Book Review: History of the Roma

By Jonas Wilkison

From the historical accounts and personal experiences of Madeline Potter of the Roma and their history, takes the reader throughout Europe and into America with the expenses of the Roma, their hardships, their beauty and their triumphs over terrible odds. The novel goes over historical stories, bad stereotypes, and her own expenses from living or visiting these places.

She starts the reader off in Britain and with her story of arriving there. She of course faced racist comments and even someone asking if she stole her doctorate. She would go over the history of the Roma in Britain, and how they were sent over as a gift to a king, stayed and roamed the land because of their culture. They would also gain their name here called gypsies because many thought they came from Egypt but their true origin is roughly unknown. It’s theorized to be around Northern India and would be sent across India to Purisa in ancient times as gifts from kings to other kings. She recounts stories of the hardships they faced and their arrival in Britain in around the medieval era of Britain, introducing their culture, and almost immediately facing hardships. Potter would tell tales of myths from the Roma and how they survived the hardships and today the Roma striving for better and better rights.

The next couple nations being Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria, and Germany would also keep the stories very similar to each other. The Roma would come there, first would be welcomed and celebrated almost, till later years were they wouldn’t settle down in the nation and couldn’t be taxed from it, so the Kings of that time would put laws attacking them. A note from Germany would be during world war two, they were the second most massacred race in the holicoast but would be barely mentioned in a lot of German holocaust memorials. To add the last Roma to be freed from a contraction camp would be in 1946, a full year after world war two would end. Potter would also add historical accounts of how the Roma would interact with kings and people, not great.

The next couple of chapters take place more spread out being France, Spain, the United States, and Sweden. These places kind of share a similar story to each other, mainly Sweden and the US. For France and Spain it’s more the same story as previous, but rather they had more acceptance. Especially Spain, they would allow more Roma to enter their nation and would have too many laws forbidding them from existing, but still would carry some hatred towards them.

Of course there’s more stories on this of the difficulties, child kidnapping, whole nations ignoring genocide, but you would have to read the book to understand this. So I highly recommend reading it and understanding a history most would ignore or pretend doesn’t exist.

For me the interesting story comes in with Sweden and the US. Especially Sweden, they would be known around the world as the nation that was the most kind, the most fair, the most equal, but would still have laws against Roma entering the nation or later in the years causing newspaper advertisements to arrest innocent Roma. The thing that makes this different from other nations though, would be the response from the nation compared to others. They would try to radically change these laws to be fair to the Roma, because the Swedish government did see the hypocrisy in their ways. Then for the US it’s kind of funny, most people in the US would just assume they were from the middle east, or from a Latin nation, which was completely way off, but other than the normal hardships minorities would face in America, it was relatively fine.