Foreword by Dr. T.A. Acton
Ian Hancock is a marginal man. Like all Romani intellectuals, he has had to live torn between the pariah status of his people and the embrace of a dominant culture which can hardly conceive of such a monster as an educated Gypsy.
Some Gypsies in this position accept this, and pass as non-Gypsies, keeping at a distance all their Romani relatives, and keeping silence at who knows what cost, to them and their own children, on all of their family’s past. But a sprinkling of such people find a personal liberation by joining Romani organizations where intellectuals can make a political contribution to winning a better place in society for their people. They have to face incomprehension by non-Gypsies, and often rejection by assimilated relatives, and the constant accusation that they are not “true Gypsies.” Face to face with the divided reality of their identity, they are like the man in Yevtushenko’s poem, strung out on a high-wire “between the city of yes and the city of no.”………………….
Foreword to the Patrin Web Journal edition
This book was the first in English to deal with the enslavement of the Romani people in Romania. When it first appeared in 1987, no one expected that massive political and social changes would begin to take place in Eastern Europe just two years later. With the death of Ceaucescu in 1989 and the shift to democracy in Romania, many more documents concerning those more than five terrible centuries have come to light, and our knowledge of the nature of Gypsy slavery, and the implications it has for our understanding of the world view and character of those descended from it — the Vlax Roma — are just now beginning to be understood.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080802212237/http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/pariah-contents.htm
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