museli zbourat vlastní domy – How We Had to Raze Our Own Homes) or "O Rusi kij’amende" (Rusové jsou tady – The Russians Are Here) are doubtless also of documentary value and could serve as reading material for teachers who want to discuss the Fascist persecution of the Roma specifically, but not schematically: The passage from one such memoir in which a Slovak mayor refuses to hand a Jewish shopkeeper over to the Guard is a moving illustration of the classic Romani studies lesson that "some mayors stood up for their persecuted citizens", and when the narrator says at the end that "Pal o mariben pes phundraďa e luma a sako šaj geľa, kaj kamelas. Tolčemešiste le Romendar na ačhiľa aňi jekh." ("After the war the borders opened and anyone could go wherever he wanted. Not one Roma remained in Tolčemeš."), the reader has a very detailed notion of the kinds of gulfs these wartime events exploded between the non-Roma and Roma neighbors in the village, what those ruptures looked like and how they were forged.
That detailed view, the intimacy of the characters and the moments, is also characteristic of other texts in this collection, whether they introduce the reader to the environment of the Rokycany smelting works ("E Maruška" / Maruška), bring him into a neighbors’ chat in a park ("Pre lavkica" / Na lavičce – On the Little Bench) or into a contemporary gaming room in the ghetto ("Sam diline, či nasvale?" / Jsme hloupí, nebo nemocní? – Are We Stupid Or Sick?). Giňa mastered the ability to capture the nature of a mood or a situation, and he achieved this elegantly and with ease in just a few words or phrases of direct speech, which is unusual in the context of Romani writing.
The same goes for the character-types in the folk fairy tales included here from Giňa’s transcriptions: Even though these are well-known, widespread themes, the author’s versions turn them into fresh, imaginative little pieces with no lack of piquant humor, as a Czech reader is accustomed to expecting from Romani fairy tales. Even the more didactic, moralizing pieces in the collection (such as the title story "Na bisterďam pre peskeri paťiv" / Ještě víme, co je úcta – We Still Know What Respect Is) are communicative and readable thanks to the author’s ability to amuse and tell a story – they are genuine entertainment that reveals their originator to be an experienced, immeasurably kind, and wise person, and the author’s father Andriš is presented as such in the anthology.
The volume is edited according to the best Romani scholarship traditions, the foundations of which were laid here by Milena Hübschmannová. Most of the pieces in the collection have been previously published (the first three stories came out in 1991 in the collection Bijav/Svatba – [Wedding] as Giňa’s sole book publication to date and won the Open Society Fund’s literary prize in 2003), but the translations have been newly revised and the language of the original has been edited for uniformity.
The introductory study to the collection by Karolína Ryvolová is valuable, as it places Giňa’s works in a broader social context and includes a great deal of less well-known information about the author’s life, the Romani movement, and this developing culture in general. The course of Giňa’s life, as portrayed in this study, is a model form of authorship among Czech Roma, and most certainly a contribution toward understanding the background and forms of Romani authors’ writings.
An appendix to the collection includes a selection of Giňa’s letters to Milena Hübschmannová, the founder of Romani scholarship in Czechoslovakia who was an editor and friend to Giňa for many years, a valuable document that provides further insight into the context of the Romani movement and Giňa’s works.
