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This book is yet another chronicle of the on-going humanitarian work Paul Polansky has been doing for the Romani people, in this case, the plight of the Roma of Kosovo, whose dire situation has been untold and ignored by mainstream media and the numerous relief organizations operating in Kosovo.
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I was fortunate enough to be present for the overwhelming welcome that Paul received that spring day in Macedonia.
His commitment to these people, his friendship with them, will continue regardless of the fate of Kosovo itself or the
eventual twists and turns of each individual life, including his own.
Not A Refugee is both tragic and a testament to the human spirit Read it and live.
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As a Rom who knows very well what racial discrimination means, I can confirm that this book is authentic in its portrayal of the stories of real, live Roma. The poems in The River Killed My Brother are a reflection of the post-revolution reality. The fall of communism, with its "hidden" form of genocide, brought about a new period of a "cold but more open" race war.
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The village of Lety in South Bohemia was the cradle of Czech emigration to the American Mid-West. It was also the site of a concentration camp for gysies run by the Czech government during World War II. Paul Polansky got hold of a list of survivors of the camp, and interviewed them to find out what really happened at Lety...
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"Lety by Písek? I never heard of the place."
Paul Polansky's chilling testimony of the concentration camp in Lety by Písek is all the more frightening since it’s presented in such a conversational tone. It records the testimonies of those Romanies who survived the Lety camp or the recollections of their children. Czech literature might have as few as two books that can match Polansky's: David’s Star by Jirí Weil and Black Lyre by Jirí Kolár. Ladies and Gentlemen, hold on to your hats, this ride’ll freeze you to the bone.
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Antonin Dvorak, My Father is a personal biography by his son Otakar who at the age of seventy-five years old decided to "write about the events missing from the other books about my father. "
Competition and sport have provided motifs for human cultural endeavors and have been the expression of such endeavors—Paul Polansky directly touches on these motifs in an accessible style that offers a poetic account of one's aversion to the brutality of violence.
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In its rush to proclaim its assignment a success, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo is ignoring - or coving up - a medical tragedy there for which it is directly responsible. At three camps built by the UN High Commission for Refugees, some 60 Gypsy children under the age of six have been exposed to such high levels of lead that they are highly likely to die soon or to suffer irreversible brain damage. This number represents every child born in the camps since they were built five and a half years ago.
PAUL POLANSKY
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Bus Ride in Jerusalem
A chap book containing a selection from the sixty-one poems Paul wrote as a result of the 15 day trip he took to the Holy Land. Some were written in Tel Aviv, some in Jerusalem, the rest after he returned to the United States. Some demanded to be written seconds after the encounter, others needed to filter through his mind and soul for several days before surfacing on paper. As with most of Paul's poems, he wrote about irony, hypocrisy, discrimination he saw. But for once, he let his own voice tell these stories, even though it is not his voice that matters. What matters are the lives of those people he encountered trying to survive in a land that has never known peace, and probably never will.
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To UNHCR, With Love
Paul Polansky has spent the last four years listening to the voices of the people in this book. In between compiling reports for various aid agencies, he sometimes transforms the story of the Roma, Ashkalija and Egyptians (RAE) of Kosovo into poems. The voices in these poems are theirs, punctuated by his own interjections; the drawings are theirs as well. This little book contains perhaps the grimmest chapter in a story which makes no sense.
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Sarah's People: Nish Cemetery Poems and Photos
"What Paul has done in Nish and in this book is to lift a cover and let us glimpse something of what lies within"- Yechiel Bar-Chaim, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Country Director for Serbia and Montenegro. A collection of poems and photos about restoring the old Jewish cemetery in Nish, Serbia, one of the oldest cemeteries in the Balkans.
Kosovo Blood
In July 1999 shortly after the arrival of NATO troops in Kosovo, Paul volunteered to live in a Gypsy IDP camp near Obilic. As the only non-Gypsy in the camp at night, his job was to inform the UNHCR director of the camp if there were any problems. During the day, he spent all his time in the Gypsy tents collecting their stories about how they had been chased away from their homes by the returning Albanians.
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Safari Angola
In 1975 Paul went on safari in war-ravaged Angola. Officials in Lisbon told him the civil war was over; it was safe to visit, epsecially to go into the bush after big game. He didn't start to write these poems until twenty-three years later. Never had the intention of publishing them until a Serbian friend, Ilija Elezovic, president of the Kosovo Hunters Association, kept pestering him to tell him what it was like to hunt big game, what it was like to be in the African Bush. These poems tell a story. Not a true story, but all the poems have true experiences in them, from his life and the lives of others who were in Angola during the civil war, "on safari." Most people agree, killing a human being is a sin. But is it a sin to kill "big game" that has noble feelings (maybe even more noble than most human beings)? Read and judge for yourself. A book in both English and Serbian.
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Roma: VERACHTET, VERFOLGT, VERGESSEN
Prosagedichte aus Tschechien und Kosovo 1991-2005, Auswahl und Übersetzung, Andreas Wormser. The book is in German.
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Written both in English and in Serbian, Gyspy Taxi(Ciganski Taxi) contains poems that mainly tell the story of Paul Polansky's trips during the summer of 2001. Each poem reflects on Romani traditions and customs. As he keeps telling his Gypsy friends, not all their traditions are good ones, but he's always believed you have to see people's warts before you can help them. Of course, many of these traditions are outdated among the Gypsies themselves in other countries. But in the Balkans and especially in Kosovo the spirit behind those traditions is what he believes has enabled them to survive all the wars, and genocide, that is still taking place. Paul hopes a lot can be learned from these poems.
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Although most Gypsy communities in Yugoslav survived WWII, many suffered horrible tragedies. In Volume I, we saw what happened to the Roma in Nish, where the German army established their first concentration camp in the Balkans. In Volume II, the Roma tell their stories for the rest of Serbia. Many different kinds of Gypsies lived in Serbia before WWII. Most had never been nomadic in the sense that they lived fulltime in wagons. Yet many made their living as touring musicians, playing with Gypsy bands in fashionable hotels and resorts. Others took their wares (reed baskets, bridles, ropes, horseshoes, wooden troughs, second-hand clothes, and charcoal) to sell in village markets. Almost all had a permanent home they returned to after conducting their "summer" business. According to many of their oral histories, this is what saved them. They were not nomadic. They had homes; they had jobs. Many of their gadjo neighbors respected them. In fact, some Serbian authorities intervened on behalf of the Gypsies, telling the German commanders what good workers Gypsies were, how honest they were.
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My Romani team and I interviewed and filmed 154 Gypsy survivors of WWII in the former Yugoslavia. But perhaps the best stories, at least my favourites, are in Volume III.
Because Volume I was only about the Roma of Nish, and Volume II only about the Gypsies in the rest of Serbia, their stories weren't so different. Although we encountered many different kinds of Gypsies, with unusual traditions, their stories were somewhat similar.
But in Volume III, we have the stories of many Gypsies who, according to their customs and tales, came from various regions in Old India and from many unrelated castes. Their stories in Volume III show for the first time in Gypsy studies that the "Roma" were not one people, with one language, nor with the same traditions. From their customs, it is possible to recognize Kashmiri, Punjabi and Rajasthan castes from northwest India; the Gond, Ghasia and Sais castes from central India, and even the Tamil from south India.
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Polansky's poems immediately strike like a fist in the stomach, whether they are personal or committed and "angry". Wide is the variety of human experiences described, either lived personally or seen by the eyes of a man who moves with passion in his body and spirit, and fights for things to get better. Words can change the world, especially when they are a written reflection of an action accomplished or of a voice screamed against the world's injustices. This is Polansky's poetry: the mirror of a man who has never let the events glide on him, who on the contrary has let himself be touched and wounded by his own and other people's life. As an old boxer, Polansky always fights, and still undefeated he resists the offensive of an unjust society, for he knows the match is never over and nothing is lost, neither for himself nor for the people he supports and defends.
The volume is part of the projects of Casa della Poesia. It includes more than 100 poems Paul has written from 1994 to the Old Madrid collection written in 2008, all translated in Italian as well.
'Underlying the Word/Action of these poems, and this is perhaps the heart of the authenticity of Paul Polansky's work, the reader is going to enter a world that he or she like most of us have never really known. And we're going to be educated, we're going really learn some things about different peoples, and in ways that will be starkly and strikingly unforgettable, manifested by a world traveler who graduated from being a picker-of-fights in small town Middle-West America, to a boxer in fact, only to find his way to Europe in 1963 and, in many books of poems, continue The Good Fight with the best weapon in hand.' Jack Hirschman
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In January 2009, BBC journalist Nick Thorpe visited the former UNHCR Roma/Ashkali camps in north Mitrovica (Kosovo) with his team to report on the children suffering there from lead poisoning. The World Health Organization had already told him that this was the worst-ever lead poisoning that they knew of in Europe, maybe in the world. After visting several families and filiming the children who looked up at his camera with hopeless big brown eyes, he turned to me and disgustedly asked, "Who is responsible for this tragedy? I want to know!"
This book tells you, Nick, who was responsible for this senseless, deadly neglect.
Mustalaistaksi on amerikkalaisen Paul Polanskyn omaelämäkerrallista runoutta Kosovon mustalaisalueilta, häistä, matonaisen kämpiltä, Montenegron satamasta ja Makedonian rajoilta. Polansky vie lukijansa katsomaan mitä ajankohtaisinta aihetta, Itä-Euroopan mustalaisten kurjia oloja ja syitä lähteä kerjäämään muualle. Runoilijan kynästä lentää vihaisia terveisiä niin NATO:lle, kansainvälisille avustusjärjestöille kuin YK:llekin. Hän kaahaa Pristinan moottoritiellä vanhassa Chevy Astrossaan kyydissään maakunnan paras varas, Femon äiti, 32 mustalaista samaan aikaan tai synnyttävä nainen. Käsikranaatteja hän ei suostu kuljettamaan.
Polanskyn runous on kuin Charles Bukowski parantuisi renttumaisuudestaan ja alkaisi välittää ihmisistä, suoraa, mutta empaattista. Jos olet miettinyt itäeurooppalaisten romanien elämää, tämä on kirja juuri sinulle.
Polansky on nykyään Serbian Nišin lähistöllä mustalaiskylässä asuva amerikkalainen runoilija ja mustalaisaktivisti.
Hän on asunut ympäri itäistä Eurooppaa, saanut tappouhkauksia ja vihaa aktivismistaan, nyrkkeillyt nuorena, ollut Günter Grass -palkintoehdokkaana ja pelastanut satojen romanien hengen tai terveyden.
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La mia vita con gli zingari (Italian)
Thanks to his presence and his activism and humanitarian work of disclosure, the world cannot condemn to oblivion the Roma families living in camps in Kosovo contaminated by lead.
Now comes the new book by Paul: "My life with the gypsies." Foreword by Pietro Marcenaro. A civilian witness that becomes manifest and causes us not to stand idly by the tragedies that affect the Roma people, but to act.
