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IN A BOROUGH DEFINED by its ethnic mix, there remains at least one Queens community that has eluded demographers and John Rocker.
The Bangladeshi of Astoria? Haitians in Laurelton?
Try the Rom of Ridgewood.
If you're not familiar with the Rom community, it may not be your fault entirely. It's also by design.
"We have learned, from the time we left India, to walk a careful line," says Morgan Ahern, co-founder of the organization Lalo Diklo: Roma Against Racism. "Not to sound melodramatic, but every time we've reached our hand out, it's gotten cut off."
In some cases, that's stating it mildly.
While the most extreme example is the Holocaust, in which more than 500,000 Roma were put to death alongside Jews, their history has no shortage of harassment, ostracization and, even today, widespread misconceptions.
Look no further than the name. Rom is the Romani-language term for what is commonly called Gypsy (Roma is plural). The word "Gypsy," however, is believed to be rooted in the idea that Roma came from Egypt. This folktale has been bolstered by some Roma themselves, sensing that outsiders might hold a higher regard for an Egyptian lineage than for their actual roots, in India, dating back more than 1,000 years.
Because so little Rom history has been officially recorded, the community has become cloaked in a confusion largely created by - or meant to placate - outsiders.
"My mother's side of the family fled the Holocaust," says Ahern, 54, a Rom lecturer who was born in Brooklyn and lives in Seattle. "My mother got into this country by pretending to be Italian. ... People don't know who we are."
For many of the world's estimated 11 million Roma, invisibility and isolation have been preferred to fractious or faux relations with the gaje (non-Rom) world. This is what makes a...