Sharing a Broken Umbrella. Roma Life-Stories in Communist Romania
Sharing a Broken Umbrella. Roma Life-Stories in Communist Romania

Summary/Abstract: History played and still plays an important role in the nation building process in Romania. When occurring, in a rather silenced historians' world, the debates are always among equals and do not touch issues related to the Other, such as the deep scars of the Romanian past, for example Roma slavery. There is no room yet for the Roma in the Romanian master narrative. Oral history might be a challenge for the master historical narrative, because it provides a voice to those not belonging to the dominant group, it is still highly conditioned by the limits imposed by the Roma-non-Roma dialogue. Roma tell sometimes different stories, in a different manner, other times they tell similar stories in similar manner with the non-Roma. I argue that these narratives, collected from the Roma, are more often than not complementary rather than contrasting to the non-Roma narratives and they are essential both for writing about and understanding the communist regime in Romania as a whole. This chapter deals with the content and shape of Roma life stories, trying to analyze how and what Roma say - or do not say - when remembering the(ir) past.

• Details
• Contents