This New Edition of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem includes new poems by Cecilia Woloch reflecting the ongoing saga of the Roma people and includes an expanded and updated timeline based on her new research.

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A lyrical journey through history and memory so beautiful that at times it belies the deep pain it represents. Woloch takes us through fragments of memory that give glimpses into a life-long struggle with a hidden identity. Before I read Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, I knew what had happened to Gypsies across the ages —I knew the detail of their persecution under the Nazis; their gassing at Auschwitz—but now I understand it completely differently. Now I feel it as if I had lived it. Poetry so tender allows one to be led by the hand through an anguished and otherwise unapproachable world with dignity and love. 

— Stephen D. Smith, Executive Director, USC Shoah Foundation Institute

 “I read and re-read it with admiration, indeed, but with gratitude for the realization, the authenticity of its wandering fire. What depth and scope you give to the very image of Tsigan, the Gypsy, until you have it become the spirit itself.” 

—  Poet W.S. Merwin, in a letter to Cecilia Woloch

“I can’t think of anyone who writes like Cecilia Woloch. In Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, she reinvents herself as a Gypsy fire of language, a “single word” set flaming as a daring, dancing, lyric conflagration in the reader’s hand.”

— Carol Muske-Dukes

To view a clip from the presentation of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem at the University of Southern California in 2013, as part of its Visions and Voices Initiative, in cooperation with the Shoah Foundation Archives, click here

To view clip from the presentation at POLIN (The Museum of the History of Polish Jews) in Warsaw in 2015, as part of the museum’s commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, click here.

To read an early review of the new Tsigan in Bonjour Paris, click here

To read a micro-review of the new Tsigan in DMQ Review, click here