Josef Serinek / Jan Tesař: Česká cikánská rapsodie (A Czech gypsy rhapsody)

A Czech Gyp­sy Rhap­sody is an exten­sive anno­tat­ed edi­tion based on the mem­oirs of Josef Ser­inek, a famous Romani par­ti­san. His nar­ra­tive was col­lect­ed in 1963 – 1964 by the his­to­ri­an Jan Tesař and pre­pared for pub­li­ca­tion fifty years lat­er. The result is a three-vol­ume edi­tion of near­ly 1400 pages.

The first vol­ume con­tains 275 pages of Josef Ser­inek’s mem­oirs, divid­ed into 18 chap­ters as struc­tured by the nar­ra­tor him­self. Jan Tesař has added an intro­duc­tion and an exten­sive epi­logue to the mem­oirs. The vol­ume also includes an inter­view with Josef Ondra, a black­smith who worked with Ser­inek, and adds infor­ma­tion about Ser­inek’s resis­tance activ­i­ties. Tesař record­ed the inter­view with him sev­er­al years before he began record­ing Serin­ka. The first vol­ume also includes brief por­traits of oth­er char­ac­ters in Ser­inek’s sto­ry and index­es of names.

The sec­ond vol­ume con­sists of Jan Tesař’s notes to Josef Ser­inek’s mem­oirs. He com­ments on indi­vid­ual details of Ser­inek’s sto­ry, explain­ing the back­ground and con­tem­po­rary con­text, and adding addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion he col­lect­ed dur­ing his ten-year search for traces of the sto­ry in the archives.

The third vol­ume includes a sec­tion with maps of the region where Ser­inek’s par­ti­san unit was active, as well as addi­tion­al tables and dia­grams on the par­ti­san resis­tance in the Vysoči­na region, and above all Tesař’s crit­i­cal mil­i­tary-his­tor­i­cal essays on the par­ti­san move­ment in the Czech lands (and beyond) and on the resis­tance dur­ing World War II.