My gypsy soul — and ours

My parents thought that it was funny. But it wasn't.

They used to threaten to “sell me to the gypsies.”

The gypsies (or, more properly, the Roma) are back in the news again. In Farsala, Greece, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed four year-old girl was discovered in a Roma camp. How did her swarthy parents wind up with a child who looked like that? It did not compute, and this led to a worldwide hunt for her real parents. A DNA test proved that she was not, in fact, the child of her alleged Roma parents, and they have been offering conflicting explanations as to how the little girl came into their care. 

And then, there was the case of the girl in Dublin. The same kind of story – blond-haired, blue-eyed girl with dark complexioned parents. Irish authorities removed her from her family, but this time, a DNA test proved that she was, in fact, the child of her parents.

That’s the mythology about the gypsies/Roma – that they steal children. And, of course, the gypsies have long had a reputation for fortune telling and various other scams. Watch “Borat” again and you will see what I mean.

The renewed Roma-phobia in Europe has prompted various responses. Some of them appeared in the New York Times Letters page, in which sincere correspondents decried the new persecution of the Roma. Prompted by an article titled “Are The Roma Primitive, Or Just Poor?”