Books & Poetry

At a time when sensitivity to the feelings and values of diverse ethnic, faith and minority communities could not be more widespread or politically demanded, it remains extraordinary – and shocking – that such awareness does not extend to Gypsy populations. For centuries the target of crude stereotyping, prejudice, hostility and, in Word War II, the Genocidal intentions of the Nazis, Romany peoples have rarely enjoyed the wider support of liberal advocates of human and cultural rights.

Such engagement was not a problem for Jan Yoors. Born in Belgium in 1922, by the age of 12 he had left his comfortable home and started to travel with a Gypsy tribe, fully engaged in the rituals and traditions of the family and community he joined. As a gadjo, or non-Gypsy, this could have been a threshold too far to cross but, while he went on to become an acclaimed war hero, film-maker and tapestry artist, Yoors remained close to the Roma for the rest of his life. His memoir, ‘The Gypsies’, remains one of the most compelling and informative accounts of such a relationship yet published and it is extracted at length in this beautifully produced volume, which blends essay and many of Yoors’ striking photographs of his time with the tribe. Recently published, this moving memoir was itself overlooked, perhaps the clearest indication that it is more needed than ever, to counter the ongoing persecutions of an extraordinary people.