The Story of the Gypsies

by Konrad Bercovici

Overview

With this book, first published in 1928, Romanian-born American author Konrad Bercovici has written a sympathetic, thorough, and fascinating account of an extra-ordinary people. Long an admirer of the Gypsies, he was determined to penetrate their mysteries. He listened to their legends, traced their history, and here presents all that he knows and could learn from others about their origins, customs and lives down through the centuries and throughout the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787208810
Publisher:	Valmy Publishing
Publication date:	01/12/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	203
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

KONRAD BERCOVICI (1882-1961) was an American writer.

Born in Romania in 1882 into a non-observing Jewish family, he grew up chiefly in Galati. His family was polyglot, teaching their children Greek, Romanian, French and German, and they mixed freely with Greeks, Romanians, Russians, Turks, Jews, and Roma that moved throughout Dobrudja and the Danubian Delta region. He developed a close connection with local Roma through contact with his Roma nursemaid, her family, and the Roma with whom his father traded horses. The family remained in Romania until Bercovici was 11.

After his father’s death, most of the family emigrated to Paris. Konrad worked there during preparations for the 1900 World’s Fair, and his education was influenced by witnessing public debates and recriminations surrounding the Dreyfus Affair. Bercovici attended the Université Populaire where he studied to be an organist. In Paris, he met his wife, the sculptor Naomi Librescu. They emigrated to North America. After some time in Montréal, Canada, the family settled on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York City. He had begun his work as a writer as a journalist for a Yiddish paper in Montreal, but first garnered attention with the publication of his first English-language book in 1917, Crimes of Charity.

Bercovici continued to write articles as a journalist throughout his career, but became best known for his literary fiction that explored Gypsy themes. Stories like “Ghitza,” and “The Bear Tamer’s Daughter” established Bercovici as a peer of his contemporaries in the 1920s. His stories also generated interest in Hollywood where he worked as a screenwriter for several years, befriending Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.