It's 1937, the eve of World War II. At twenty-six years old, Rezsi Lehrer leaves Munkacs, a small charming city located deep within a remote corner of the Carpathian mountains and travels alone to the United States. War breaks out and Eastern European borders are sealed. Rezsi's family is trapped in Czechoslovakia and the packages she sends home are returned unopened. When the war ends, Rezsi discovers her parents, two brothers and scores of relatives perished in the Holocaust. Gypsy Music Street is the story of one woman's endless sorrow and guilt she suffers at the loss of her family, the family she left behind "to die alone." Yet she still yearns to return to her town, "the little Paris of the East," to see it just one more time. But after the war, countries borders are redrawn and Mukacevo is no longer located in Czechoslovakia. It becomes completely closed off within the iron grip of the Soviet Union and the political climate is one of Cold War. Mukacevo is off limits for travel. As the years pass, Rezsi reminisces, sharing her longing and grief about the past with her daughter Bobbie. And when she dies an old woman, her dream unfulfilled, Bobbie is driven by her own loss and grief to make this journey home for her mother, and for herself. Adventures in Budapest, Ukraine and Israel make Gypsy Music Street an enthralling memoir of love and loss. Yet, it is also a story of the overwhelming joy a daughter experiences when she travels back in time and discovers her own torn roots.

In 1998, Fernanda Eberstadt, her husband, and their two small children moved from New York to an area outside Perpignan, France — a city with one of the largest Gypsy populations in Western Europe. Here she found a jealously guarded culture, a society made, in part, of lawlessness and defiance of non-Gypsy norms; and she met MoÏse Espinas, the lead singer of the Gypsy band, Tekameli. As her relationship with the Espinas family developed over the years, progressing from mutual bafflement to a deep-rooted friendship, Eberstadt found herself a part of the captivating Gypsy life–a life rich with tradition and culture, but slowly being consumed by the modern world.

This book highlights the role of Romani musical presence in Central and Eastern Europe, especially from Krakow in the Communist period, and argues that music can and should be treated as one of the main points of relation between Roma and non-Roma. It discusses Romani performers and the complexity of their situation as conditioned by the political situations starkly affected by the Communist regime, and then by its fall. Against this backdrop, the book engages with musician Stefan Dymiter (known as Corroro) as the leader of his own street band: unwelcome in the public space by the authorities, merely tolerated by others, but admired by many passers-by and respected by his peer Romain musicians and international music stars. It emphasizes the role of Romani musicians in Krakow in shaping the soundscape of the city while also demonstrating their collective and individual strategies to adapt to the new circumstances in terms of the preferred performative techniques, repertoire, and overall lifestyle.

"Here she found a jealously guarded culture - a society made, in part, of lawlessness and defiance of non-Gypsy norms - that nonetheless made room for her, "a privileged American in a Mediterranean underworld." As her relationship with the Espinas family changed over the years from mutual bafflement to a deep-rooted friendship, Eberstadt found herself a part of Gypsy life, moving about in a large group whose core included Moise, his wife, her sister, and their children - at cockfights, in storefront churches, at malls, in their homes, and at their rehearsals, discovering lives lived "between biblical laws and strip-mall consumerism" - and always accompanied by the intense and infectious beat of their heart-stopping music."--BOOK JACKET.

Smart. Funny. Fearless."It's pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark, and whose demise is so lamented" --Dave Eggers. "It's a piece of garbage" --Donald Trump.