Yenish Erotic

The Yenish are Western Europe's homegrown travelers: an itinerant people who are not Roma and not Sinti, but the descendants of Central Europeans who dropped out of settled society and built a living on the road. They live mostly in Switzerland, Germany, Austria and eastern France, with smaller communities in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Most are now settled, in towns and in a scattering of villages that have been Yenish strongholds for generations, while a minority still move with trailers between stopping places through the warmer months and winter on fixed sites when the trade season ends.

What holds them together is trade, family and speech. The classic Yenish occupations were the jobs a village needed a few times a year and nobody wanted full time: grinding scissors and knives, mending pots, weaving baskets, repairing umbrellas, peddling, dealing in scrap and second-hand goods, and later showmanship and music. Many of those trades survive in updated form, and they pass down through families that have historically married among themselves. The speech is Yenish itself, a German-based cant rather than a separate language, built on the local dialect and salted with words from Rotwelsch, Yiddish, Hebrew and Romani. It was meant to be opaque to outsiders and largely still is. Every speaker is also fluent in the surrounding language, which is why the Yenish are invisible to most of their neighbors until they choose not to be.

The name appears in eighteenth-century records, and the group seems to have formed earlier, in the wake of the Thirty Years' War, from discharged soldiers, displaced peasants and the working poor who took to the road. Religion is mostly Roman Catholic, with Protestant pockets in Germany, and pilgrimages remain a fixture of the traveling calendar. The defining modern wound is Swiss. From 1926 to 1973 the charity Pro Juventute, with official backing, ran a program called Kinder der Landstrasse, "Children of the Country Road," that took hundreds of Yenish children from their parents and placed them in homes and institutions in order to end the traveling way of life. The Swiss government apologized in 1986, and the Yenish were later recognized there as a national minority. Under the Nazis, Yenish in Germany and Austria were labeled "asocial," and some were sterilized or sent to camps. Today the Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse speaks for the Swiss community, and the Feckerchilbi, a Yenish fair revived in the 1980s, is the one occasion when the scattered families gather in public as a people.