Reviews

“Gypsy Tears,” penned mostly on Block Island, tells a tale from far away

By Judy Tierney | The Block Island Times | September 10, 2007

Author Cora Schwartz is a reverse tourist: she loves Block Island in the winter. During the years of her romance with the main character, “Rudy,” in her roman-a-clef novel, “Gypsy Tears, Loving a Holocaust Survivor,” she came here with him, first renting at the Sasafrash Antiques B&B, then purchasing weeks at the Neptune House time share.

“We started with one week, and worked up to six,” she said.

After his death, Schwartz kept the Sheffield House open one winter for the late Nancy Sarah, and it was during that stay that she wrote much of “Gypsy Tears.”

I agreed to read “Gypsy Tears” with trepidation. I was steeped in the Holocaust as a child (my mother narrowly escaped from Austria), and return to its terrible events reluctantly. Also, romance novels are not a genre I’m usually attracted to. Beautiful heroine meets eligible rich handsome man, fights off competition from evil beautiful anti-heroine and lives happily ever after does not speak to me when I search the shelves in a bookstore.

This is not that kind of book. “Gypsy Tears” is more than a romance novel about Rudy, who survived the Holocaust in body but not in spirit, and his younger American born narrator-lover. It is, according to Schwartz, 75 percent true, and it is the story of the author’s enduring love not just for Rudy, but for the camp survivors who returned to Rudy’s home in what is now the Ukraine (formerly the USSR).

Rudy brings her there to the town of Chernovtsy to meet family members who returned and are living out the remainder of their lives in abject poverty. Each time he goes, he carries suitcases full of American goods that he sells in the local market to raise money for them. These are the best chapters of the book. Schwartz’s descriptions of the people, their homes and the village are beautifully detailed and moving.

Rudy tells the narrator about his idyllic childhood there, and his youthful dreams of becoming a soccer star. One day, he says, when he was practicing soccer by the river, he met a Gypsy girl, and so began his first romance. He spent time with the Gypsies in their campground under the river’s bridge, and grew to respect and enjoy their culture. His life was filled with the joys of adolescence.

With the German invasion, the Gypsies began to disappear. Then it was Rudy’s time to disappear. Later, he met groups of Gypsies in the German work camp, Transnystra, where he was imprisoned as a teenager.

Gypsy music and culture come to symbolize his lost youth, and while revisiting the Ukraine, he and Cora spend their evenings drinking and dancing to their violins. But nothing can stop Rudy’s spiral into despair. Cora struggles to save him as he sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholism. As they whirl, she uncovers her own family secrets.

There are those who tend to think that when an experience ends, we can wipe it away with a cleaning cloth and go on. There is the well-worn saying, “Get over it,” that expresses our exasperation with those who are unable to climb out of the past. Schwartz, a psychologist in her “day job,” understands how insurmountable healing the human psyche can be. Rudy died seven years ago, she said. “I don’t think the camp ever left him.”

Since his death, she has continued to bring humanitarian aid to the former labor/death camp survivors in the Ukraine. Proceeds from a previous publication, “The Forgotten Few,” were dedicated to that endeavor.

Filled with photos of survivors in the town of Mogelev, and poetry, “The Forgotten Few” is a poignant reminder of these people and their suffering. “I carry a great pain,” says Vera Nieberg, pictured with her daughter Zina. Bushy browed and gray haired Ephram Masavitch says, “They dug a pit and buried people alive. For three days the soil trembled.”

Schwartz is hoping to return to Block Island this winter, and is searching for a house-sitting situation. I hope she finds one, and when she comes, will talk more with us about Chernovtsy, Mogelev and the people she has fallen in love with there. Until then, she says, copies of “Gypsy Tears” are available in the Book Nook. It is also available from her publisher, Hobblebush Books, and Amazon.com.

Read the comments about this review

256 pp, Hardcover
ISBN 978-0-9760896-9-8
Price $21.95
Publication Date: June 15th, 2007