The Gypsies, by Jan Yoors

This book is an insider account of a Dutch boy who, for reasons unknown perhaps even to himself, found himself drawn to wander along with a company of Gypsies several months of the year several times in the period just before the beginning of World War II.  Like many people who read this, I found the story told both powerful and troubling, powerful because it represents an insider look at gypsy society, with the internal divisions and the approach to the societies and their governments by gypsies portrayed vividly, and troubling for the reason that it demonstrates a certain lack of honesty and transparency in the relationships between gypsies and outsiders.  Even for those whose sympathy for gypsies and their struggles is limited, this book is particularly poignant for showing a picture of gypsy society in Europe just before it was greatly harmed by Hitler’s regime and the murder of a great many (at least tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands) of the people the author wandered with and befriended.  And it was that poignancy that made this book worthwhile to me even if I did not find the gypsies the author traveled with to be all that enjoyable of a people to read about.

This book is about 250 pages long and it covers a period during the author’s life when he spent a lot of time wandering around with gypsies.  The author details how it was that he found himself gradually and perhaps grudgingly accepted by a company of gypsies and how his identity as a gypsy-friend allowed him to not only befriend the gypsies himself but also to serve as an ambassador in the company’s dealings with outsiders.  He witnesses the tension between different companies of gypsies and the way that certain gypsies seemed to inflame relations with outsiders more than others, and examines the way that gypsies were a lot more sympathetic to the author once he saw their rules and the way that they sought to cleverly deceive those on the outside.  In one dramatic moment the author finds himself being pushed into marriage with a young gypsy girl, which is meant to seal his membership in the gypsy company, but he turns his back on the marriage in a way that seeks to avoid causing offense to anyone, and then finds himself a member of Dutch society in a period where it was itself imperiled by Nazi rule.

In general, I have to say that this book solidified what it is about gypsy society that has most bothered me when I have read about it.  To be fair, it is not a problem that the gypsies themselves alone have, but it is very characteristic of them.  That problem is the way that the gypsies themselves do not wish to be known by others.  This leads inevitably to a sense of deception and a glorification of the gullibility of those with whom the gypsies deal with, and is an essentially dishonest approach that prevents trust from building across the gulf between gypsies and the mystified and often irritated populations with whom they move.  That is aside from the many acts of petty thievery that the author notes, including horse rustling as well as subsistence stealing of food items like chickens and fish and even hedgehogs.  If the gypsies do not appear as threats to mainstream society, they do not seem like the sort of people one would want to be hanging around one’s community, engaging in various charlatan tricks and seeking to preserve a sense of mystery and power through claims of magical ability.