Wellington Women’s Club Hosts Dinner
with Author Sonia Meyer
The next meeting of the Wellington Women’s Club will be Thursday, March 3, 2011, beginning at 6:30 p.m. at Binks Forest Golf Club, 400 Binks Forest Drive, Wellington.
Members and guests will enjoy a buffet dinner and a presentation by Sonia Meyer, author of the novel Dosha, Flight of the Russian Gypsies, a story of early Soviet Russia, the persecution of the Gypsies and a young Gypsy girl.
Sonia Meyer fled the Nazis with her parents when she was two years old to live in the woods of Germany and Poland with partisans and Gypsies. There her father taught her to throw hand grenades using a wooden darning egg. They lived in the woods, in abandoned houses and in fields and barns, dodging the German and later Soviet armies who hunted them relentlessly. Shortly after the war, Sonia and her family returned to Cologne, Germany where she foraged for food with a band of Gypsies camped nearby.
Married at the age of 17 and divorced at the age of 21, Sonia became a successful fashion model. Her fluency in eight languages allowed her to work as a translator for embassies, large corporations and an American philanthropic organization. There she discovered documents on the genocide of Jews, but was struck by the absence of similar documents on the genocide of the Gypsies.
Sonia reconnected with Gypsy culture while traveling in France. A chance encounter with a Gypsy encampment, with horses grazing nearby, allowed her to break the ice by quietly whispering a few words in Romani to the horses. She was welcomed as one of their own…which she may partly be. She now lives in Vermont where she researches Gypsy culture and breeds horses.
The guest fee is $30. For additional information or to make a reservation, please contact Allyson Samiljan, 561-798-6741.