Abstract
This article discusses the representation of Roma–Sinti (“gypsy”) characters in young adult literature about the Holocaust. It analyzes three primary texts: Jerry Spinelli’s Milkweed (2003), Erich Hackl’s Farewell Sidonia (1991), and Alexander Ramati’s And the Violins Stopped Playing (1985). The article argues that only Ramati’s text gives a detailed description of Roma–Sinti culture, while Spinelli’s and Hackl’s texts merely deal with the “gypsy” on a surface level. I call for a critical evaluation of texts featuring Roma–Sinti characters in order to encourage cosmopolitan engagement with another culture. In the article, I adapt the language of cosmopolitan philosophers Kwame Anthony Appiah and Judith Butler to exemplify the positive and negative effects that literature can have on readers.
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Notes
While I am attempting to broaden the scope of personhood and victimhood in this essay, adding Roma–Sinti as an additional category is by no means exhaustive. Nazis also targeted the disabled, homosexuals, black Europeans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, resistant Christian groups, and political dissenters. Some of their stories are featured in Ina Friedman’s ALA Best Book for Young Adults, The Other Victims (1990).
There are not many more texts available for adult readers. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM 2012) bibliography lists four fictional texts in its bibliography on Roma–Sinti victims: The Eighth Sin by Kanfer (1978), The Gypsy Man by Florence (1985), as well as the Hackl and Ramati texts (no mention of Spinelli’s text is given, for reasons I will explore in this essay). I have chosen to not include The Eighth Sin and The Gypsy Man in this essay because they presuppose knowledge about the Nazi era that most young adult Holocaust literature does not assume readers have. The Eighth Sin also has a complex narrative structure that is more often found in adult, rather than YA, fiction. This is an untold story of the Holocaust in literature more broadly, and while new books are published yearly “about” the Holocaust we can see the dates of books with “gypsy” characters are only prevalent for about a decade (1978–1992).
Their discriminatory treatment is detailed in the 2008 report Recent Migration of the Roma in Europe, from the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, which found the Romani are subject to “regular, invasive controls of home and person by police” as well as “forced evictions from housing” in countries as varied as Italy, Serbia, Romania, and France (Cahn and Guild, 2008, p. 59).
Appiah speaks here of “civilization,” a term that can only be defined by a cultural studies scholar as “loaded” due to how it created hierarchies of the “civilized” versus the “barbarians.” Still, there are enough elements of Romani culture that I believe civilization applies as a loose descriptive term: particular occupational specializations, legal systems, government, shared language, and so on. However, “culture” is perhaps a more accurate term and one that will be used throughout the bulk of this article.
See Dean-Ruzicka (2012). “Combating Hate Through Young Adult Literature.” The Journal of Hate Studies 10, 199–220.
Within this article I have used the term Romani to refer to the more universally shared cultural elements and Roma–Sinti in reference to Holocaust populations specifically, which is consistent with the larger body of literature on the subject.
Because they come from India, Romani peoples are technically “Aryan.” One can trace the movement of Romani peoples from India to Europe through linguistics, watching how Persian, Kurdish, Armenian, Greek, Slavic, and Romanian terms appear in Romani languages (Hancock, 2002, p. 9). However, a hyper-focus on Indian origins without acknowledgement of the hundreds of years they have lived in Europe merely leads to the neo-Nazi slogans such as “Gypsies Go Back To India” (Hancock, 2002, p. 78).
In the top-listed Amazon.com review for the book a reviewer notes the fluidity of Misha’s identity, but also comments in his/her final summary: “This book made me feel like I was a Jew, and I was going through all the things they went through” (Mz, 2005). So while his identity is initially unfixed, and potentially either “gypsy” or Jew, the ultimate identification this reader had was with the Jewish experience.
Attacks and arrests of the communists and socialists are also uncommon in young adult Holocaust fiction. In Edward Sullivan’s bibliography The Holocaust in Literature for Youth (1999) I have yet to find reference to any books that explicitly deal with this topic. This is, of course, problematic in its own manner, particularly as some voices in contemporary American rhetoric refer to President Obama as both a communist and a Nazi. Perhaps if the fundamental disagreement between these two groups was made clearer in young adult literature, it would not be so easy to conflate the two.
In addition to deporting approximately 10,000 Romani in 2009, in the summer of 2010, French president Nicolas Sarkozy decreed that “some 300 illegal camps and squats would be dismantled within three months” as “part of a raft of new hardline security measures recently announced by the government” (British Broadcasting Company, 2010).
For more detailed information, see Ian Hancock’s We are the Romani People (Ame same e Rromane džene) published by University of Hertfordshire Press in 2002.
References
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Rachel Dean-Ruzicka received her Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. She is currently a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology where she teaches English and Gender Studies. Her work has recently appeared in Quarterly Review of Film and Video and The Journal of Hate Studies. She studies systems of power and privilege in popular entertainment, and particularly the way tolerance is tied to privilege in young adult Holocaust literature.
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Dean-Ruzicka, R. Representing “The Great Devouring:” Romani Characters in Young Adult Holocaust Literature. Child Lit Educ 45, 211–224 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9217-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9217-z