Customer Reviews

The Heroic Present: Life among the Gypsies

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Life among the gypsies indeed! Jan Yoors had an amazing opportunity to live with the Rom, or gypsies, and he documented his time with photos and writings. This book collects these together and presents that world to the reader. Overall very worthwhile. I offer a few comments in the hope it will be useful to potential purchasers.

First, the book is very nicely produced. The text and pictures are clean and crisp and the format is large enough to really appreciate what is being presented. My only complaint is that the captions for the photos are printed in light ink and very small - difficult to read.

The text seems to be pulled from his book 'The Gypsies', and as such is very interesting but somewhat disjointed. It seems to me that there is a lot missing - which you would no doubt get in that other book. I was both frustrated by this and also motivated to get the other book. The pictures are very candid, very homestyle. Not the epic and perfect compositions I expected, but rather a family album of sorts. They are mostly from the 1930s or from 1961, when he returned to Europe as a photographer with an express purpose in mind. My sense of the photos is that they are very real, very genuine. On the other hand, I would have liked them to be more joyous, more what I imagined the gypsies to be like. The truth is that they were a very different and separate people, not necessarily the image we tend to hold from stories or movies. Theirs was a hard life, and the photos reflect that.

This is my first foray into the world of the Rom, or gypsies. It leaves me wanting to see more, and to learn much more. I think this book is a good place to start.

This book is essentially a series of extracts from Jan Yoors memoirs, accompanied by a good number of candid and informal black and white photos shot by Yoors (and later, others as well) in the 1930s, in 1961 and in 1971. As such, from the point of view of the text, it is a fairly short book - 150 pages, and loads of pictures among them. It is bolstered by a well done introduction by Ian Hancock, himself part Romani, and a brief biography of Yoors at the end of the book.

As a short general introduction to Gypsy life and history, the introduction is better than the book itself. Yoors' memoirs, carefully cherry-picked for brief anecdotes presented in this book, are unique, perceptive, and completely accepting of the Romani lifestyle, highly idiosyncratic as it is, and deal with a number of important, pivotal events: weddings, funerals, births, kris (courts of justice or of elders), music, celebrations, and so on. Various rituals, oaths, relations between men and women, notions of cleanliness, and the like, are all brought up, and are illuminating. Throughout the book, one gets a very good idea not only of the walls put up by the outside world against the Romanis, but of the very sharp divide the Romani themselves construct between themselves and everyone besides themselves - where theft, lies, deception and mockery are considered completely appropriate.

The photos are all outstanding. People are photographed against their wagon caravans, with their horses, celebrating, drinking (a lot), smoking (apparently required above the age of 6 or 7), dancing, cleaning, repairing goods, just living. They are very intimate and real; professional sociologists would never be able to get this close to the people.

The book as a whole is a very well produced volume. One wishes for more in the vein of the introductory material, but the book as it stands is beautiful and fascinating.