Voices for the Yenish. Arts, book: Jakob's Colors by Lindsay Hawdon; Videos

Roma, exhibit Zigeuner, Mauthausen KC, Austria

 Yenish and the Holocaust.

Frame anew the identities and cultures of those thrown away.

1.  Book alert.  Jakob's Colors, by Lindsay Hawdon. This is not yet in our nearly statewide library system, but apparently follows a Roma-Yenish child, mixed blood, alone in Austria, World War II. Find the recent review of Jakob's Colors at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/books/review/jakobs-colors-by-lindsay-hawdon.html?_r=0I .  Information about the book and the Yenish is riveting.

Roma were excluded from reparations after WWII because, it was argued, Roma were not in the death camps for racial reasons but because of their "asocial and criminal record."  See NYT review.   See a prior post on other aspects of the Yenish, at http://gypsiesroma.blogspot.com/2013/10/yenish-travellers-blonde-angel-as.html

• Yenish culture:  Research before reading:  The Yenish are European Travellers who identify, as do others, from roots different from the Indo-Roma, see video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8Z3X7yTiDQ. They are referred to as Romany, at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/02/jakobs-colours-lindsay-hawdon-review-romany-holocaust, so the terms may still be somewhat interchangeable.

•  The Yenish.  Read an account of life in Switzerland at http://www.errc.org/article/gypsy-hunt-in-switzerland-long-pursuit-of-racial-purity/1203.  See a video of Yenish Travellers at http://www.errc.org/article/gypsy-hunt-in-switzerland-long-pursuit-of-racial-purity/1203. 

Click on the many videos now online.

3.  Come away with an affirmation that, as one theme score repeats with enthusiasm, it's no crime -- to exercise a culture and its traveling, to follow one's own traditions. 

• Settled groups would add: Traveling, that is fine so long as it does no harm, and cite as did the Nazi quoted in the review, not the racial-ethnic aspects of getting rid of these movable and moving groups, but the "asocial and criminal record" of those some half-million Roma exterminated in the Holocaust.

• Other settled ones (perhaps like my son and I who love to travel (improvised road trips), who somehow feel an affinity with the Roma and now Yenish, Travellers, would say otherwise:  It is the rigidity and intolerance of difference of others, that the settled ones foster among themselves, that is the root cause of trouble between travellers and settled, not the act of, say, travelling. Calcified borders do not solve problems.

A proud past, emerging re-pride for the future.  Is is possible for Travellers to settle and retain their identity.  Why should they have to.  This, from the small hotel where we stayed at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France, a Roma-multi cityion the Camarques. What truths lie in idealized pasts.