The ROM: Walking in the Paths of the Gypsies [Paperback]

* Which of the tribes in northern India produced the ancestors of the Gypsies/Roma?

* Why did these people leave their homeland and move west?

* What overwhelming forces caused three tribes of Indian people to interbreed, overcoming deeply held cultural taboos against miscegenation, to form a new race?

* Why didn't the Gypsies/Roma retain the Hindu religion of their Indian homeland?

* What factors led to their arrival in Persia?

* Why did they leave Persia and move on to Constantinople?

*Why did they leave the home they had made for themselves in Constantinople and disperse widely among the lands of Europe?

* Why did the Europeans despise the Gypsies so much when they arrived among them?

* The best way to describe this book is speculative history. The above questions are not answered in any known historical documents that have survived to this day, and therefore no one can authoritatively state "This is the factual story." So Moreau carefully studied the historical documents that do survive that tell of events in the individual regions, and then he pieced together how those events probably would have affected the people of the kalo rat (dark blood). His speculations are very credible. Although he can't support them with historical documents stating, "The Gypsies/Rom did this because...." his conclusions fit very well with the facts that he was able to substantiate about events affecting the regions as a whole.

After describing his conclusions about the early history of the Gypsy/Romany people, Moreau then led into Book Two, which described what happened to them after they left Constantinople and spread across Europe. This part of the book was very difficult to read, because it told a story of many centuries of persecution, including slavery that was just as heinous as the acts perpetrated on the early African-Americans, persecution during the Spanish Inquisition, and near extinction in the gas chambers of Hitler. But Moreau's story of the Gypsies/Rom would have been incomplete without covering those horrors, and it helped me understand why I've heard people say that the Gypsies/Rom lived with many hardships over their history.

The thread that binds much of the book together is Moreau's description of his three Indian traveling companions--one from each of the Indian tribes that Moreau believes comprised the ancestors of the Gypsy/Romany people. To some extent, it was fun to read about the exploits of this group as they made their way across India, into Afghanistan, and eventually to Turkey. They definitely added a human element to the book. But at times, I found myself getting a bit impatient because I wanted Moreau to get back to the point of revealing his research, theories, and discoveries.

I wouldn't advise the author to remove his traveling companions from the book, but I would have preferred that he devote a little less space to them and more to the anthropological and cultural histories of the region he researched.

Unless the Gypsy/Rom of Europe are understood and accepted soon, Europe faces another Holocaust. Even in countries as EU-ready as the Czech Republic, there is much reference to the "The Gypsy Problem" evoking memories of 1930s Nazi Germany.