Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I had initially intended to write a much harsher review of this self-published book but, on consideration, I believe that the author is more naïve than manipulative. So totally seduced by the Hollywood "Gypsy" image, she sees no anomaly in describing the experience of the Holocaust's Romani victims in the context of "steamy sex," "secret magical traditions" and the "magic of the gypsy culture." She writes of the agonizing lives of the lower-case-g-gypsies in Auschwitz as being filled with "music and dancing." This is unconscionable. She maintains that "As the gypsies were Aryans, and not Jews, they were treated differently." But both Jews and Gypsies were categorized as non-Aryan (Untermenschen, sub-humans) according to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and the late Miriam Novitch of the Ghetto fighters' House in Israel wrote in her 1968 book that "The motives invoked to justify the death of the Gypsies were the same as these ordering the murder of the Jews, and the methods employed for the one were identical to those employed for the other." Why strive to make a difference? A difference not explained. Whole families of Gypsies allowed in Auschwitz? Yes, but the Jewish families brought to Auschwitz from Theresienstadt in 1943 were also kept together. Is this a backhanded attempt, à la Margalit, to feign sympathy for the Romani victims of the Holocaust but in fact to diminish its import by trivializing it? Ms. Kagan inserts a note of legitimacy by claiming to be half Gypsy herself, but there is no evidence of her familiarity with Romani language or culture anywhere in the book which, in fact, reproduces the errors found in the sources (Yoors, especially), to which they may be traced (for example a non-Gypsy is not a "gage"). I know of three historical novels dealing with Roma in the Porrajmos (the Holocaust) that are now being written, and those authors are taking great care to check their facts step by step. It is a pity that Ms. Kagan chose this topic without doing so beforehand too. She's really just perpetuated the damaging and inaccurate stereotype of magical, sexy, singing and dancing [g]ypsies, fantasy characters, but who in real life, according to a recent United Nations report, are the prime victims of racial violence in Europe,and the most severely targeted for human rights and violations (visit [...] or [...] for reports of this).