Empower Yourself... A Gypsy in New York by Juliette de Bairacli Levy Author of Common Herbs for Natural Health

A Gypsy in New York
by Juliette de Bairacli Levy
Pre-publication preview courtesy of Ash Tree Publishing

INTRODUCTION

New York is the most written-about city in the world. In this book it is seen through unusual eyes, Gypsy eyes, and readers will enjoy new and strange information concerning New York’s large Gypsy population, which is still nomadic and hidden from those whom the Gypsies do not accept as their friends.

 

Author, herbalist, and world traveler, Juliette de Bairacli Levy, wanders through New York streets, accompanied by her two young children and her Turkuman Afghan Hounds (for which breed she is famous). Like the true Romany people, they are more often outdoors than in, and they explore the city in its snow-swept wintertime and its cold early spring.

 

“As a traveler,” wrote the poet Stephen Spender in his page-length review in the Sunday Times (England), of Juliette’s book Summer in Galilee, “she makes other recorders of their journeys seem like waterflies skating over the surface of a pond. Her progress across a country seems more antlike, moving from stone to stone, and from stalk to stalk of grass, which is the Gypsy way of looking at things, the small details, whether in city or countryside.”

 

Juliette de Bairacli Levy describes New York’s wild plants, which are many, and its wild birds of interesting variety; enjoy with her the mysterious sight of truckloads of almond blossoms being driven along a Manhattan avenue to an unknown destination. She also looks at the litter in the streets, the rats, the Manhattan alley cats, the city drunks and tramps. She experiences New York’s crime: her purse is stolen from her apartment by a dangerous fake window cleaner. There is a frightening chase along the East River walkway by a man and his boxer dog, and she witnesses a possible murder in an apartment facing one of her windows. And at the end of it all, Juliette’s beloved amber necklace is bewitched away from her by a Gypsy friend of deep occult power!

 

There is nothing vainglorious nor unkind in this book. It radiates a strange charm and a deep appreciation of its subject, which critics have praised highly in others of Juliette de Bairacli Levy’s travel books.

“In Memory of Juliette the Grandmother of Herbal medicine”

 

A Gypsy in New York
Author: Juliette de Bairacli Levy.

In this richly detailed memoir, Juliette de Bairacli Levy – one of the founders of American herbalism – offers us a rare documentary. It is at once an herbal, a travel book and a compendium of Gypsy lore and Gypsy ways. 210 pages, index, illustrations.
Retails for $21.95

buy A Gypsy in New York in our Bookshop

 

---

 

 

Helen Siemers:

“A Gypsy in New York is simply a charming book that has captured so truly and intimately the spirit of that city. Indeed, it should be classified as a travel book as well as a rare documentary of Gypsy lore.

“Here we have not only a great city’s Gypsy heart but also its very essence, in river winds, snow which turns to dirt within minutes, elegant clothes coming down the rubbish chutes, the strange characters around and about in the streets by day, along which by night the rats scurry, and the legions of cockroaches in the apartments, against whose windows the blossoms of apple and pear trees toss, even in the city’s cement heart.

“And the author even experiences a New York crime, which remains unsolved. This book is charmingly written, unusual, and captivating. I was sorry when its end came, all too quickly to please my pleasure.”

 

Margaret Behrens:

“I read A Gypsy in New York with great pleasure and was left much wiser concerning that strangest and greatest of the world’s cities, New York, which is also my city. In this fascinating book, Gypsy eyes, indeed, help me to see New York in all sorts of ways that I formerly had never imagined existed. But now I know – and am wiser as well as more intrigued!”