The Ursitory

Matéo was born in 1917 in Barcelona, Spain, where his family, after having travelled through many countries in Eastern and Western Europe, took refuge trying to escape the First World War. A few years later, in 1920, his relatives settled in France, initially as nomads, with no fixed abode, then settled in wooden huts in Pantin, near Paris, in what is still called "the zone". Their father was a Rom kalderash (coppersmith) who had left Russia with his whole family (about 200 people) at the beginning of the 20th century to flee from the Bolsheviks. His mother came from a family of manouches from France. Before that, his ancestors had lived for five centuries as slaves in Moldavia and Wallachia, principalities of present-day Romania.

Matéo never set foot in a school. His father, a coppersmith, spoke French badly and his mother, a circus performer, was illiterate. At the age of five he already spoke several languages, but he did not know how to write because no one had taught him. His father, who could read and write a little, taught him to count (it was important for work) and then taught him to write the letters of the alphabet. That was the extent of his learning. The rest, he acquired on his own. Completely self-taught, he learned from everything he could get his hands on: newspapers, magazines, low-quality novels, and great classic authors. His mother died when he was eight years old and his father died a few years later. At 14, he was the oldest of five children and had to work to feed his brothers and sisters. Initially, he worked as a coppersmith, just like his father.
At the age of seventeen, he was married to an older woman, with whom he had a son, Bourtia. But the marriage ended badly. They separated and Matéo distanced himself from his Roma family. In 1935, after this separation, Matéo left in search of his mother's Manouche family, who travelled by caravan through central France. For two years, he shared a nomadic life with his maternal aunts and uncles and with his cousins. He was, at the same time, a circus worker, a traveling salesman and, best of all, he projected movies on an itinerant basis in various villages.
At this time, when he was 21 years old, a dramatic event led him to write. In Auvergne, near Clermont-Ferrand, two Manouche families violently confronted each other over the honour of a young girl. One of these families was Matéo's. There were numerous injuries and several deaths. Matéo, like other members of his clan, was arrested and put in prison on charges of collective murder. But Matéo had not killed anyone, he had only tried to protect his own. In prison, Matéo wrote a letter to his lawyer, a young intern named Jacques Isorni, who would later become famous for his defence of Marshal Pétain. The lawyer, surprised by the young gypsy's ease with which he expressed himself in writing, asked him to tell his version of events in detail, in order to be able to support his defence. Matéo did so and in a few pages, he described the events of that tragic night. Isorni, impressed by Matéo's personality, sensed that he had a genuine talent as a storyteller and, possibly, as a writer. He provided him with paper and pencils to write, and encouraged him to take advantage of his incarceration to write.

Matéo Maximoff died on November 24, 1999 in Romainville. He remains today the first and most famous Gypsy writer of the 20th century.