Gypsies among us
I’ve always claimed my father had gypsy in his blood as he was a wandering Jew who could never sit still. They have a term for that in Spanish – it is called “culo inquieto”. T ordered a documentary from Netflix the other day called When the Road Bends, about Gypsy tribes from all over coming together to play music in an extraordinary event. The film is named after an old Gypsy proverb that states: You cannot walk straight when the road bends. Great saying. And the music in this movie is extraordinary. I realize that my father might have had some Gypsy in him after all as the sounds are similar in some ways to the Ladino and Sephardic music I heard growing up.
But I learned that Gypsies trace their origins to medieval India. The Rom people hail from Northern India but the musical influence as they spread through Western and Eastern Europe is magical. Esma Redzepova stars in the documentary and she is fabulous, with a Serbian mother and Roma father. But my favorite line goes to the woman who describes her mother as a “cathedral” – fabulous imagery.