Fairly or not, I'm often wary of a novel that purports to draw from historical parallels; my caution here was unwarranted. "Zoli" is a commanding novel with an inner reality so authentic it could only have come from the matrix of a novelist's imagination. But its bounty of emotional and character detail is tethered by McCann's research : a four-year immersion in Romani culture, in the archives and in Slovakia. The woman who arises from these ashes of print and memory is a splendid protagonist and sometimes narrator -- a girl christened Marienka, then called Zoli, a boy's name, by her grandfather, who gave her the heretical gift of teaching her to read.
The novel opens in 1930s Czechoslovakia with grief and horror: Zoli and her grandfather Stanislaus return to their family's encampment to see their caravans driven out onto the ice by fascist troops who have set fires around the edges of the frozen lake. The girl and the man watch everything they love -- people, horses, wagons, their entire world -- disappear into black waters. Zoli is 6 and Stanislaus, 39; they flee to another tribe of Romanis, who make music in the cloistered forest and then bury their harps to hide them from the fascists. Zoli learns to read, then write; she hides pages in her skirts and finds that the most precious things in life must be kept secret. These are a few of the things she has learned: "Remember weather by the voice of the wheel. Do not become the fool they need you to become. Change your name. Lose your shoes. Practice doubt. . . . Adore darkness. . . . Beware the Hlinkas, it is always at night that the massacres occur."
