This book discusses narrative as an adaptive cultural mechanism among Gypsies in Serbia. As a key traditional trait of Serbian Gypsies, storytelling, conveyed along kin generations, influences the behavior of all who listen. Since their appearance in the Balkans centuries ago, an insecure social environment has shaped their cultural traditions, including that of storytelling. Their traditional stories reaffirm the strong identity with their kinship group, yet, at the same time, plead loudly for recognition from outsiders. The success achieved by Gypsies in maintaining themselves and their culture can be attributed, in large measure, to the power of their traditional stories.

This book provides students, instructors, and lay-readers with a cross-cultural understanding of storytelling as an art form that has existed for centuries, from the first spoken and sung stories to those that are drawn and performed today. This book serves as an indispensable resource for students and scholars interested in storytelling and in multicultural approaches to the arts. By taking an evolutionary approach, this book begins with a discussion of origin stories and continues through history to stories of the 21st century. The text not only engages the stories themselves, it also explains how individuals from all disciplines, from doctors and lawyers to priests and journalists, use stories to focus their readers' and listeners' attention and influence them. This text addresses stories and storytelling across both time (thousands of years) and geography, including in-depth descriptions of storytelling practices occurring in more than 40 different cultures around the world. Part I consists of thematic essays, exploring such topics as the history of storytelling, common elements across cultures, different media, lessons stories teach us, and storytelling today. Part II looks at more than 40 different cultures, with entries following the same outline: Overview, Storytellers: Who Tell the Stories, and When, Creation Mythologies, Teaching Tales and Values, and Cultural Preservation. Several tales/tale excerpts accompany each entry.

Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest feast of Elijah’s Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation—waiting to wait—becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.

GYPSY PRINCESS recounts heartaches and joys, fears and tears of a young girl and her close knit family who were torn apart and ravaged by war, reunited in Austria and made their way to the safe shores of America. GYPSY PRINCESS is a unique view of the other side of the story. It's different and nothing you have read before because most stories about World War II are written by German solders or Jewish refugees - this is a young woman's perspective of the war as she wandered like a gypsy through nine countries ending up in North Dakota.

Of all the styles of jazz to emerge in the twentieth century, none is more passionate, more exhilaratingly up-tempo, or more steeped in an outsider tradition than Gypsy Jazz. And there is no one more qualified to write about Gypsy Jazz than Michael Dregni, author of the acclaimed biography, Django. A vagabond music, Gypsy Jazz is played today in French Gypsy bars, Romany encampments, on religious pilgrimages--and increasingly on the world's greatest concert stages. Yet its story has never been told, in part because much of its history is undocumented, either in written form or often even in recorded music. Beginning with Django Reinhardt, whose dazzling Gypsy Jazz became the toast of 1930s Paris in the heady days of Josephine Baker, Picasso, and Hemingway, Dregni follows the music as it courses through caravans on the edge of Paris, where today's young French Gypsies learn Gypsy Jazz as a rite of passage, along the Gypsy pilgrimage route to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer where the Romany play around their campfires, and finally to the new era of international Gypsy stars such as Bireli Lagrene, Boulou Ferre, Dorado Schmitt, and Django's own grandchildren, David Reinhardt and Dallas Baumgartner. Interspersed with Dregni's vivid narrative are the words of the musicians themselves, many of whom have never been interviewed for the American press before, as they describe what the music means to them. Gypsy Jazz also includes a chapter devoted entirely to American Gypsy musicians who remain largely unknown outside their hidden community. Blending travelogue, detective story, and personal narrative, Gypsy Jazz is music history at its best, capturing the history and culture of this elusive music--and the soul that makes it swing.

From the beloved host and producer of PBS series Joanne Weir's Cooking Confidence and Joanne Weir Gets Fresh. "Joanne's infectious enthusiasm...draws readers effortlessly into a new and beautiful relationship to food." - Alice Waters Chef, cooking instructor, and PBS television host Joanne Weir has inspired legions of home cooks with her signature California-Mediterranean cuisine and warm, engaging style. In Kitchen Gypsy, the James Beard Award-winning author offers a taste of the people, places, and flavors that have inspired her throughout the years. With refreshing honesty and humor, Joanne shares the spark that led to her love of cooking, how she learned to taste and develop a palate, the meal that would forever change her life, her years working with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse during the beginning of the farm-to-table movement, and her continued travels teaching cooking classes the world over. Throughout, she offers the cherished dishes and lessons that have shaped her culinary journey, from the 140-year-old Lighting Cake recipe handed down from her great-grandmother to the luxurious Beef Roulade with Mushrooms and Garlic perfected during her Master Chef training in France, and the approachable, globally-inspired dishes, like Fried Pork Belly Tacos and Autumn Salad with Figs and Pomegranate, that have made her a favorite of home cooks. Lushly illustrated with full-color photographs, Kitchen Gypsy is both an inspirational cooking resource and an armchair read, offering recipes made to be shared and savored against the colorful backdrop of Weir's evocative writing.

Poland, 1943-Heinrich Himmler orders the mass deportation of Gypsies to concentration camps. Sasha Karmazin, a Gypsy woman living in Warsaw, Poland, is torn from her family by the Gestapo and must leave behind her Polish husband, Henryk, and her two teenage sons, Karl and Dimitri. After being transported to Auschwitz, Europe's largest Nazi concentration camp, Sasha is forced to work as an interpreter for the Nazis. Her survival depends on her wits, and she will do anything to stay alive. Nebraska, 1984-Beth Karmazin, a beautiful, bronze-skinned young woman and daughter of Karl Karmazin, is all too aware of her Gypsy heritage. But when she learns that her grandmother Sasha, presumed to be dead, is accused of having taken a Nazi lover and collaborating with the Nazi's while at Auschwitz, Beth is determined to prove her grandmother's innocence. Beth's commitment takes her on a three-year quest deep into Communist-controlled Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War, a journey that changes not only her life, but also the course of history. Seamlessly moving from the turbulent 1940s to the 1980s, The Gypsy in My Soul creates a riveting portrait of one woman's devotion to family-and to uncovering the truth.