American Gypsy

May 7, 2012
At 15, Marafioti, granddaughter and daughter of Roma performers, arrives in Hollywood from Russia, encountering culture clash and the rapid disintegration of her family, both rendered with touching, funny, and outlandish details. In the U.S.S.R., she’d been part of the upper class and traveled with the act, but was subjected to intense prejudice as a mistrusted “gyp.” In her new homeland, her father marries his mistress, while Marafioti, her sister, and mother furnish their own apartment scavenging Beverly Hills castoffs and she learns that Gypsies are Stevie Nicksesque bohemians plus history and hatred. It’s a source of liberation for her, and for her father and stepmother, who rely on the old ways and become sought-after palm readers. As the best English speaker among them, Marafioti is routinely conscripted into serving as a translator for the readings, even getting dragged to the cemetery to steal dirt for a curse. Her struggles between the two worlds play out daily as she deals with her father’s chauvinism and his push for her to join the business and marry one of their own while she’s trying to learn English, figure out how to have a Brazilian boyfriend, and get through the immigrant teenage experience. Although her journey would be more satisfying if it went beyond high school, Marafioti has a rich, colorful story about a long misunderstood culture that she treasures, despite some truly antiquated beliefs.

June 15, 2012
In this engaging immigrant memoir, first-time author Marafioti, nee Kopylenko, 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. Born into a Moscow-based Roma family, the author spent the first 15 years of her life seeing Siberia, Mongolia and the former Soviet Union with her parents, who performed in a traveling Roma ensemble "the size of a circus." Even as a child, Marafioti became acutely aware of racism both within her own family, as she witnessed the difficulty her Armenian mother faced gaining acceptance from her Russian paternal grandmother, and in school, as her Roma heritage was cruelly outed by a classmate sticking a sign to her back that read "Gyp." Though well-off in their native Moscow, Marafioti's family--especially her father, a gifted guitarist and composer--looked to the United States as a land of even greater opportunity, where their Romani roots would not carry the Gypsy stigma. One of the more humorous scenes involves the family's green card interview, where the U.S. consular officer's limited Russian led her to question Marafioti's mother on her drinking (which she was notorious for), when she meant singing (one letter difference in Russian), her father babbling on about wishing to play with B.B. King and heal people with his bare hands. Soon after the family arrived in California, the author's parents divorced, leaving her to cope with a broken home and dramatic change in finances, alongside the more typical immigrant difficulties of adapting to a foreign language and culture. As she recounts her love, loss and academic achievement experienced while "attending the same school that Cher once did," 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.

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June 1, 2012
The idea of a Gypsy is both fact and metaphor in this wry, unforgettable memoir of coming to America today. Growing up in the Soviet Union, Oksana suffered from Split Nationality Disorder, labeled dirty Gypsy, split between her Armenian mother and her Romani dad, who perform in a touring band. At 15 in 1994, when the family relocated to L.A., and her parents divorced, the conflicts became worse. She moves from ESL class to magnet school, but her parents understand nothing of that, and when she dates a gorgeous classmate, Mom and Dad forbid it, just as Oksana's grandparents had banned her parents from seeing one another. In America, Dad gives up his music for the psychic business, and Oksana describes a steady stream of seances, exorcisms, and tarot readings. But 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 (Does fat-free mean fat has complete freedom?). Always there is richness lost and found.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)