“You Old Sinto, Don’t Forget Me”: Listening to and with a Romani Survivor

This piece explores processes of counterlistening with Marie “Tchaya” Hubert, a French survivor of the genocidal persecution of Romanies during World War II.¹ I present and analyze two audio clips from ethnographic encounters with Tchaya in which she confronts anti-Romani racism through spoken and sung articulations of her beliefs concerning Romani heritage.² Tchaya belongs to the Manouche group of Romanies who, among other Romani and non-Romani populations, were targeted for internment, house arrest, and in some cases deportation by Nazi and French governments between 1940 and 1946.³ In this piece, I show how Tchaya refutes assumptions that Manouches do not or should not openly discuss the persecution they faced during the war, and how she advocates for broader recognition of the genocide to which her community was subjected. Specifically, I explore how a multilayered musical recording she made represents an effort to repair cultural and social loss, a corrective to racial essentialization, and a deliberate redirection of music’s affective potentials. Against enduring popular narratives that portray Romanies as being “without history,” Tchaya channels an array of voices to foster a sense of social cohesion between past and present while transforming her listeners’ understandings of Romani agency.⁴ I argue that by listening to, with, and for those who might otherwise be forgotten, her work generates new modes of relationality and historical consciousness within and beyond her community.

Beginning in the early twentieth century, itinerant populations — a large proportion of whom were Romani — were officially classified as “nomades” under French law and subject to discriminatory treatment as such. In 1940, following a Nazi decree, French authorities began rounding up so-called nomades and placing them under house arrest, confining them to internment camps, and carrying out other forms of violence against them. This occurred in the context of the Nazi genocide of Romanies, in which hundreds of thousands (estimates vary) were killed across Europe.⁵ Since the war’s end, the French government has barely acknowledged its responsibility for these actions and their long-term, devastating consequences. Today descendants of nomades may self-identify in ethnoracial terms, including as members of the Romani subgroups of Manouches, Sinti, and Gitans, and/or in non-ethnoracial terms as “voyageurs” (“travelers”), reflecting the slippage between race and lifestyle instigated by antinomade legislation and perpetuated by the supposedly colorblind French state.

I first visited Tchaya at her home in Sarrebourg, about an hour northwest of Strasbourg by train, in October 2024, followed by numerous visits between 2024 and 2026 and many more phone calls through the time of this writing. I had learned about her through colleagues and from stumbling upon a website about Manouche war survivors which included both her oral testimony and songs she had composed.⁶ By the time I met Tchaya, I was aware of numerous efforts she had made to disseminate her story in the prior fifteen years or so, primarily through interviews with media and academics, and in keeping a series of journals she hoped to have published one day.⁷

My first visit to her was coordinated and accompanied by a mutual friend, photographer Jeannette Gregori, and preceded by conversations with one of Tchaya’s granddaughters to help clarify my intentions for our meeting. I had been working on an ethnographic and archival book project about artistic approaches to Romani genocide commemoration in France, building on over a decade of research and community engagement concerning the politics of jazz manouche in Alsace.⁸ As part of my oral consent procedure, I explained to Tchaya that I was interested in learning about her musical and testimonial efforts to raise awareness about her wartime experience and that of Manouches more broadly, and that I intended to disseminate her words and music through presentations and publications. She welcomed my suggestion to place a digital audio recorder on the table between us and was very enthusiastic about the possibility that our encounter that day would form part of her public-facing story. My background as a US American, white, non-Romani scholar contributed to complex interpersonal dynamics with Tchaya. On the one hand, my ethnoracial and occupational status offered certain privileges to which she did not have access. On the other hand, my longstanding relationships with Manouche musicians, as well as my own experience as the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp survivor, offered us some common ground and helped to establish an ongoing relationship.⁹

Tchaya was born in 1939 into a Manouche family that lived in a wagon in the woods around Sarrebourg. Though the full details of her wartime life are beyond the scope of this piece, during my encounters with her and through the aforementioned media, she described how her family was captured, put on south-bound trains, and held at Rivesaltes, Thonon-les-Bains, and Argelès-sur-Mer, camps known for interning large proportions of so-called nomades. Eventually her family escaped and made their way to Lyon, then further north by the end of the war. She married in 1958 and spent the next several decades raising her fifteen children.¹⁰

During our first meeting, Tchaya explained that because she was so young during the war, she did not know much at all about what her family had endured, until one day she asked her mother about that period. Now she deeply regrets not being “curious” enough to ask for more information before she died.¹¹ In turn she laments that most of her descendants (whom she proudly observes, as of March 2026, number 180 and counting) are also not “curious” enough to learn about this history.¹² To her, this storytelling is a form of repair for her failure to salvage more memories from her family before it was too late.

Through conversation, writing, and singing, Tchaya engages in counterlistening, which Gascia Ouzounian outlines in a capacious sense as entailing a host of antihegemonic values and practices — a form of “listening against.”¹³ Tchaya’s storytelling is an explicit attempt to have her audience listen “against unequal systems of power,” ranging from wartime acts of abuse to broader regimes of state oppression and other manifestations of prejudice and deprivation.¹⁴ Tchaya’s work is also a reaction to a popular myth of Manouche “silence” in which Manouches are assumed to intentionally resist or even be incapable of talking about their wartime persecution because of cultural prohibitions against such discussions. Ample evidence shows that any Manouche silence about the war is due more to a host of factors, such as institutional disregard and denial, than to ethnoracially specific customs, yet French institutions, media, and even scholars have still promoted this assumption.¹⁵ In contrast Tchaya’s work enables her audience to “[listen] with those who are not listened to” and “against received histories and knowledges. It is listening to the gaps, the omissions, the absences, the erasures.”¹⁶ Finally, the recording this piece examines demonstrates how “counterlistening is shared, collective, and plural” as well as “relational and situational,” as I listen to and with Tchaya during and following our encounters with each other.¹⁷

In the following audio clip, I ask Tchaya why she insists that people know her story, especially her experience of the war.

Transcribed English translation (produced by the author):

Siv: I want to know why it is so important that everyone knows your story/history, especially during the war. Why is it so important to tell this story/history?

Tchaya: Already, our elders — we learned that from our elders. We lived with our elders. I have my grandfather, my mother, my, my, my great[-grandfather] and all that. We were always together in the woods and all that. And there was always music. And then a big fire, always a fire. But now you don’t even see fire anymore. Now, you don’t see it anymore. So, voilà, and then at night, voilà. Around the fire, [there was] music. We danced. Now, now! People, the youth, they hear our music — well, not me. Me, I love it — but they go away. They don’t want, they don’t want, they don’t want to listen.¹⁸

In this segment, Tchaya responds to my question indirectly. She first describes how when she was young, members of her community learned from their elders and she extolls their traditions of making music and dancing around a campfire. Importantly, these practices are central to her idea of what it means to be Manouche, and she draws on them to articulate a chronotope of Manouche authenticity.¹⁹ She then sets up a contrast with younger members of her community today, bemoaning that they do not listen to this music anymore. While she does not say anything explicitly about the need to transmit her wartime story, her lament for a lost way of life and connections with elders suggests that the history of her family might also be unduly forgotten.

Here and at other points in our encounters, Tchaya pointed her finger at systemic forces she deemed responsible for cultural decline. In her notebooks as well, she describes postwar life and how certain traditions were maintained until their gradual downturn a few decades ago. She echoes broader societal anxieties about modern technologies and changing social values, and the resultant degeneration of both social connection and cultural traditions, underscoring the acute loss she felt plagued Manouche communities specifically. Considering that she expresses these grievances in tandem with her stories of wartime persecution, I see her drawing connections between the genocidal violence to which Romanies were subject during the war and a kind of culturally destructive violence she observes still taking place within Manouche communities. Hence her indirect answer to my question about why it is so important for her to talk about the war: it is not just about preserving a history or a tradition for its own sake, but also about the very survival of her own community as Manouche. For Tchaya, sharing this history is a form of counterlistening in which she identifies and confronts forces, both specific and diffuse, that she perceives as threatening Manouche existence across spatiotemporal scales.

At one point during our first meeting, I asked if she was familiar with the song “Lass Maro Tschatschepen.” It was written and recorded by the guitarist Häns’che Weiss, a member of the Sinti group of Romanies (closely related to, and for some synonymous with, Manouches). “Lass Maro Tschatschepen” emerged in the context of a Romani civil rights movement in Germany and called on Sinti to seek justice for the genocide committed against them. Once I recited a few of the lyrics to this song, she exclaimed that she had a recording of it, along with songs by other important German Sinti musicians. She then revealed,

Tchaya: And me, I sing. Listen, listen! [Laughs] I was living in town. I had a record player . . . and my son brought me a vinyl. Then I listened to it, and [the singer] was singing in German. And then there was a free space [i.e. an instrumental break]. Me, I sang in romanès on the CD.²⁰

She proceeded to stand up and turn on her TV and Xbox, which she uses for the sole purpose of listening to music.²¹ It took a few minutes to flip through the numerous tracks find the one she wanted to show us, titled “Tchaya.” The following clip was recorded as she played the song for me and Jeannette. It captures at least the following layers of mediation: the version of the song as mass reproduced on vinyl; a digitally manipulated version of this vinyl recording; Tchaya’s vocals recorded on top of this digital manipulation; my own field recording of the playback of this combined digital recording and our spoken commentaries as we listen; and, finally, the playback you as a listener are about to hear.²² The recording Tchaya played for us was structured to include an instrumental introduction preceding the first verse of lyrics in German as originally sung by Leo Monosson, followed by Tchaya’s verse in Manouche and then a final recapitulation of a brief section of Monosson’s singing. I have rendered the following audio clip as a video with titles and translations to facilitate your multilayered listening.

As displayed in the video above:

German lyrics:

Du schwarzer Zigeuner, komm, spiel’ mir was vor
Denn ich will vergessen heut’, was ich verlor
Du schwarzer Zigeuner, du kennst meinen Schmerz
Und wenn deine Geige weint, weint auch mein Herz

Spiel’ mir das süße Lied aus goldener Zeit
Spiel’ mir das alte Lied von Lieb’ und Leid
Du schwarzer Zigeuner, komm, spiel’ mir ins Ohr
Denn ich will vergessen ganz, was ich verlor

—

English translation of German lyrics (initially generated by Google Translate and edited by Matthew Gelbart):

You black Gypsy, come, play me something²³
Because today I want to forget what I lost
You black Gypsy, you know my pain
And when your violin cries, my heart cries too

Play me the sweet song from the golden age
Play me the old song of love and sorrow
You black Gypsy, come, tickle my ear
Because I want to forget completely what I’ve lost

—

Manouche lyrics (transcription produced by the author and Tchaya with assistance from Monia Nei):

Am doch pouro sinto, mit tiri gaiga.
Tou hallès doch mit lenza, pach i yack kova tziro
Am bech tout pach mandé, oun guin mangé dren
Me kamau doch ta djinap, lengro djiben

Kané gaigré du mangé tiri heimligi gidli
Kané péné tou mangé lengro kamleben
Tou heimlogo sinto, tou bistral man gar
Tiri gaiga rovela, miro dji nina

—

French translation of Manouche lyrics (provided by Tchaya):

Toi le vieux tsigane, avec ton violon
Souviens toi près du feu, avec eux ce temps là
Viens donc t’asseoir près de moi, raconte moi leur vie
Moi, je veux tout savoir, de leur histoire

Maintenant, tu vas me jouer ta mélodie d’autrefois
Maintenant, tu vas me dire leurs joies et leurs peines
J’ai connu ces jours heureux, tsigane m’oublie pas
Mais quand ton violon pleure, mon coeur pleure aussi

—

English translation of Manouche lyrics (produced by the author and based on the French translation above and subsequent conversations with Tchaya):

And you, old Sinto, with your violin
Remember close to the fire, with them back then
Come sit near me, tell me about their life
I want to know everything about their life

Now, you’re going to play me your melody of times gone by
Now, you’re going to tell me their joys and their pains
I’ve known these happy days
You old Sinto, don’t forget me
But when your violin cries, my heart cries, too

—

English translation of French spoken during the recording:

Tchaya: You see, it’s a German who sings. After, I sing in Manouche.

Jeannette: This gives [me] goosebumps! That makes [me] think — it really makes [me] think of the war.

Tchaya: Do you understand?

Siv: A little, yes.

Jeannette: And it’s a song … for the Tsiganes? Yes?

Tchaya: Yes, yes, yes. The Germans, they sang for us.

Jeannette: [inaudible]

Siv: “The Black Gypsy.”

Jeannette: Ah, the “Schwarzer Zigeuner.”

Tchaya added that her sons jokingly asked her, “Did you do that as a duo?,” marveling at the technological feat that they had accomplished together²⁴ — what Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut would describe as an “intermundane” collaboration.²⁵

During our conversations on this day and others, Tchaya seemed to think that the German lyrics were a positive representation of Romanies, saying that the singer was “singing for us [Manouches]!” But it is notable that in her lyrical response, she swaps the titular “Du Schwarzer Zigeuner” (“You Black Gypsy”) for “Du Pouro Sinto” (“You Old Sinto”). She therefore replaces an arguably pejorative exonym with an endonym and an explicitly racializing and othering adjective with one denoting age (which, in this context, probably connotes wisdom and memory). From the very beginning of her intervention, Tchaya effectively corrects the German lyrics’ explicit racial essentialism. Complicating this correction is the fact that in a French translation of the lyrics she gave me, she replaced “Sinto” with “Tsigane,” the latter being an exonym she likely does not view as pejorative but which can still carry essentializing connotations.

Tchaya’s sung response recasts the German lyrics’ proposition to the Romani addressee: whereas he asks the violinist to help him forget his sorrows through music, Tchaya asks him to help her remember both pain and joy. This, of course, aligns with her ambition to raise awareness about anti-Romani persecution during the war. The stories she tells, after all, detail both the horrible circumstances her family underwent as well as moments of joy and resilience. (Indeed she confirmed this motivation in a later conversation with me.) But I also want to underscore the fact that in positing the importance of memory over forgetting, she pushes back against the widespread stereotypes that Romanies only live in the moment and do not care for history, and, importantly, the idea pushed by official institutions, scholars, and media in France that Manouches do not want to remember the war. In doing so she transforms the idea of Romani music itself from a tool of forgetting (at least according to the German lyrics) into a tool of remembering. This reorientation aligns with her stance articulated in the first audio clip of this piece, in which she laments the loss of Manouche traditions such as particular kinds of music as a result of forces both specific (e.g., violence exacted by Nazis and their collaborators) and diffuse (new technologies, social isolation, and other perceived threats to Manouche traditions).

Composing these lyrics in Manouche means that her listening audience is necessarily Manouche, since this language is very rarely understood by outsiders. As Tchaya told me, she hoped that fellow Manouches, and especially her own family, might internalize her challenge to the idea that Manouches are supposed to forget. That said, she also asked me to do whatever I could to bring this song (and others of hers) to a broader listening public, and she was enthusiastic about my initiative to disseminate the song’s translation through the piece you are now reading.

In tandem with thinking of this recording as an act of counterlistening, my analysis is also inspired by J. Martin Daughtry’s idea of the “acoustic palimpsest.”²⁶ He offers this concept as a way “to foreground the multiple acts of erasure, effacement, occupation, displacement, collaboration, and reinscription that are embedded in music composition, performance, and recording; acts that can be recovered — partially, imperfectly, but valuably — by critical listening, research, and occasional leaps of the imagination.”²⁷ The recording you just heard might seem less like a palimpsest, which necessarily entails erasure, than an accretion of sonic layers, with each new layer interacting with the previous ones. Yet the audible substrate of the recording, at least in its lyrical denotation, calls for the erasure of memory. Tchaya interprets these lyrics as laudatory but also as enacting a kind of violence in their demand for this erasure. In contradicting the German lyrics and advocating for remembrance, she is attempting to undo the erasure of both cultural traditions and, more broadly, Romani history. If we think of this recording, then, as a palimpsest in the relatively capacious sense Daughtry points to, one that entails more than strictly sonic erasures, we might consider Tchaya to be undoing the violence of forgetting through her insistence on remembering.

This palimpsestic approach also helps to illuminate the historical context of the song’s original recording and the multiple forms of labor it involved. Weeks after first listening to Tchaya’s recordings, I finally got around to researching the song’s genesis. I learned that it originated as an instrumental tango written by the Czech composer Karel Vacek as “Cikánka” and was likely first released on record in 1931.²⁸ In 1933 a recording with German lyrics by Austrian librettist Fritz Löhner-Beda was recorded in Germany and released by the Paul Godwin Tanz Orchester featuring tenor Leo Monosson.²⁹ It turns out that Löhner-Beda was well-known not only for “Du Schwarzer Zigeuner,” but also for writing the “Buchenwald Song” while, as a captured Jew, he was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp. He died at Auschwitz in 1942.³⁰ Paul Godwin was a Polish Jew who escaped Germany in 1933,³¹ and Leo Monosson, a Jew born in Moscow, also fled Germany in 1933 to France (where, incidentally, he recorded with famed Manouche guitarist Django Reinhardt) and later moved to the United States.³²

For me, learning about this context raised a host of questions about how to interpret Tchaya’s recording. What to make of the fact that the 1933 recording was made by Jews in Germany and released shortly before Hitler’s takeover? That the song is about a listener’s desire to forget his troubles? That the lyricist met the same fate as many Romanies during the war? Could I hear the German version of this song as more than a simple romanticization of Romani musicality?

On the phone one evening, I asked Tchaya if she had been aware of this backstory — she had not — and what she thought about it. She responded by saying that she loved this song, but she did not really comment on the information I had just given her.³³ Realizing later that a telephone call may not have been the most appropriate medium for eliciting a response to this information, on a subsequent visit, I conveyed it again. Her reaction was quite different this time: clearly moved, she held my arm, let out some expressions of astonishment, thanked me, and told me that I had “deepened things.” When I showed her the sheet music I had obtained for the song, she interpreted the German subheading of the song’s title — “Lied und Tango” (Song and tango) — as “Leid und Tango,” and explained that leid meant “misery,” or more specifically, that one had endured misery and malice.³⁴ Perhaps, in emphasizing this subtext of hostility as the cause of sorrow, she was drawing a connection between Löhner-Beda’s lyrical intent and the growing persecution of Jews at the time. Perhaps this was also her way of rendering the song all the more relevant to her own experience as a Romani survivor. Considering her strong emotional reaction in that moment, I chose not to press her for further clarification of her interpretation.

At the time of her recording, Tchaya was only adding to a song she found pleasant and appreciative, but which called out to her to respond with some gentle correctives. My intervention seemed to catalyze a new dimension of meaning for her. Following Alessandro Duranti, Krystal A. Smalls is “inclined to treat most communicative acts as agential even if not always intentional,”³⁵ calling their consequences “errant perlocutionary effects that may travel to places and peoples never expected or known.”³⁶ Such effects certainly resulted from Tchaya’s rewriting and recording of this song, from her interpretation of further context for the original recording, and from the development of the present article. Before my intervention, this recording was still complementary to her explicit testimonial work in that it sought to counteract the stereotype that Manouches deliberately forget their pasts, and in that it allowed her to leave a sonic trace of herself. As such, the very existence of this recording remains a willful act of remembrance, one that might shape how members of her own community understand where they came from and their rightful place within broader historical narratives.

My own listening to her recording, a palimpsest that involves more layers than I initially thought, reminds me that “Counterlistening is spectral, ghostly, haunted. It is listening as part of an historical continuum: as informed by and attuned to the past and its audible traces in the present.”³⁷ For a listener like me (and, perhaps, you), Tchaya’s recording resonates with the histories of the song’s creators, whether or not she intended this in the first place. It inspires us to be “curious” about the past, to resist forgetting, and to remain open to a plurality of contingent and changeable meanings.

Endnotes

1. I use “Romanies” to refer to people who self-identify as Romani and may belong to groups including Roma, Sinti, Manouches, Gitans, and others. See Siv B. Lie, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France (University of Chicago Press, 2021), ix.[↑]
2. According to Márton Rövid, the term antigypsyism “emerged in the second half of the 1980s aiming to describe to the symbolic, political, structural and institutional violence which characterize the relationships between majority societies and the social group labelled ‘gypsy.’” See Marton Rovid, “From Tackling Antigypsyism to Remedying Racial Injustice,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 45, no. 9 (2022): 1738.[↑]
3. Arguing against the consensus of French historians, Lise Foisneau contends that the persecution of so-called nomades during the war should qualify as a “genocide”; I agree with this assessment and refer to this period of anti-nomade violence accordingly. See Lise Foisneau, “Le génocide des « Nomades »: figures du déni,” L’Homme 249, no. 1 (2024).[↑]
4. Alaina Lemon, Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism (Duke University Press, 2000); Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People without History’ in the Narratives of the West,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992).[↑]
5. Ilsen About and Anna Abakunova, The Genocide and Persecution of Roma and Sinti. Bibliography and Historiographical Review (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, 2016), 2–3.[↑]
6. Her testimony is available on the website “Mémoire Tsigane,” developed by Xavier Bazot, at https://remue.net/Marie-Tchaia-Hubert.[↑]
7. See, for example, the website cited in footnote 3. Her testimony was included in a documentary film, Vignuelles, les oubliés (dir. Kamel Maad, 2010), and in an academic project titled “Recherches sur la persécution des personnes dites nomades en France de 1940 à 1946. Recueil de témoignages écrits et oraux (2019-2022)” [“Research on the persecution of people called nomades in France from 1940 to 1946. Collection of written and oral testimonies (2019-2022)”].[↑]
8. Lie, Django Generations.[↑]
9. Tchaya was especially excited to be in contact with a US American, so much so that she immediately gave me the nickname “Hamburger.”[↑]
10. Interview with Tchaya Hubert, Sarrebourg, France, October 26, 2024.[↑]
11. Interview with Tchaya, October 2024.[↑]
12. Telephone interview with Tchaya Hubert, March 8, 2026.[↑]
13. Gascia Ouzounian, “Counterlistening,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 46, no. 2–4 (2020): 311.[↑]
14. Ouzonian, “Counterlistening,” 311.[↑]
15. On challenges to this assumption, see Lise Foisneau, “« Quelle Grandeur, Le Patrick! » Paroles d’amitié Chez Les Manouches d’Auvergne,” Ethnologie Française 51, no. 3 (2021); Siv B. Lie, “Playing for a public: French Manouche commemorations of Roma genocide,” Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah 217, no. 1 (2023); and Jean-Luc Poueyto, “Être Manouche : Une Histoire de Familles,” Ethnologie Française 48, no. 4 (2018).[↑]
16. Ouzounian, “Counterlistening,” 312.[↑]
17. Ouzounian, “Counterlistening,” 312.[↑]
18. Interview with Tchaya Hubert, Sarrebourg, France, October 26, 2024. Original French: Author (Siv): Je voudrais savoir pour vous pourquoi il est tellement important que tout le monde sache votre histoire, surtout pendant la guerre. Pourquoi est-ce que ça c’est tellement important de raconter cette histoire? Tchaya: Mais déjà, nos anciens — on a appris ça de nos anciens. On a vécu avec nos anciens. J’ai mon grand père, ma grand mère, mon, mon, mon arrière [grand-père] et tout ça. On était toujours ensemble dans les bois et tout ça. Et il y [avait] toujours la musique. Et puis un grand feu, toujours du feu. Mais maintenant, on ne voit même plus de feu. Maintenant, on en voit même plus. Alors, voilà, et puis le soir, voilà. Autour du feu, ben, la musique. On dansait. Maintenant, maintenant! Les gens, les jeunes, là, ils entendent notre musique — ben, pas moi. Moi, moi j’adore — mais ils s’en vont. Ils veulent pas, ils veulent pas, ils veulent pas écouter.[↑]
19. On linguistic-anthropological approaches to chronotopes — representations of time-space — see Jan Blommaert, “Chronotopes, scales, and complexity in the study of language in society,” Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (2015).[↑]
20. Interview with Tchaya Hubert, Sarrebourg, France, October 26, 2024. Original French: “Et moi je chante. Ecoute, écoute! [rires] Mon fils, il m’a—j’étais, j’habitais en ville. Mon fils, il est, il m’a ramené —J’avais un tourne disque. T’as vu? Un tourne disque. Et puis il m’a ramené un disque, un vinyle, quoi. Et puis je l’ai écouté. Et puis il chantait en allemand. Et puis moi, il y avait un espace de libre. Moi j’ai chanté en romanès dans le CD.” Romanès is a term for the Romani language, and I refer to Tchaya’s variety of Romani as Manouche.[↑]
21. Tchaya refers to this Xbox as “my box” and treats it lovingly: “When we [listen to] music at night, I hit [the button]. [I say] ‘stay with me!’ and I hug it, like that. I say, ‘thank you, stay with me.’ It’s my only music, I don’t have anything else!” (Quand on fait la musique de la soirée, alors je tape dessus. Alors “reste avec moi,” et je l’embrasse, comme ça. Je dis, “merci, reste avec moi.” C’est ma seule musique, hein! J’ai rien d’autre!) [↑]
22. In the recording Tchaya played for us, a repetition of the first verse of the instrumental section was inserted between the end of the original instrumental section and Monosson’s final verse. This implies that Tchaya was not singing directly with the vinyl recording, but rather with a digital version of the recording that one of her sons had manipulated to accommodate her final Manouche verse.[↑]
23. I am not capitalizing “black” here because it does not refer to Blackness as usually conceived in the US, even though it is meant to racialize Romanies.[↑]
24. Interview with Tchaya Hubert, Sarrebourg, France, October 26, 2024.[↑]
25. Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane,” TDR/The Drama Review 54, no. 1 (2010).[↑]
26. J. Martin Daughtry, “Acoustic Palimpsests,” Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Wesleyan University Press, 2017).[↑]
27. Daughtry, “Acoustic Palimpsests,” 53.[↑]
28. Karel Vacek (music) and Fritz Löhner-Beda (text), “Du Schwarzer Zigeuner” (Melodie der Welt, 2010). Several instrumental recordings of this piece under the title “Cikánka” appear to have been released in 1931; see “Cikánka by R. A. Dvorský a jeho Melody Boys,” Second Hand Songs, https://secondhandsongs.com/performance/483755/versions.[↑]
29. Karel Vacek and Fritz Löhner-Beda (composers), “Du Schwarzer Zigeuner,” performed by Paul Godwin Tanz Orchester and Leo Monosson. 1933, Polydor 25068, 78 rpm.[↑]
30. “Fritz Löhner-Beda,” Memorial Auschwitz-Birkenau — Austrian Exhibition (online), https://www.auschwitz.at/fritz-lohner-beda-en. See also Barbara Denscher and Helmut Peschina. Kein Land Des Lächelns: Fritz Löhner-Beda, 1883-1942 (Residenz, 2002).[↑]
31. Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (Oxford University Press, 1992), 40.[↑]
32. Monosson’s grandson, François, recounted this timeline to music historian Jerzy Płaczkiewicz; see “Leo Monosson Returns … with His True History !,” posted by jurek46pink, 2012, YouTube, 3:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZMe3mf469U. On Monosson’s recordings with Reinhardt, see Patrick Williams, “Cette Chanson Est Pour Vous, Madame. . . ” L’Homme 3, nos. 215–216 (2015).[↑]
33. Phone interview with Tchaya Hubert, November 21, 2024.[↑]
34. Interview with Tchaya Hubert, Sarrebourg, France, June 11, 2026.[↑]
35. Krystal A. Smalls, Telling Blackness: Young Liberians and the Raciosemiotics of Contemporary Black Diaspora ( Oxford University Press, 2024), 13; see also Alessandro Duranti, The Anthropology of Intentions (Cambridge University Press, 2015).[↑]
36. Smalls, Telling Blackness, 12 (emphasis in the original).[↑]
37. Ouzounian, “Counterlistening,” 313.[↑]