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The history of the Gypsies is a history of wandering and persecution. It is also a history that is virtually unknown.

The daily life of the Gypsies is similarly a mystery. The Roma, as Gypsies call themselves, keep apart from the rest of society. In the absence of knowledge, wild stereotypes take hold of the public imagination. The Gypsy is Carmen, dark-eyed and passionate, luring men towards violence. The Gypsy is the fortune teller who can cast spells to bring you love or destroy your life. The Gypsy is the pick-pocket/con artist fleecing the gullible at county fairs.

The reality of gypsy life is this: five hundred years of enslavement in Europe followed by liquidation in the Holocaust has convinced this group they are not really welcome — anywhere. Stay separate and keep your bags packed is their creed for survival. But that is slowly chaning. The separate world and brutal history of the Gypsies is on this hour.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Jasmine Dellal, Documentarian

Ian Hancock, Professor of English, Linguistics, and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, author of The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution.

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When the critics compare a new author to Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov you have to pay attention.

Thirty-five year old Aleksandar Hemon is the recipient of those accolades — and attention is being paid. Like Conrad and Nabokov, Hemon, born in Bosnia, did not grow up speaking English. He didn’t begin to write in English until 1995. He might never have written in English at all if he hadn’t had to flee his hometown Sarajevo in 1992.

Hemon’s stories stand as witness to the horrors of the Bosnian Civil War and the reality of being an immigrant, an exile, a refugee in modern America — a reality that is different than it used to be because today you can watch your hometown being bombed to smithereens on CNN in real time. His stories are also like the best work about grim subjects — savagely funny.
(Hosted by Michael Goldfarb)

Guests:

Aleksandar Hemon