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Hi everyone, welcome to the new books network. I'm your host, Tatiana Klépikova. Today I have two guests, Walha Vartash and Dommoszka Mocella. Walha Vartash is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota in Germany and a co-conveno of the Network, Margins of Memory, Cultures and Politics of Non-Hijumwank Remembrance.
Dommoszka Mocella is reading more than central and eastern European history at the University of St. Andros, whose work focuses on language, politics and nationalism. The book we will be speaking about today is Nothing Last of an Academic, Literary and Historical Miracle. It is titled, Popusa, Briniso Avais, Tears of Blood, a poet-sweetness account of the Nazi-Genocide of Roma.
Walha Vartash and Dommoszka Mocella co-edited it with Viktor Shapoval, and it came out with real in 2024, available now to everyone in open access. It is dedicated to a key figure of Roman literature, Briniso Avais, also known in Roman language as Popusa. Their book offers, from the very first time in history, the full version of Popusa's key work, Tears of Blood, which was considered lost for 70 years and was circulated only in a highly reduced copy. This song is a unique account of a woman poet about the Roma Holocaust in Eastern Europe during World War II.
Beyond this important historical and literary document, the book also provides literary translations of this manuscript into several languages, including English, and has chapters written by leading researchers of Roman studies who comment on the history of this text and the challenges behind making it available to the world public. It took its team over three decades to locate the manuscript, translate it, and fill in the gaps in its history, and I won't be losing any more second out of these decades to dive deeper into the story of this truly amazing project. Walha Tomek, welcome to the show. Hi everyone.
So let's start with Popusa, whose key work, the poem or song Tears of Blood, this book celebrates. Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about who Popusa was? Walha, maybe you could start? Yes, with Plairham.
So, Popusa or Brinslava Vice was a poet's corona woman born near Lublin to poet's corona parents in 1908. And what does it mean when I say poet's corona? It means a cultural and linguistic community of Roma with a strong sense of belonging to Polish culture and using Polish as their language for external communication. Popusa and her family traveled and lived in different localities of Eastern Poland that are present table, Ruth, Ukraine, and Lithuania.
And there was something unusual about her family. They made a living by playing music for local rural communities and for the local nobility. Unlike many other Roma in Eastern Europe, because the majority of Roma in this region were horse traders. But there was also something unusual about Popusa herself because she could write and read.
And at the time it was unusual not only for a Roma woman, but for anyone in this region because the levels of literacy were very low in Eastern regions of Poland. So, Popusa was an exception not only in her community. And she was self-educated and she learned how to write and read from school children and as one of the legends about her life says from a Jewish shopkeeper in Krona, which is present table, Ruth. So, during World War II, Popusa and her family were in Valinia, which is Ukraine today, and they survived in the woods and swamps of Valinia.
They experienced the Nazi persecution, but also the persecution from the Ukrainian insurgents. And precisely these events she describes in her poem, Ties of Blood, which is also an eyewitness or a survivor testimony. And after World War II, Popusa and her family, like many other boys, Krona from this region and Polish people from this region, made a decision to leave Valinia, which became the Soviet Union and moved to Poland, where they kept travelling till the Polish Sterengetization campaign in the beginning of the 1950s. This is an absolutely fascinating life story that I get all this world, and you have already started mentioning that this poem was dedicated to the time of the Second World War.
So, Mac, maybe you could get our listeners a little bit deeper into this poem or song as it was defined as a genre. What is it about and why is this text so important? The text was written, composed, kind of performed, first of all, for the Roma community. Yet it was the time as Vohrcha mentioned of Sterengetization, and there was this future friend of Popusa, Polish Catholic person, Yasue Vizowski.
And he was, if I remember, correct, Volkha, correct me if I'm wrong, he was asked by a committee in the Polish government, communist government, the time to gather testimonies of what was happening in the war. So, Popusa was convinced by Vizowski to compose such a testimony on the Holocaust, on the distribution on the genocide carried out by the Germans of the Roma, because apart from the Jews who were to be liquidated, as a people, the Nazi German ideology also entailed a parallel liquidation of the Roma as a people. So, Popusa composed this song long narrative poem and performed it because that was kind of the first original, not the first, the original of the song, and then using the skill which was unusual among the Roma's Volkha, or the mentioned of writing, she wrote it down, so it was preserved. Yet, as it was mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, the manuscript was kind of mislaid or preserved in places unknown to the scholarly world.
And what we had at our disposal was basically an extract composed from different bits or pieces of the song and translated into Polish by Yersie Fitsowski, and given the fact that the poem in this bolder eyes reduced for, was published in 1956, it had to comply with all kind of political and ideological restrictions, which obtained in Comi's Poland and across the Soviet bloc. Apart from this, the poem also had to meet the criteria of what poetry was believed to be at the time, how poetry should look like. So, it is kind of divided into standards and so on and so on, there are some rhymes, and like that. So we didn't really have a true poem yet, I mean in this entirety, and not like a papusha intended it, because of the reasons which I just mentioned.
Yet it was the first and every time when the poem was published alongside the Roma in the original in 1956, after that it was not republished, I mean the original. And we as a team like half a decade ago, when we tried to make this poem known to the world as a historical document primary source of high importance on par with the it's like a catenelson's, in the English language poem of a similar narrative poem of a similar size of 1200 verses, the song of the murdered Jewish people which was kind of the first witness account in a poetic form of the Jewish Holocaust and papusha did a similar thing, obviously, towards the Karli-Trash, the Roma Holocaust, but when we tried to publish it and make it known for the English speaking world, we wanted to translate it from the Romani original, not from the Polish translation which during the past the case had become a stone which is not really good, I would say, to translate from a translation. So we had this 1956 Romani original and we proceeded with the translation, but it was still not good enough. And we as a team were actively looking for the handwritten manuscript, which the existence of which was mentioned, but we didn't know where it was located or how to access it.
And without going into the details of the story, which are not still fully known and understood in 2021 or in 2020, the manuscript surfaced in the regional library in Kóśuw Velkopolski in north western Poland, or what before the world was German and the Landsberg. And when we got this original, we immediately understood that it was much longer what was published and what was published was kind of a selection done in the idealized manner as I were mentioning. We had a problem, you know, how to decipher it, because it was handwritten, it was handwritten with the use of the Polish hand-school, inter-war Polish hand-school, which I could read at the surface of it, but papusha used this Polish style orthographic, inter-Latin letters to record phonetically her Romani language words, but I don't know Romani. So that was a problem because if you do not know both things, it is difficult to establish where one word starts or ends or what kind of phrase is it, so even transcribing is difficult.
So we were lucky that our team was joined by Viktor Shapovall because he knows Romani, he knows Polish, he knows Ash and Ukrainian or kinds of languages, and because of his family, the history, he knows the Polish hand-school, so he meticulously transcribed this poem as written by papusha. And apart from this, he developed the transliteration in what the day is a consensual spelling orthography of the Romani language, so it could become available to end a person knowing Romani. So yeah, even the first step, as you can see, was kind of difficult, but luckily for us, but above all, for Romani literature and for European history, we got down to the manuscript which became the core of this book as the Romani original, not the initial original, because that is the question, what is original? And papusha was always saying that the original is the song, and the song is the performance, not the written down thing.
So we have a reflection of the original in writing in papusha's hand, so as close as it is possible to be close to this original. This is of course an incredibly difficult path to just one text that you are describing, Tomak, and you have already mentioned how important today is. Maybe we could speak about why it is so important, what is actually there in that manuscript, what could you maybe give us a couple of glimpses into what papusha is writing about in that document? Yes, as I already mentioned by Tomak, and that was the main focus of our project to represent the poem as what it actually was meant to be, and it was meant to be a survivor, first in the morning.
So the poem was produced at request of Yajifizovsky, who was working for the main commission investigating Nazi crimes in Poland, and he also interviewed papusha's family members, mostly male members of her community, about their experiences in the linear during World War II. And he asked her to give a testimony, but her testimony took a biotic form and came with a delay so she sent it to Fitsovsky in 1952. And the text is very complex. First of all, it is a historical testimony, and it sheds light on such topics as the Nazi genocide of Roma, their survival experiences and strategies, and what we learned from her poem is that Roma were actually not only victims, but they were addons of their history, and they initiated attempts to survive.
And they were actually actively active, and they made important decisions, so it transforms our understanding of Romani victimhood. And among the historical topics that she addresses in the poem is, for example, solidarity with Jewish people, especially between Jewish and Roma women, and the Renaissance dedicated to the Holocaust, because as we know in such regions as Wallinia, Roma and Jews witnessed their genocides of each other, but we can actually only rarely find anything about the genocide of Roma in Jewish testimonies. So it's very important for historians that papusha actually talks about the Holocaust and encounters that they had with the Jews also in hiding and in the resistance movement. Then it is the persecution that they experienced from the Ukrainian insurgents, from their opar units.
And here they were obviously sharing the destiny of their fellow Poles, because as boys, Karuma, they were also persecuted as Polish people. So she also had a lot of light on women's experiences over the genocide and war, mentioned in sexualized violence, mentioned in the experiences of mothers who failed to provide for their children under extreme circumstances. Then a lot is about the experiences of hiding and resistance. And she is mentioning, for example, their cooperation, a sort of cooperation with the Soviet partisans, but she also covers the complexity of this situation in which they found themselves.
And the Soviet partisans, for example, were ready to provide them with some degree of support and shelter, but they were only rarely accepted Roma groups in the so-called situation. So basically, the situation was very bad and they experienced the persecution from the Nazi forces, from the Ukrainian pro-nationist partisans, and the Soviet partisans were not actively accepting them. So this is about the historical part of the poem, very briefly. But it is also a trauma text, and we can see how it works like this.
In many lines of the poem, Opusia writes about her mental state as she watched the scenes of ethnic cleansing or children's suffering. And when she lost her composure or lost her mind, all these episodes were actually cut out by Fitsovsky in the first version because they were perhaps not seen available by him. But this is basically a trauma text and also the analysis of her handwriting by Yikir Shapoval suggests that she was extremely tired when she wrote her poem, that she wrote at night, she worked at night, and once the process of her own, the process of unblocking her trauma started, she couldn't stop. So she was feeling like every free sport on paper with words and writing and writing until actually their paper was over because maybe Thomas could tell us something about the materiality of the poem, it would be interesting, I think.
Well, as you mentioned, she was writing about her mental state and writing about survival in genocide is never easy for survivors. And it should be acknowledged and survivors develop all kinds of tactics when they start talking about the experience in order, first of all, to be able to share this experience with other people. On the other hand, in order to survive this experience of talking about the genocide and Papusha did it through songs, through singing, through performing, which was happening within her community, we don't have recordings of it so we don't know how it actually happened. And so, this is probably these kind of performances became the basis for this oral based poem, that's why Papusha is referred to by Victor and rightly so as former of Roman literature.
As a materiality of this poem, she was trying to fill in with words, all the available space on pages of school, popular book, which her son was using at the time, or was to use but didn't use because she kind of took it from him. And Victor is proposing that this transition from oral culture to literary culture, writing based culture, in this transition, Papusha wanted to reproduce in the entirety of the techniques she was using for things. And when you think you fill in with your voice, with your words, the space where the audience is. So when she was trying to fill in the entire page with words, it was kind of reproducing this room in which she was performing and how she was performing.
So, physically speaking, it is like a 16 sheet copy book, school copy book, and she kind of ran out of pages so she added several rules sheets of paper to this copy book. So, the entire thing is filled in with words or probably from the oral perspective of Roman literature with songs with song performance, which is kind of reduced quote unquote a reproduce on the written page. So, I would like to start with you two, since you are in the room today with me, and I would like to know how you came to be working on Papusha's legacy. So, Tom, maybe we begin with you since it was your interest in Papusha in the 1990s Poland that put you on the quest of looking for this original text in the first place.
Well, you know what? Seriously, although so little or next to nothing was published of what Papusha wrote down in the Roman original ever, the care poems in these kinds of translations or rather, I would say, adaptations by Fizoski, where a common place in communist Poland, because Roma were treated as a kind of a folklore. Roma were treated as a kind of a folklore. Roma were not treated in communist Poland as a different ethnic group.
Roma were kind of mistreated and stirred by as lumben proletaria, the sport illiterate people. And yet, there was kind of tantalizing the poems of Papusha collections of poems by Papusha were published. So, it was interesting because you could see Roma living in your town, in your city, after the action of sedentarization. And you were brought up to believe that with all this kind of story that Roma are thieves and they are stealing children.
Okay, okay. Yet here you have this kind of literature, but you were told at school that they don't have literature that they are not interested in books. They are not writing and they don't want to go to school. Obviously, they didn't want to go to school because school was in Polish and they didn't understand anything when they were speaking Romani, but we didn't realize at that time, because we were told otherwise.
But in the 1980s, when I entered university, I was doing linguistics. I came clearly to realization that Roma speak a different language and then I started reading books and yeah, it was kind of confirmed and then it kind of deemed on me. Well, if it's a translation, there should be the original, but you couldn't find the original, the Romani original. And it was kind of unbelievable to me given the importance given to her points in communist Poland.
The fact that the Romani original was unavailable. I was asking at that time, from time to time, trying to find something going to the libraries, it was before the internet. So, when I started dealing with history, even though I haven't found, haven't located, didn't know people who would know where the original is, I started teaching at St. Andrews like 15 years ago, kind of specialist module on genocide and ethnic cleansing.
So, the point of the years of that is of paramount importance as sketched out by Volha for the understanding of documenting the Roma Holocaust. And at that time at St. Andrews, there was also an ERC project carried out Rominder Bellum about Roma political thought and writings in the interwar period in Europe. It was carried out, I mean, the project, the ERC project between 2016 and 2023 under the direction of Alana Maruszakova and the selling pop off.
And you know, they were kind of next door, I was talking to them and I was talking about this poem and the importance of it and the importance of making Roma history into an integral part of the mainstream of European historiography, like it happened with Jewish history after the Holocaust. And so that Roma wouldn't be seen as kind of strange people with no history, no literature, no culture, a fair go for any nationalities to victimize them and use hideous stereotypes about them. So, I believe that it could be my small contribution to making Roma history a part of the mainstream of European historiography and the LN was kind of supporting this idea and I was trying to get more people around it. And at first, as I already mentioned, we translated the Romani original published by Fitsovsky, this fragment, this annotation in 1956.
But I was raising the issue that there should be the manuscript and we should use actually the manuscript and through her contacts and through her research of Romani issues. And then we had a paper called Marouscha Kova and the selling pop off, kind of learned about this deposition in 2020 or in 2021 of the Manus of all the literary estate of all the papers of publisher in this regional library in Goshwil Kopolsky and they got from the library So when we had a scan, we could start working on the original as done on the paper original as done in Pupuscha's camp. So it was the beginning, it was quite a long route, I have to say. And I'm glad we are here, but it also shows how much work is to be done because there are hundreds of thousands of pages written by Pupuscha and only small snippets were kind of adapted and translated by Fitsovsky and made available in Polish.
And they are available in Polish in the form of overlapping three collections of points. So that's the challenge for the future researchers. And it is surprising quite often to people that it is a challenge because on the one hand, you have 10 to 12 million on the Roma in Europe. So that's quite a large group, the size of the Czech Republic, you could say, or Greece.
So there should be specialties who would be able to do it. Yet, it is kind of forgotten that the Roman, till today, don't have a single school in all of Europe, all across the world where Roman, you would be the medium of education. That is just one in Budapest, if it's still working under urban regime, where Roman is a medium of education alongside English and alongside Hungarian. Basically, we do not have mainstream scholars who are mainstream intellectuals, let's say, working in English, working in French, working in Polish, working in Hungarian or German, who would know Romani to such a level that they would be able to attempt literary or scholarly translation.
So the choice which we made was to team up to get people who have whatever skills are needed for such a job, and with these skills pulled as a team, we were able to execute what we intended, meaning translation, the first of all a transcription and then a translation of this poem into literary English. And it can be reproduced. Teamwork is an answer to dealing with such situations, because yet another probably difficult challenge in all this process is the fact that Romani is not a language, but it's not a standard language like German, with the official dictionary of the words and the grammar of how this word should be syntax. So there is a lot of variety within this language, which is a beauty of it, and which is also a challenge of it.
Yeah, a challenge for a whole team. And at one point, how you joined the team to bring this project over across the finish line. So could you maybe speak about what kind of experience you had brought you on this team? Yes.
So for about 20 years now, I've been working in the field of Roma history and culture, and I have my own personal or academic transformation from focusing mainly on Roma culture to more historically oriented research and historical topics, but still with strong focus on community perspective and oral history. And I actually remember the first time when I encountered Popusa's poem, and it happened during my studies in Minsk, when I worked at the National Library, and I was of course reading everything produced by Yashisovsky, because his books were seen as a big value for trained technologists in Belarus. And so I also ordered his edition of Popusa's poem, I read it, and I immediately sensed that actually something was missing, like something stayed unsaid. And so it was my feeling, but at the time I couldn't imagine that I would have something to do with the publication of Popusa's manuscript.
So I continued with my cultural studies, and as I was interviewing people for my research and asking them about Roma cultural traditions and the experiences of sedenturization in the Soviet Union, actually, I was talking to mostly elderly people, and they would ask me back. So why are you always asking us about Roma traditions, but you never ask us about our wartime experiences. So we could tell you stories about our families, how our people died, and how our people survived, but you're not interested in listening to our stories. And so then I thought why wouldn't I actually become interested in reckoning their stories, and I started documenting family biographies before, during and after World War II and the Massage and the Side.
And so when I was able to see and to read Popusa's tears of blood in its full version, I was immediately able to sense their continuation of my interlocutors stories. So it was essentially the same narrative of the Romani hardship and survival resistance as well and suffering. And I joined the project, so for the first time I joined for the public outreach that Tomak and Yelena organized in St. Andros in 2019, and I was contributing with a talk on the oral histories of Roma genocide from Belarus and Lithuania, so based on my research.
And then after some time, and I'm now very happy that we had that procrastination. After some time Tomak reached out and asked me whether I would be interested to join as a co-editor. And it happened shortly after the full manuscript, it was discovered by, but we didn't know about that. And Tomak, if you let me correct you a little bit, I very well remember the moment when we learned about the manuscript.
And it was when we started to talk to the researchers in Poland, and we had a conversation with our colleague Emilia Kledic, who wrote the biography of Popusa for our volume, and we learned from Emilia that the manuscript of tears of blood is in possession of the provincial library in Goshuyl Kopolsky. And then we requested the scan of the poem from the library via Yelena, so it was a big collective effort and big network of scholars engaged in this project. Across Canada in Evolveau. Destination, Vancouver, turn left to leave.
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Adventure and comfort with Volvo. Whether you prefer gas, plug-in hybrid, or fully electric, there's a Volvo for everyone. Learn more at VolvoCars.ca. Yeah, and an absolutely marvelous endeavor, which as you both mentioned repeatedly throughout this conversation has involved a wealth of expertise that one needed to find, which was absolutely unique.
And one of the people of course without whom this project would not have been possible was Victor Schapelow, so it would also like to give some space to him in absentia. If you could speak about the contribution he made to making this text available to broader audiences. Maybe Donak, you could go. Well, Victor Schapelow was the linchman of this project, and it should be properly acknowledged.
He was able to transcribe it, the text with the understanding of the Roma language as coded in this Polish interval, Hansko. He translated this poem into Russian translation. The Russian translation is not included in the volume, but probably is available for publication in the future. On the basis of this translation I developed an English literary translation, and the literal translation became the basis for the Scottish poet, the Hamish Magdonat, to develop English poetic translation.
He also developed a translation into the Scottish language of Scots. You see how the project bifurcates and then creates a new sub-projects and other projects making this point available to the world, but returning to Victor. He meticulously compared the adaptation of Fitsoski against the recently made available originals, so we know how Fitsoski did it and where he took the words and how he changed them and so on, which is of importance for the biography and obviously the author. He also had a poem that was written for literary scholars and historians.
Then he commented on the text with his background knowledge alongside with Volha regarding the history and communities of Roma involved depicted in the events. He also had a poem that was written in the book of Roma. He also had a poem that was written from a famous poem into manageable, smaller stories, if you may say which makes it easier for non-Roma, for uninitiated readers to understand what's going on. And so, Victor's project, her song Performances onto the written page, is coming from Victor's long chapter in the book, which comments on literary aspects and approaches in oral literature and how it crosses or not onto the written page.
So yeah, Victor is quite a linchpin in this project and the Karmish Magdonal is the English mouth of this project making this poem available to uninitiated public to read for pleasure, if they choose so, or as a historical document. Oh, we absolutely do hope that people read it for pleasure or at least for engagement, right, with the text out of regular curiosity and not out of scholarly curiosity with the trauma with the memories and with the veracity, maybe, that this text delivers. And I would like to join you in speaking about these translations too, because as you mentioned, this was also a particular kind of challenge to do that and about the word that Hamish Magdonal did in preparing for English and scores version. Could you maybe, Thomas, speak about the difficulties behind translating tears of blood and what would other translators learn from your work on this project?
The difficulty was that there was not a single person who would be able to read the Romani original and translated it into English. So there were all these kinds of steps which you had between the poetic translation into English and the Romani original, which I've just mentioned Victor translating it into Russian, and me translating the Russian translation into a literal English translation and so on. So, I mean, a lot of meaning could be lost, because I do not know Romani and Hamish doesn't know Romani either. So in order to prevent it, we had Elena, Maruchakova and the selling pop of checking upon our translations as they were happening, whether we are sticking to it within a sensible range or not.
Well, I could go on into details, but it doesn't matter truly speaking, yet with the privilege of Heinz and I have already mentioned the challenges of translating from non-standardized languages, and the majority of the words languages are non-standardized, so let us not fool ourselves about it. The team approach probably is a good answer before some translators are educated and arise who would be able to translate directly from Romani into English into German and so on. But part and part of all these difficulties is making the Romani originals available to such translators and researchers. I would also like to emphasize the fact that the book which got published includes the Romani original, because when it comes to publishing Romani poetry, Romani literature, the fate of all the ordinary should be published, and then the translations should be coming.
That's a huge challenge, because now we know where the manuscripts are, but we do not have people apart from Victor, and Victor cannot do everything, because his life, like we all do, these manuscripts are there, but they are not transcribed, and before they are transcribed, no research, no translations into other languages are really possible. So I hope there will be more teams like ours in the near future, not taking 30 or 40 years, but rather a year or two, who would press on with first of all transcription and the publication of the Romani originals. I think this would be a great moment to wrap up this conversation and think about the meaning of tears of blood that you put out in the world, because as you don't mentioned, one of the most important contributions of this book was not just to provide these translations and scholarly companions to this text, but also to publish the text in its entirety and make it available to the public. So maybe I could turn to you, but to speak about the hopes that you had behind making this text available alongside this other companion text, like what is the potential of a pushless tears of blood in changing the world?
What other kind of perspective we would look at it? I am not quite sure about changing the world, but our hope was that this publication would change the way how we understand what happened to Roma during World War II, so the Roma genocide, and we are convinced that this text has a greater potential to tell the story of the Roma genocide than any handbook or scholarly publication. I can see it actually happening with my students because I'm always given this text to them when we study the history of Roma genocide or the history of World War II in Eastern Europe more generally, and I see how they become impressed and by their monumentality of this text, and basically you're immediately, since the meaning of what happened and the scale of what happened to the Roma people, and they learn about this not only by learning the facts and historical figures that Popusa describes in tears of blood, but they learn it also at the emotional level, which is a powerful educational tool, I think. Another thing which is very important is that the text is now available in the Romani language to the Roma communities across Europe, and it was important for the Roma communities even before our publication, even in its shorter version, the lines of the poem were produced at the inscriptions of memorials in genocide, commemorations, ceremonies, and in other forms of artistic commemoration and remembrance.
So now we expect that our publication will provoke new artistic responses and community forms of remembrance, and here we see the main value of our project. Don't look, is there anything you would like to add? Of course, please go ahead. Yeah, I would add that, you know, a kind of making the poem available to the public at large across the world, or at least across Europe, contributes to one important goal, which not only me but many scholars involved with this project have had the two incorporate Roma culture, Roma history into the mainstream of European culture and history.
That's the main contribution, and hopefully it will be like this, because as far as I know there are in the pipeline translation into of this poem and publication into Polish, into German, into Scots, so things are happening. And Vohja has already mentioned the importance of this poem of this Romani original for the Roma themselves. To give an example, let us imagine there is Homer's Iliad or Odysse, available to Greeks only in the English translation and there is no Greek original, although everyone knows there is a Greek original but no one can find it. So that was the situation of the Roma culture and Roma literature.
Now, out of sudden there's not only translation but the original so the Roma themselves can read the poem and use it as an inspiration to develop a Romani language literature for themselves and for Europe. So this is an absolutely marvelous project that you did and I congratulate you wholeheartedly on wrapping it up and as maybe a finishing touch to this interview, I would like to know what you are now working on. Hopefully nothing for this three decades long and as big of a feat as this project has been, but it would be really lovely to know if there is anything else coming out from your work in the coming months, years and so on. Vohja, maybe you could start and then we'll finish with Tomc.
At the moment I'm trying to finalize my own monograph on the experiences of suffering and survival among the Roma communities in Bellerwes and Lisswynia and it will be largely based on my oral history survey among the Roma communities in these countries. But there are also some follow-up projects to this one and just recently I've started working on a short publication for another edition, coordinated by the German History Museum. The text will be on Popuřa's harps and the role of music in their survival in Valinia, which is I think another exciting but under started topic also in broader East European perspective. Yes, absolutely, Tomc, what about you?
I should stress one again that I'm not especially in Romani studies or Romani language. I had an interest in this point as a historian of modern, central and Eastern Europe, especially with a focus on the question of genocide and ethnic cleansing. So my research in language politics is not focusing on Roma actually. Now I'm involved with the Ukrainian history global initiative project and it is a large 70s solar project run in Ukraine with some kind of international connections and I've tasked with writing a short 30,000 word history of language use slash language politics in medieval and early modern period across broadly speaking ethnic Ukrainian lands.
But not to leave the listeners without some kind of a comment on some ramifications of importance coming from the project of the translation of the years of that. I have to say that it gave an impetus following the wrapping up of the Elena Marcio Kova's ERCV project, Roma Interbellum, to establish a book series, Roma History and Culture, which is the first of its kind ever. And it is the place to watch, I would say, because it is how in practice is collaborative practice, Roma History and Culture is being incorporated into the European mainstream of culture and historiography. Well, these are exciting projects and I can't wait to see them in print and also the similar volumes coming out of this new series on Roma History and Culture.
And I thank you both very much for coming on the new books network today and sharing this important work and the history behind this project with our listeners. Thank you for having us.