Ricardo "Dicky" Schoening: A Salvadoran Childhood, an American Adolescence

The following excerpts describe Dicky's first memories of school in El Salvador and his formative years at a boarding school in the United States.

(Did you ever feel like the Salvadorans treated you differently because you were Jewish?)

I think in my early days at the Escuela Americana, I was a very frail person. I was a very frail child. I mean, what you see now is not what used to be. I was very skinny. I was not very much into sports or into exercise. I was very shy. Preferably I would hide beneath my mother’s skirt. So I was very happy if nobody talked to me, because then I didn’t have to talk to them. So it wasn’t that I was being, let’s say, moved aside because I was Jewish. It’s just that I didn’t really want to mix with anybody. I was very happy mixing with those few children whom I had grown up with, like, oh, my cousins, maybe the Liebes, Ruth Reich, and the Lewinskys. I was very happy there. With these people, we were together—not every day all day, but a lot of the time.

Once I got to—I would say this took until age ten or eleven, for me to get over my fears, my shyness, and once I was eleven or twelve, I started mixing in very well with the local friends. I became part of the Boy Scouts. I think I was probably one of the very few Jewish Boy Scouts in El Salvador, because all the other guys didn’t want to become Boy Scouts. That’s where I made a lot of friends and I started to develop a personality. I started to do sports, feel more at ease with people.

(So you don’t have any distinct memories of anti-Semitism?)

No, no, I don’t.

(Moving forward a few years, you went to the American school until which grade, ninth?)

I was in the Escuela Americana until—I went through the tenth grade. That’s as high as I could go. Then my parents sent me away to boarding school and I went to a school by the name of Stockbridge School in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. A few others went there. Just one, really, my cousin Arturo Falkenstein, who passed away in 1960. And when I got there, I was just fifteen, so they put me back into tenth grade, because definitely I was not ready to be with sixteen-year-olds or to—let’s say, I was not ready to go into the eleventh grade from a maturity point of view. I was just fifteen. And the reason for that was because I had been allowed to go to first grade at age five because my father was El Presidente of the Escuela Americana.

So I went to Stockbridge School for three years and then went to the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, for two years. I decided that a college education was not something that I really needed, because I had a business waiting for me at home. At age twenty I started working in my father’s business.

(Just going back a little bit, how was the Stockridge School? How was that adjustment?)

Initially it was a little tough, because you came from a very closed environment, a very protected environment, where—you came from a very good home, where your father basically was home every night, where you had dinner with your parents every night, where you saw your parents at breakfast, at lunch, and at dinner, where you were surrounded always by family and by friends and it was a very protected society. In other words, if you needed to go somewhere, Mama took you. You never took the bus. And now, you came to Stockbridge School. You had to do things you had never done in your life, like make your own bed and wash your own clothes. Plus, of a hundred and twenty kids, I would say that seventy percent came from some type of a broken home or home in problems. So this was quite an adjustment.

The other thing was, I would say that at that time, every kid from the tenth grade on up smoked and drank, which was for us unheard-of in El Salvador. This was not something that we did. So it was a very, very—I would say the first semester was a very tough adjustment, very difficult.

(And how did people react to you? What did they think, this kid from Central America?)

(Well, that was not so bad, because the school—of a hundred and twenty kids and let’s say seventy percent from broken homes, seventy percent, or at least sixty percent, also were foreigners. So you had kids from Europe, you had kids from Latin America, you had kids from India. I think the biggest thing that Stockbridge School taught me was how to get along with people from all walks of life. In El Salvador at that time, we had never seen a black person. And we had—I would say that we had a good twenty blacks in the school. We had Catholics. We had Muslims. We had all kinds of people. So that was a very good experience. It really taught me how to integrate.

(Did you experience any anti-Semitism there?)

No. No. No. As a matter of fact, we were—all the kids were encouraged to follow their religious traditions, and the school made it a point of making sure that for the individual holidays, the kids were placed with families in the area who would take care of them. So for example, when it came time for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I went to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which was fifteen or eighteen miles away, and I stayed with the Lipton family. There I slept and I went with them to synagogue and I had my meals and I had a wonderful time. I was right back in the Jewish circle of things that I was used to.

(Did you feel that you were very different from these American Jews that you met?)

No, no. The American Jews at that time—there were two types of Jews in our school. There were basically the Orthodox Jews—who really wanted to be Conservative, but they were Orthodox, they came from an Orthodox family—and those who didn’t care. And the ones who didn’t care, they really went to synagogue on Friday night because it was a way to get into Pittsfield and then go get a hamburger and a cup of coffee at the local coffee shop. And then there were those of us who really cared, who went to synagogue because we believed in synagogue. We wanted to borrow this Shabbat service.

(Did you ever envision yourself staying in the US when you were in Rochester? No, you wanted to go straight back?)

Definitely not. I mean, the idea never crossed my mind. Because we lived—the life in El Salvador was a fantastic life. Beautiful country with every comfort that you can think of. Plus, I had a business waiting for me. So I felt that my life was already pre-arranged when I came here to school.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC