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Reviewed by C. J. Singh (Berkeley, California)
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Oksana Marafioti's coming-of-age memoir succeeds brilliantly at several levels: First of all, it's a gripping read; it shows the marginalized situation of the Romani people in Eastern Europe as experienced by insiders; it shows the lasting contributions of the Gypsy people to European popular music and dance; it shows an immigrant family's struggle to survive in the U.S. of the 1990's; and it presents glimpses of the Gypsy people's journey from India to Europe that began more than a thousand years ago.
To begin with, the term "Gypsy" refers to an ethnicity that originated from the Punjab region of northwest India. The term "Gypsy" is regarded as pejorative by the people it refers to; they prefer to call themselves Romani or Sinti. (So why is the title not American Romani? Publisher's marketing decision? )
Marafioti's memoir nicely complements three well-known books about the Romani people:
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey by Isabel Fonseca, a journalist who lived with Romani families in Eastern Europe for five years;
All Change!: Romani Studies Through Romani Eyes, edited by Damian Le Bas and Thomas Act; and
We Are the Romani People by Ian Hancock, himself of British Romani descent, and professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas, Austin, and widely regarded as the leading scholar of Romani Studies. The last two books are published by the University of Hertfordshire Press, U.K. (See my detailed reviews of these three books on amazon.)
The memoir opens with the parents of 15-year-old Oksana applying for immigration visas at the American embassy in Moscow in 1989. Her Armenian mother "had made sure none of us looked too rich or too poor; it was important to appear like average Soviet family. This was tricky, since, as far as the Americans knew, the USSR did not have a middle class and was not supposed to have an upper class, which we happened to belong to" (page 4). Right there, she dispels the stereotype that ALL Romani people are poor. The family's wealth came from her grandparents' great success in music and dance, winning the title "National Artists of the USSR - - an equivalent of the Lifetime Achievement Award in the States" (page 55). Nonetheless, the family wanted to migrate to the U.S. to escape the widespread hatred against the Romani as "the mainstream society still considered us feral despite our polite handshakes" (page 55).
Oksana, with her fair complexion, was accepted at first as white in her school: "When I started first grade, my parents, without much explanation, told me not to mention that I was part Roma." But when her classmates find out, she's cornered by her female classmates, verbally abused, beaten, and left bleeding in the snow (pages 32- 34). This scene, like many others in the memoir, is described with the skill of an accomplished novelist.
"My father, being a real spoon-bender, didn't move across the ocean to change. He knew that no matter what, he'd always be Rom, but that at least in America, nobody cared. He took his outsider status to even greater heights by getting engaged to his longtime mistress, a notorious fortune-teller with eyes the color of chimney smoke and a soul a shade darker. The day my mother heard that Dad was bringing his fiancée to the States, she steam-ironed all the curtains in our apartment." He divorces Oksana's mother and marries Olga. The mother finds it hard to support her two daughters in Los Angeles. Thanks to a Russian immigrant, her mother finds a subsistence job as a cashier in a Las Vegas casino. Oksana enters the English as a Second Language program at Hollywood High School. She moves in with her father and Olga, who begins making big bucks as a fortune-teller in Beverly Hills.
Interspersed throughout the dramatized memoir are engrossing historical facts such as: "During World War II, wounded soldiers often found refuge among the Gypsies. Many a time Romani aided the partisans by carrying messages between military posts across hostile territories" (page 98). And cultural facts such as: " `Romancy,' Russian songs that were a vital element of Russian culture, were a fusion of Roma and Russian styles. Great writers like Tolstoy and Pushkin were known to disappear with the caravans for weeks. Tolstoy mentions it in his writings more than once. Every time he feels dejected, it's off to party with the Gypsies" (page 98). On page 99 is a ten-line excerpt from Pushkin's narrative poem "The Gypsies." Later in the memoir, a flash-back chapter "Comrade Pushkin" dramatizes Oksana, at age 12, holding a seance along with her Moscow classmates, summoning the spirit of Pushkin to explicate his poems that had been assigned as their homework.
At Hollywood High, Oksana is invited to join its Performing Arts Magnet Program, where she falls in love with a fellow-student, Cruz. Both her father and Olga vehemently reject Cruz as he is not a Rom. The memoir ends in May 1993 when Oksana moves to Las Vegas to join her mother and sister. Later, she graduates from the University of Las Vegas.
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[Addendum: On August 10, Oksana Marafioti gave a reading from her book at Books Inc. store in Berkeley. After reading a few paragraphs from her memoir, she asked the audience what are the images they had of "Gypsies." The first few responses were predictable American stereotypes: Gypsies like to travel, they tell fortunes, they are wonderful musicians. Suddenly, a woman sitting at the back shouted that she was from Romania and knew a lot about Gypsies and made several nasty comments. Her husband, a Czech, added more negative comments. Oksana did not respond and resumed reading from her memoir.
After the meeting, I invited the couple who had made the nasty comments about the Roma people to tea at the cafe next door. I read to them my 2-page essay on "Human Rights for Gypsies." (The essay appears as my review of Isabel Fonseca's book "Bury Me Standing" on amazon.) We talked for over an hour. The couple sought my advice as to how they could improve their English. I suggested: Take the UC Berkeley extension classes in English as a Second Language in San Francisco, and go to author-readings at bookstores and listen. They live in Marin County, so I suggested the wonderful bookstore "Book Passage" in Corte Madera. We parted with warm handshakes.
-- C J Singh
