The Romani Gypsies, by Yaron Matras

This book was a bit frustrating to read.  That doesn’t mean it was a bad book–it was quite a good book from the level of its technical competence.  Yet it is not only competence by which a book is to be judged.  For one, there is the larger political context of a book, and this book is full of discussion of the identity politics of the Gypsies and how it is that uniting gypsies together in Europe and North America has been an immensely difficult task.  The author makes grand sweeping statements about the experience of the Gypsies (including equating the experience of the Gypsies with that of the Jews in World War II as a way of ramping up the sympathy for them, which is not an entirely accurate view of history and is clearly done with political motivations).  The author also spends a great deal of time talking about her experiences working with the Gypsy population as if that makes her an expert on it, when she should really be considered one of those do-gooder leftist types that tends to inflame rather than resolve the problems of identity politics in the contemporary world.

This book of about 300 pages is divided into seven chapters along with other material.  The author begins the book by asking the question of the identity of the Romani people, giving a brief discussion of their supposed history as well as their travels throughout the Middle East and into Europe, where they appear in history in the late Middle Ages in Eastern Europe (1).  The author then spends a fair amount of time talking about the nature of Romani society, with its family-based and honor-based traditions (2).  After this comes a look at some of the customs and traditions of the Romani, many of which will (not surprisingly) seem very odd and puzzling to those who are not Romani themselves (3).  The author spends a bit of time talking about the Romani language but not to the detail that one would hope for (4).  After this comes a discussion of the Romani and their experience in dealing with various nations, which has generally been negative (5), after which the author looks at the experience of the Romani in the 19th and 20th centuries struggling with romanticism and racism (6), as well as the problems of contemporary Romani identity and its fragmentation and complexity (7), after which there is an appendix on Romani groups, notes, a selected bibliography, and an index.

Given the preliterate nature of much of Romani culture and the way that they have often sought to survive in various niches that often played to stereotypes that others had of them, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Romani themselves should be so intensely divided, because it is hard to build up unity in the absence of shared institution or overall structures.  The author is clearly sympathetic to the Romani, but is herself also aware of the extent to which many Gypsies seek to deny who they are to outsiders and by their marginalization find themselves easily misunderstood.  Quite honestly, it does not appear as if the Romani want to be understood by the majority cultures they live around, and perhaps they fear (not without reason) that their superstitions and culture would be viewed negatively if it were better understood by others even if it does not correspond to the precise nature of the stereotypical views that others often have of them.  In reading about the gypsies myself I have managed to find a great deal of compassion for their suffering but also some frustration with some of the more backwards aspects of their ways, and a respect for having endured centuries of marginal status with frequent periods of exploitation and abuse.