Editor’s note
The photographs featured in this issue of New Letters were taken, though we can’t be sure exactly when, at some time during the 1930s. They provide a rare glimpse into the daily life of Roma people almost 100 years ago, and so of course what strikes the contemporary viewer first is the strangeness of that life, or so it seems from here. Oxen pulling carts through the streets. Barefoot women selling popcorn out of baskets. Priests in long robes, with expressions so severe they send a chill up the spine. And the clothing. It takes a moment for our eyes to adjust—to see the tunics and hats, for instance, as everyday clothing rather than costumes, which is likely the only place we’ve encountered such garments before, in high school productions of Peter Pan or Brigadoon, perhaps. But it’s not long before the strangeness subsides and the familiar creeps in. Something about the eyes of a popcorn seller reminding us of a great aunt we knew in childhood, or the profile of a smoking man recalling that of an old teacher. We are able to see, in addition to what is distant and unfamiliar, what is already known to us, sometimes even deeply-held. There’s something magic about those moments of recognition. Proust knew this well, and used it to good effect in his epic meditation on the play between past and present. Twenty-some years after trudging through In Search of Lost Time, I don’t remember much in detail, but I most clearly remember those moments of identification, as young Marcel declares the characters around him to be the living