Every year on April 8, we commemorate the Day of Romani Culture. It is an opportunity to pause and appreciate the richness that the Romani community brings to our shared cultural space. Literature is an essential part of this richness: stories written from lived experience, in the voices of those who live it from within. Romani authors offer perspectives that have long been missing from the mainstream of Czech and world literature and their books are well worth discovering.
Since the Romani language did not have a standardized written form for centuries, there was no written literature—yet oral tradition was all the richer, sustained by the relative isolation of Roma from the surrounding population, high levels of illiteracy, and limited access to other forms of entertainment. Written Romani literature in the Czech lands (Czechoslovakia) began to emerge only after the Second World War, while the Holocaust had deprived the Czech Romani community of the vast majority of its members. The pioneers of written literature thus came mainly from Slovak Roma. A key milestone was the political liberalization of the late 1960s, when the Union of Gypsies–Roma was established in 1969. Its bulletin became the first real platform for Romani literary voices and helped stimulate the codification of a written standard of Romani, without which systematic literary production would not have been possible.
When the Union was forcibly dissolved four years later, the need to write had already taken root among Czech and Slovak Roma. It resurfaced publicly thanks to the work of Milena Hübschmannová, the founder of Romani studies, who not only collected Romani oral literature but also actively encouraged Roma to write in their own language. Early Romani writing was motivated by the desire to demonstrate equality with the surrounding society; over time, however, it became emancipated and began to draw from its own world from oral storytelling traditions, the experience of the Porajmos, and the everyday reality of socially excluded communities. Roma and today, especially Romani women, write not only in Romani, but also in contact languages such as Czech or Slovak, sometimes incorporating Romani elements into their texts.
In our context, the Kher publishing house has established itself in recent years, bringing a number of high-quality publications to readers, including bilingual editions. One of them was shortlisted this year for the Magnesia Litera award. The themes of these books stem from the natural life experiences of Roma in both recent history and the present; they often take the form of social novels reflecting interpersonal relationships and seek to reduce the level of misunderstanding that still persists within the majority society.
In our collection, you can find several titles by Romani authors, for example: I Was Born Under a Lucky Star by Elena Lacková, I Don’t Want to Return Among the Dead by Erika Olahová, We Live in Secrecy by Ceija Stojka, Čhávata from the Manège by Gary G. Steele, American Gypsy: A Memoir by Oksana Marafioti, Me, Tran, and Everything Else by Martin Kanaloš, and others.
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