by Laura Shepard Townsend | Blog
“As for our future, we left it to its rightful owners: the wind or to fate. So unlike the frightened gadje who lined up for predictions from the gypsy fortune-tellers to reassure them about their lives…. The Rom do not tell fortunes for one another because...
by Laura Shepard Townsend | Blog
“If you ask the gadje about the Gypsies, they call us thieves, but all Gypsies know it is the gadje who are the worst thieves. We Rom know if the gadje had their way, they would own everything, and if they could, they would even claim to possess the sun and then...
by Laura Shepard Townsend | Blog
“Until I was ten, I lived in an Old World across an immense sea. Now, of course, I know it to be the continent of Europe, and the year to be 1915. But as with everything, then was then, and now is now. Most of the time, when I contemplate the life I led...
by Laura Shepard Townsend | Blog
“So it was, that at my birth in the early part of the 20th century, the Rom had succeeded in neatly sidestepping history. As we traveled slowly from village to village in our luminous wagons drawn by our splendid horses, it worried none of us that we lingered...
by Laura Shepard Townsend | Blog
A boy plays on a slide made out of discarded construction material at the Romanian gypsy settlement of “El Gallinero”, on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain, Nov. 24. More than 400 Romanian gypsies live in precarious conditions, without running water or sewage...
by Laura Shepard Townsend | Blog
GYPSIES & ORACLES IN VENICE by Laura Shepard Townsend One morning, I awoke, my mind swirling, still enmeshed within an extensive dream. As I do not remember many of my dreams, I immediately began writing it down so as not to lose any of it to reality and its...
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