Reply #3: My maternal grandmother was from Bohemia..and was part gypsy

[SoCalDem]

Her mother was a gypsy who married a young man (my great grandfather) who went on to become a professor in Baden-Baden..

I know nothing about them :(.. my grandmother died when I was 12, and I lived outside the US for 8 of those years so I never really knew her much.. That's sad.. I bet she could have really told some interesting stories..


Here's some info on Bohemian gypsies..

http://www.kewatt.com/Bohemia.html

Bohemia Recherché
By K.E. Watt
for New York City Opera



The "Bohemia" of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème is not that ancient kingdom of Eastern Europe now called the Czech Republic—it’s the bustling Paris of 1840. But there is a connection.

Medieval Bohemia’s population included large numbers of gypsies—dark-skinned nomads so named because they were once erroneously believed to have come from Egypt. In fact, these tribes migrated originally from India, calling themselves "Romas," from the Sanskrit word meaning "man of the low caste of musician." These gypsies were the Bohemians who wandered into France in the 15th century as itinerant blacksmiths and entertainers, forging traditions that continue today in Roma tribes strewn worldwide, still subsisting on society’s fringes by luck and sharp wits.

In France, the word "bohémien" became synonymous with "gypsy," and not in a flattering way, invoking the vagabond Romas—musical and clever, disheveled and furtive—a dangerous urban proletariat. By the early 19th century, Bohemia had come to describe not just the geographical homeland of vagrant foreigners, but the figurative home of any disenfranchised counterculture—like the communities of students and artists that crowded into Paris after the revolutions. Writing in 1834, Félix Pyat found the penchant of those young people for exoticism and ostentation to be "outside the law, beyond the reaches of society….They are the bohémiens of today…." Gypsies. They could be wealthy or destitute, revolutionary or apolitical, French or not. The constant among them was the impulse to challenge mainstream culture. And wherever they congregated was this figurative "Bohemia."

...snip.....


Bohemia’s principle chronicler, Henry Murger, arrived in Paris as a second-generation bohemian whose comrades had emerged, like himself, from the laboring classes in the provinces, with no solid foothold in the urban bourgeoisie. These bohemians were conscripted by their circumstances, without education or means, prospering only by their wits. But they knew they might survive, even thrive, in Bohemia, where wits were coin of the realm, and nothing was more highly prized than creative scavenging. Demonstrable artistic talent was incidental for these bohemians, for, as Murger wrote, "…their everyday existence was a work of genius."

...snip.....

Claiming a distinguished pedigree for all fellow bohemians, Murger writes that "… have existed in all climes and ages…from ancient Greece, to modern time." And so they have, even to a cultural apogee in the "charming and terrible" American counterculture of the 1950s ‘60s. But Bohemia will flower anew wherever ardor is invoked by opportunity. For despite its usefulness as a social and cultural paradigm, Bohemia is fundamentally a state of mind, with all its power to seduce and transform. And as fleeting, after all.




—K.E.Watt, Brooklyn, NY




© 2003, K. E. WATT. All rights reserved.