"I think Roma in Europe survived slavery and genocide thanks to our drabarimos," says George Eli of Connecticut in ROMEA TV's #me.Rom series
His family traveled from Romania to the USA on a ship during what was called the Great Migration. He says his great-grandmother had to dress herself and her children in more European clothes and deny that they were Romani people to get into the country.
According to Eli, his great-grandmother identified her family as being from Greece. “When they were asked if they were Roma, or Gypsies, they pretended like they didn’t even know what the guy was talking about, and that’s how they go into this country,” Eli told ROMEA TV as part of the #me.Rom interview series with Romani people living in the USA.
George Eli (PHOTO: František Bikár)
Eli did not grow up like other children in the 1970s in the USA; thanks to his family traditions, he was home-schooled and learned the trade he performs successfully to this day. “I didn’t go to school, nobody I knew went to school, we had what my grandparents would call ‘Romano shkala‘, which is learning a trade, learning how to deal with other local Roma, learning respect, learning how to dress properly, and the business that we grew up in (my mother, my aunts, everybody I ever knew) was the English word ‘fortune-tellers’, we would say drabarné, because drab means medicine, so potion-makers. Every household I knew had an altar and a crystal ball and a reading room, this was normal life for me,” Eli said from his office in Westport.
Eli went on to become a successful author and film producer and says that doing so was a kind of rebellion, an attempt to do what he loves, motivated by a desire to do something other than the family business. In 2009 his first full-length documentary film, “Searching for the 4th Nail“, received the Best Filmmaker Award at a Connecticut film festival.
Currently Eli makes a living as a personal coach and a therapist, and on the doors to his office, just like other people in this same field in the USA, there is a sign saying “Psychic Reader”. “I studied filmmaking and I did it for a while and I love it – but look where I’m back again, when they say ‘it’s in your blood’, it’s in your blood. It’s what pays the bills. I love making movies, I love writing, I love doing other stuff, but I always come home to drabarimos, no matter what. I think it’s DNA, I don’t think it’s nurture,” he said with a smile.
Many rumors exist about the field in which Eli provides services to his clients – for example, that crystal balls are used for clairvoyance. “That’s very Hollywood,” he told ROMEA TV.
“Because we’re a business, we like to make them happy, so we provide a visual for them, but when they actually sit down, they realize that I’m not looking into the crystal ball, the crystal ball is on the table because it circulates the energy, that’s why it has to be a round table. Nobody looks into the ball, that’s Hollywood. All of my life, and still today, I just start to talk, and when I pinpoint someone’s pain, then I just give them Romano redo [Romani advice] on how to deal with that pain. That’s all, that’s all it is,” Eli said.
“These are the original therapists, the original psychologists, the original motivational speakers, the original ‘positive over negative’ speaking. If we look at the survival (and this is what my grandparents used to say), if you look at the survival of the Romaniya during such oppression, slavery, and racism, and genocide, then the drabarno disposition played a part in that positive thinking, and not loyalty to a certain land,” Eli explained, whose forebears came from Romania to the USA in the 19th century.
The #me.Rom documentary series is filmed by František Bikár for ROMEA TV and offers viewers five interviews providing unique insight into the lives of Romani people living in three different states in the USA.
