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A vivid and funny memoir about growing up Gypsy and becoming American
Fifteen-year-old Oksana Marafioti is a Gypsy. This means touring with the family band from the Mongolian deserts to the Siberian tundra. It means getting your hair cut in "the Lioness." It also means enduring sneering racism from every segment of Soviet society. Her father is determined that his girls lead a better, freer life. In America! Also, he wants to play guitar with B. B. King. And cure cancer with his personal magnetism. All of this he confides to the woman at the American embassy, who inexplicably allows the family entry. Soon they are living on the sketchier side of Hollywood.
What little Oksana and her sister, Roxy, know of the United States they've learned from MTV, subcategory George Michael. It doesn't quite prepare them for the challenges of immigration. Why are the glamorous Kraft Singles individually wrapped? Are the little soaps in the motels really free? How do you protect your nice new boyfriend from your opinionated father, who wants you to marry decently, within the clan?
In this affecting, hilarious memoir, Marafioti cracks open the secretive world of the Roma and brings the absurdities, miscommunications, and unpredictable victories of the immigrant experience to life. With unsentimentally perfect pitch, American Gypsy reveals how Marafioti adjusted to her new life in America, one slice of processed cheese at a time.
- Sales Rank: #337142 in Books
- Published on: 2012-07-03
- Released on: 2012-07-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .85" w x 5.50" l, .73 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 370 pages
Review
“Engaging . . . Marafioti describes with humor and introspection how the self-described ‘Split Nationality Disorder' she experienced growing up only magnified upon her family's emigration from the former Soviet Union to Los Angeles when she was 15 . . . Marafioti's probing observation of the contrast of American individualism with fierce Roma ethnocentrism, even xenophobia, yields a provocative exploration of identity. Contrasting cultural values shine in this winning contemporary immigrant account of assimilation versus individuation.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Touching . . . Funny . . . A rich, colorful story about a long misunderstood culture.” ―Publishers Weekly
“A most entertaining, informative and worthwhile read . . . American Gypsy is warm and funny--often very funny--and, always, is a revelation.” ―Ellen Stirling, Living Las Vegas
“Beyond the usual stereotypes of thieves in caravans, this drama of finding a home at last strikes universal chords, not least with the hilarious family theatrics and the contemporary immigrant mess-ups . . . [A] wry, unforgettable memoir.” ―Booklist
“American Gypsy is a fun, humorous and sometimes heartbreaking memoir of a teenage Russian immigrant . . . [A] spirited and touching coming-of-age tale.” ―Cindi Moon Reed, Vegas Seven
“[Oksana Marafioti's] witty, often hilarious account of her new life (not quite what MTV had promised) takes us for a ride through an immigrant's world, presenting the challenges of reconciling boyfriends, fast food, and séances with her family's strict Roma traditions.” ―Annasue McCleave Wilson, Biographile
“An illuminating and unvarnished peek into a much-misunderstood culture, one that's been plagued for centuries by discrimination and worse. That said, while American Gypsy documents some dark and troubling events, it offers just as many funny and heartwarming moments.” ―Geoff Schumacher, Las Vegas CityLife
“Oksana Marafioti's American Gypsy stands apart . . . A rare firsthand glimpse into the reality of contemporary Romani life.” ―Ian Hancock, director of the Program of Romani Studies, the University of Texas at Austin
About the Author
Oksana Marafioti moved from the Soviet Union when she was fifteen years old. Trained as a classical pianist, she has also worked as a cinematographer.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
AMERICAN CHEESE
The woman on the other side of the desk scribbled in her files. I studied her with interest: perfectly manicured nails, killer perm, and a beige pantsuit with the American embassy ID clipped to the left breast pocket. She warmed us now and then with one of those smiles that make you want to ask its owner to be your child’s godparent even if you’ve only just met. She didn’t look like someone who held the fate of my family in her hands.
Before the interview that morning, Mom had instructed Dad not to speak, for two reasons. First, he couldn’t complete a sentence without swearing. And second, but more important, he always said the wrong thing.
The woman looked up from her paperwork and turned to my father. In a version of Russian that made me feel like I was teetering on a balance beam along with her, she said, “Mr. Kopylenko, tell why you want exist in United States?”
I stared at Dad’s fedora, thankful that at least he had given up his earrings for a day. Mom tightened her grip on her purse, and my eight-year-old sister, Roxy, stopped swinging her legs.
Dad straightened, cleared his throat, and said in equally precarious English, “I want play with B.B. King. I great Gypsy musician and he like me. When he hear me play, we be rich. Here, I great musician, but nobody know. We live in 1980s, but feel like 1880s. Russian peoples only like factory and tractor. I no drive tractor. I play guitar. Her name Aphroditta. Also.” He lifted his index finger to stress the importance of what was coming next. “I super-good healer. I heal peoples. If you have hemorrhoid, I fix. I take tumor with bare hands. In Russia, I not free. I go to jail, you understand?”
I was mortified, my eyes jumping between Dad, the awfully quiet American, and my mom, who’d plastered on a smile like a fresh Band-Aid.
“We want our girls to have a better future,” Mom said in Russian, after recouping from the awkward pause. “You understand.”
Years of managing a Roma performing ensemble had taught my mother the schmooze side of business. She closed many impossible deals over black caviar and bottles of Armenian cognac, items she couldn’t bring to our interview, though not for lack of trying. That day, November 18, 1989, Mom had put on a periwinkle wool dress, a fox-fur coat—we had waited in line outside the embassy for three hours—a pair of Swedish-made boots, and not a flicker of jewelry except for her wedding band. She had made sure none of us looked too rich or too poor; it was important to appear like the average Soviet family. This was tricky, since, as far as Americans knew, the USSR did not have a middle class and was not supposed to have an upper class, which we happened to belong to.
This wasn’t Mom’s first trip to the embassy. Her brother Arsen, who had moved with his family—including two of my favorite cousins, Nelly and Aida—to Los Angeles three years before, sent us a visa that was short an important form: his agreement to sponsor us when we first arrived in the States. The visa might as well have been blank without it. But Mom didn’t give up, even though it took her years of networking, bribing, and entertaining in the classiest restaurants to finally get our file going. This last family interview was the key, quite literally, to freedom.
Thankfully Dad had kept quiet, and the American asked only Mom questions from that point on. Soon the two women were swapping locations of the best butcher shops in town. “On Wednesdays, go to Komsomolskaya Ploshad. Ask for Borya. Tell him I sent you,” Mom said, voice low as if the room were full of strangers waiting to snatch her secret.
It still felt then as if we were bargaining like prisoners caught between an unfair sentence and a pardon, but I could hear that freedom. In my ears, bells were ringing, that huge music they belted out from the towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square.
The woman flipped the pages of our file and addressed my mother in measured Russian: “I’d read here that you drink?” She lifted an arm to her lips and curled her fingers around an imaginary bottle. And a needle scratched across my sound track, exactly the way you hear it in movies.
The four of us halted like toys unwound.
Mom drank often. This was after Dad had nearly died of alcohol poisoning and renounced booze as the religion of choice, and before Mom started drinking every day. But what if Americans didn’t drink? Ever. I hadn’t considered that possibility.
With a look of complete mortification the woman said, “Oh goodness. Sometimes my pronunciation is bad. You sing, right? You singer.”
All the Kopylenkos in the room showed signs of life for the first time in at least fifteen seconds.
“Yes, yes, I do!” Mom laughed and we joined in, somewhat maniacally, as I recall. In Russian, “drink” and “sing” are a letter apart.
At the end of the hour, the American finally stamped our papers. She blushed while my parents took turns hugging her, all three talking as if they were going to be neighbors once we moved. Even when we walked out of the office I couldn’t breathe, too afraid she would change her mind and rush out to take back the good news.
Once we had our permission my parents didn’t waste time packing. In their desperation to leave they didn’t pause to consider the difficulties they might encounter across the ocean. They just knew that everything would be better in America.
The days leading up to our departure seesawed between too much activity and too little sleep. “We’re finally getting out of this hellhole,” Dad told anyone willing to listen. He practiced his guitar with frenzied dedication, for that fantasy meeting with his hero, B.B. King. It never crossed his mind that maybe he couldn’t walk up to any old music legend and dazzle him with killer technique.
Mom sold or gave away most of our valuables because Soviet customs employees weren’t shy about confiscating anything that turned a profit on the black market. Even our house had to go. According to Soviet law, we had to surrender all real estate before emigrating. Mom’s relatives talked her into giving it to one of her distant cousins. It was better than seeing it go to a stranger. My parents had friends who put their names on waiting lists for years for an opportunity to buy Moscow real estate. As connected as Mom was, it had taken her two cases of cognac and fifteen thousand rubles to bribe a housing authority official to bump up her name for a fifty-year-old house with cracked shutters.
Our house was located near the city limits, where oak and maple trees commanded the streets, making human structures look insignificant and fragile.
Muscovites preferred the city high-rises, and I didn’t know that only the old folks and the Gypsies still lived in those old houses on the outskirts until one of my fourth-grade classmates educated me.
“It’s like I read in my dad’s newspaper,” Nastya said, pushing a mop around our classroom. We had floor duty every Tuesday after school. “Our leaders built these new apartments for everyone to live in. The old people got smart eventually. But the Gypsies set up tents in the courtyards and said they liked to sleep and pee outside. Can you imagine? If you ask me, I think they just didn’t know what to do with all those walls and doors. Like, if you bring a mouse inside, it’s always looking for a hole to jump into.”
“What does that have to do with houses?” I asked Nastya, taking care with my words. When I started first grade, my parents, without much explanation, told me not to mention that I was part Roma. To Nastya, I was Oksana Kopylenko the Ukrainian, because all Soviet last names ending with nko traced their roots to Ukraine.
She leaned on the mop’s tip and whispered, “They’re closer to the dirt that way.”
After school I marched home and demanded to know if Nastya’s story was true.
Dad was in the garage mixing paints—neon yellow and torch red—to use on our car. Mom stood inside the doorway, eyes fixed on Dad, arms crossed like a pretzel high and tight over her chest.
“It took those cretins five years to get all of the Roma off the grounds,” Dad said. “They were so used to people obeying that Gypsy insubordination was big news, headlines in all the papers.”
“It’s not true.” I was appalled. I had hoped Nastya had lied. “Why wouldn’t they want to live in a house? It doesn’t make sense.”
My reaction sent Dad into a fit of laughter.
“You think everyone lives like us? Nice place with modern amenities? In some cities those charity apartments don’t even have heating or water. You squat behind a tree and wipe your ass with newspaper.”
My parents loved that house. They had put in parquet floors throughout, except for the kitchen, where Mom preferred marble. Both bedrooms had sleek Swedish furniture, while the living room, the center of all gatherings, boasted curvy Queen Anne–style couches and Persian rugs.
“We’ll buy a mansion in Los Angeles,” Mom assured everyone who called to ask after her mental health. “And for dirt cheap.”
Dad left a number of albums with his sister, Laura, for safekeeping. Featuring my grandparents’ beautiful voices, they were produced during the height of Roma popularity with the Russian public and signified an irreplaceable legacy. He wrapped them with painstaking care in soft towels, laying them inside a small wooden chest. “It’s only for now,” he had told his sister. “I made copies on these tapes in case you want to listen to them. The needle scratches on that damn record player.”
My eight-year-old sister bragged to all her friends about the...
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
and hopes things will get better when her family moves to America
By Maya Chhabra
[...]
This is a Soviet immigrant memoir with a twist– the author is half-Romani. The daughter of traveling professional musicians, she studies piano, is bullied at her Moscow school for her heritage, and hopes things will get better when her family moves to America. Right after a more-serious-than-usual teenage heartbreak– her boyfriend, who had traveled to Romania to fight for Romani rights, is murdered– her family finally gets the chance to move. Almost immediately on arrival, however, her parents split up, with her Armenian mom descending into alcoholism and her Romani father marrying a much younger woman and diving into the occult.
However, Oksana embraces the opportunities of her new country, learning English through romance novels and attending a performing arts magnet school. When she falls in love with a non-Romani boy, tensions with her father build to an unsustainable level.
This is a very funny memoir, with her stepmother’s occult antics providing much of the humor. One night, she forces Oksana to help her steal graveyard dirt for a spell, and they get stopped for speeding. The officer doesn’t believe them when they tell him the suspicious bag in the car is dirt!
There are the usual immigrant tensions between tradition and the new culture. Oksana’s stepmother is eager to marry her off, and her father views her as insufficiently free-spirited when she gets into the performing arts school (which he equates with the Soviet arts system), believing that she should learn from her family instead. The problem is that he doesn’t take her seriously enough as a musician to teach her, because she’s a girl. However, Oksana finds a balance between rebelling against sexist traditions and valuing her cultures.
You learn a lot reading this book without it being at all dry. The author offers a lot of detail about her cultures and her experience growing up in the USSR, though the book is mainly about what happened after they got to America. Some things I didn’t expect, such as the fact that though she and her family were discriminated against in the Soviet Union, they were also quite rich and connected. The author also indicates the diversity among the Romani themselves, explaining how Russian Romani were looked down on as sellouts by some Romani from other countries, and how her grandfather distrusted Hungarian Romani.
The only thing that bugged me was that at one point she talked about the negative stereotype of Ossetians in the USSR (as being gangsters), but then her only description of Ossetians in the book is of stereotypical gangsters complete with curved daggers. This was understandable as the Ossetians were fighting with her father, but just seemed out of place in a book that was otherwise sensitive to these things.
Anyway, I both enjoyed and learned from this book.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Phenomenal read!
By Kelsey Copeland
In searching for my own history and ancestry, I came across this book. While my family is not Russian or Armenian, the parallels of daily life with her Rrom side almost brought me to tears. So many questions were answered by her detailed description of traditional every day life; and such a beautiful insight to her transition in becoming "American".
I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn about the Rromani or looking for comfort that their own life's chaos is shared by others who do know what it's like to be an outcast simply because you were born.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful rendition of life in America as a Romani Girl
By Rmcelvr
I bought this book as research. I found it enchanting, and I couldn't put it down. Ms. Marafioti has a neat way of writing, and even neater? She's about my age, so I could relate to all of the '80's as she was seeing them when she first moved to the U.S. It was interesting to see how the Romani people suffered in Russia as well. Poignantly written, this is a book I would read again.
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