ROAMING WITH THE ROMA

The Gypsies (aka ‘Roma’ or ‘Rom’) are much maligned and misunderstood. Two books written by the Belgian Jan Yoors present the nomads of Europe in a positive and life-enhancing light. 

Here are my reviews of his two books.

 "THE GYPSIES"

I first learned of the existence of this extraordinarily fascinating book by Jan Yoors when I was reading Fonseca's book about gypsies (Roma), "Bury me Standing". Published in 1967, this book is available from on-line second-hand stores.

Sometime in between the 2 world wars, Jan Yoor, a young Belgian teenager, did something very unusual. He ran away with the gypsies. He joined a group ('kumpania') of Roma camping near to his home, and was eventually adopted by them. His understanding parents did not seem to mind him being away from home and school for long periods whilst he wandered around Europe with his new companions.

Yoor's first-hand experiences of living the life of a young gypsy were not wasted. Years later, he described them in his book "The Gypsies". His account of living with the Roma is detailed and seems accurate. Yet, it is not a dispassionate anthropological study. As I read his book, I felt that I was almost experiencing the trials and tribulations of life on the road with the gypsies. Yoors shows a deep understanding of the subtleties of the Roma mentality, and describes their beliefs, traditions, and daily life, exquisitely. At times, his writing has a poetic quality, yet it never becomes trite or flowery. The Roma could not have wished for a more sympathetic yet objective description of their lives than that written by Yoors.

Read this gracious book, and you will see the Roma in an entirely new light.

"CROSSING"

This book is written by the Belgian Jan Yoors. It is the second of his books that I have read. In his first book “The Gypsies” he describes how he began living with a gypsy (Rom) ‘cumpania’ as a teenager, and begun to learn about their ways of life whilst they gradually accepted him as one of their own kind. In the second book, “Crossing”, Yoors, by now regarded as a fully-fledged Rom by the cumpania that had adopted him and also by other Rom that he met, writes about his experiences with the Rom community during the Second World War (‘WW2’).

The Allied authorities fighting the Germans realised that the Rom were eminently suited to assist the efforts of the Resistance in France. Monsieur Henri recruits Yoors to become an intermediary between the Rom and the mysterious groups who worked incognito to organise acts of resistance against the Germans. All goes well for a while, but inevitably Yoors is arrested by the Nazi security police.

As in his first book, Yoors writes lyrically and sensitively about the Rom and what he learned about their idiosyncratic philosophy of life. It was what he learnt from his fellow Rom that helped him survive the most horrendous imprisonment and interrogations.

The last and very exciting part of the book describes Yoors’s role in smuggling people from Axis-occupied Europe across the Pyrenees into Franco’s neutral Spain.

After the war, Yoors became an artist in the USA, specialising in tapestry. This book, like his first, is a work of - art a fascinating tapestry of words beautifully woven together.

Read more about Jan Yoors on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Yoors

Read books about migration by Adam Yamey :

Click: HERE!

The LEGACY of Rubens

I am so disappointed that I feel compelled to set pen to paper, or, should I 'say', put fingers to keyboard. I have just returned from an exhibition, called Rubens and his legacy, at London's Royal Academy. 

I am not a great fan of the Flemmish painter Peter Paul Rubens, but I enjoy his work sufficiently to have put my head into the Royal Academy, an institution that I do not particularly care for. It is, in my opinion, often filled with people, some of who feel that visiting the Royal Academy somehow adds 'respectability' to their cultural self-perception. 

The name 'Rubens' in the exhibition's title is given a far bigger font size than the words that follow it, namely, 'and his legacy'. When I entered the exhibition, one of the first pictures that I remarked on was an evening landscape. I said to my wife: "That looks Turner-esque..."; and indeed it was a painting, not by Rubens, but by Turner who is apparently to be included within Rubens's 'legacy'.  And, this helps illustrate my problem with this exhibition. The works by Rubens are, like orange squash, heavily diluted with works of art that the show's curators feel - and I emphasise 'feel' - are the great artist's 'legacy'. 

I have to admit that the title of the exhibition led me to believe that what I was going to see was a number of Ruben's excellent canvases that portray soft-porn or eroticism in such a way that even the visually-impaired can enjoy it. I would have been happy if a few of the exhibits illustrated Ruben's legacy, but I was not. Rubens's works were hard to spot in the sea of pictures by other artists including Van Dyck, Constable, Turner, and an obscure porcelain decorator from the Chinese Qing dynasty. The works of art that fill the vast areas of wall space between the works by Rubens, which I was hoping to see, were undoubtedly of exceptionally high quality. However, had I wanted to see a pot-pourri of fine art, tastefully chosen, I could have done so without becoming a Friend of the Royal Academy or queing up for an expensive ticket by visiting the National Gallery or the Wallace Collection or a private art gallery in the streets near to the Royal Academy.

On leaving the Rubens exhibition, which I feel would be better named The LEGACY of Rubens, we dropped into the White Cube Gallery in Masons Yard. The exhibition being shown there contains five wooden sculptural works, simple in construction but otherwise awe-inspiring, by Virginia Overton. Although not Rubens, her curious bits of woodwork are exciting and novel. This tiny exhibition was, I felt, somehow more honest and life-enhancing than what I had just seen at the staid Royal Academy.

To be fair to the Royal Academy, they have held some excellent shows including a brilliant one about the Bauhaus held in the late 1960s, and, more recently, a wonderful collection of artworks by Anselm Kiefer.

Read about writing by

Adam Yamey

on his web-site:

http://www.adamyamey.com

CHARLIE CHAPLIN WAVED TO ME

The captions to this and the rest of the pictures in this article may be discovered 

by reading Adam Yamey's  Charlie Chaplin waved to me 

Capturing memories of youth...

"The attic of my parents’ house in north London contained a number of old Revelation suitcases. These were plastered with ageing colourful paper stickers bearing the names of shipping lines and also of places such as: Cape Town, Southampton, Harwich, New York, Montreal, and Rotterdam. Had they been animate and able to speak, what tales they would have been able to tell!

If, as a child, I had become a suitcase, I too would have been covered with an exotic assortment of stickers including some of those mentioned above. But, I did not become a piece of baggage, and the stickers that I carry are not made of paper. Instead, they are memories stuck in various compartments of my brain. Unlike the inanimate objects in the attic in the eaves of our house, I am able to speak: to divulge my impressions of the places that I visited in my childhood; to describe the remarkable people I met in those places; and to reveal the unusual experiences that resulted from travelling with my learned father and my talented mother."

Adam Yamey's latest book, Charlie Chaplin waved to me, contains his memories of the holidays and trips that he took with his parents, mostly during the first eighteen years of his life. 

They are worth relating because they differed markedly from the kinds of holidays that most people took during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than exposing their children to the sun on the beach, his parents preferred to expose their 'kids' to cultural experiences that, they hoped, would benefit them in the future. This was due to Adam's father’s great interest in the history of art, which resulted from his mother having been an artist. Whereas now he appreciates what they did for him then, he did not always do so at the time ...

Here is a very brief extract from the book:

 " ... my mother noticed a gondola draped with green cloths pulling up at the corner where the nearby small side canal, which ran alongside the Pensione Seguso, met the much larger Giudecca Canal. The gondolier, a young man, was dressed in green livery that matched the drapes on his highly polished black boat.

Soon after this gondola had moored, we noticed our elderly American fellow diner emerging from the main entrance of the Calcina. He headed straight for the recently arrived gondola, and then boarded it. Next, he sat down, and then started reading a newspaper whilst the gondolier began to row him across the Giudecca Canal. We watched his gondola crossing the water until it disappeared into one of the small canals that traversed the Giudecca Island. We were fascinated and intrigued. After he was out of sight, we began our morning’s activity.

My mother was never shy when she needed to know something. So, after lunch that day, she stopped our mysterious American lunch neighbour and asked him about the gondola and its liveried oarsman. He explained that everyday, he was ferried out into the lagoon in the gondola. When he reached the lagoon, he took over the oar and rowed around the waters of the lagoon for an hour before handing the oar back to the gondolier, who then rowed him back to the Calcina in time for lunch. Remarkable as it was that a non-Venetian could row a gondola competently, what he told us next was even more amazing.

Mr Milliken, as he identified himself, was, as my father was most excited to learn, none other than the director of the well-respected Cleveland Art Museum in the USA. The liveried gondolier, who we had observed, was the grandson of his late mother’s personal gondolier. She used to accompany Mr Milliken on his annual visits to Venice before WW2, and employed her own gondolier during her stays. "

"Charlie Chaplin waved to me"

by Adam Yamey

is available from:

WWW.LULU.COM

AMAZON (including KINDLE)

BARNES & NOBLE (Soon)