One Foot Here and One Foot There.

We learn more about the Davidson's move and how Jack stayed involved in the Jewish community.

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(How did the kids take this sudden departure?)

Not badly, I think. I think they probably each had their own adjustment difficulties. Jan suffered the most, but he also had been exposed to—held at gunpoint here in the car, things like that, with Lillian, but that’s a story that I don’t know enough detail to give you. So he’s the one that has the most recollection of dead bodies on the side of the street on the way to school, that sort of thing. I think Jessica being the youngest, of course, was the one that adapted fastest. She was in first grade, so her whole schooling was in New York. Jan already went to junior high school. There was a six-year difference. So he went into seventh grade when she went into first grade.

(And they were at the American school? So English was already—?)

No, they were in the British school. Their English was not what it became, but it was good enough that they had a basis. They spoke English, so they were able to get along.

(Did you continue speaking Spanish at home?)

I used to make an effort to speak English with them. Once we moved to New York, I made an effort to speak Spanish with them, to compensate so one wouldn’t be lost.

(You continue to have your business here in Salvador?)

Right.

(Were you concerned about the Jewish community when you left, what would happen?)

Well, yeah. I was always very much involved. Originally, as I said, Don Alfredo used to take us to the synagogue. I didn’t have any real affiliation with the country, because I had left Chile at age seven, I had lived in Salvador, I had lived in New York. So my only affiliation was my Judaism. The only place I belonged, the only thing I really was and ever have been, is a Jew. Everything else was really quite incidental. And of course, home base was the Jewish community of El Salvador. That’s the only place where I was completely at home, completely where I belonged, where I was part of it. When we came here to live, Lillian and I came with Jan and the other children were born in the ‘70s, then Jorge Salomon was very much into getting young people into the board of directors and involving them in the community. So I was on the board of directors quite young. I was probably not even 30 when I became—when I got on the board of the community. And then in 1974, Ernesto was elected president of Fedeco. So the base of Fedeco, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Central America and Panama, the base of Fedeco came to Salvador. And he drafted Jean-Paul, Joseph, Jorge Weil, and me into a little board. So I became even more involved, because Don Jorge got me involved in the community, and then Ernesto got me involved in the other thing, and Don Alfredo got me involved in the Judaism thing, so the three of them were my religious— my mentors in Jewish community affairs.

(What about your father? Was he at all—?)

He was. He was an observant Jew, not religious, but observant. We had Shabbat every Friday night. He was at one point or another on the board of the community as well, but not as involved as I later became, and also not as involved with the community, with the people, socially. My contacts, my friendships, with the Jewish community were not inherited from my father. They were not his friends who I became friends with, or the children of his friends that I became friends with. They were people that I—they were relationships that I made on my own, if you will. And some of them through Lillian, because Lillian was very close to Gerda (Guttfreund) and Perla (Meissner) and those people when she was a young girl. As a matter of fact, when we made our list of wedding gifts, they were on Lillian’s list, who are now people I adore and love dearly and consider my close friends,so it was not through my father. My father kept himself a little bit on the sidelines of things. He was not too comfortable being alone, and he never really quite got into it, although he was active in the community and certainly went every Friday night to the synagogue and all that sort of thing.

(Did you find that there was a big division between the French and the German sides?)

(pause) Yes, because that’s what everybody talked about. I don’t know if I could say I found it myself. Since my father was not that involved, at home it didn’t make a difference, and once I became a senior in high school, Roby came from the French side and the Schoenings and the Rosenbergs came from the German side, and I don’t think it made too much of difference. We knew the president was German, Eugenio Liebes, and the vice president was French, Jorge Salomon, and then it switched over. So there was a consciousness, but I don’t remember it being anything that affected me or my allegiance. Now we joke about it, but it was never really an issue.

(Do you think the two groups brought different things, different cultural—?)

Yes. I think first of all, the German—there was a different approach. The Germans, while they kept up the German and kept up their German lifestyle, the Germans were much more—they never integrated into the country, really, but they were also not going back, because there was nowhere to go back to. While the French always had this—France was always there. It was much more a part of their lives than of course Germany was a part of the German Jews’ life.

(Do you think the French assimilated more?)

No, if anything, the Germans not only assimilated, but I think, at least the women that I remember, the German women were happier here than the French women, simply because there was no illusion of going back to anything, while the French always seemed to have the illusion that France was there, you know

(Was there a lot of discussion amongst the German Jews of Germany, of the war?)

No. There were German Jews, like my mother, who was very German. We spoke German, we lived German. We ate German. Your grandparents were people who were very German in their lifestyle. There were people who were very rejecting of the German, like Gerda, who while she spoke German, wanted less and less to do with time. They were German Jews who lived outside, while the others were French Jews who were—I don’t think in temporary exile, but at least less likely to adjust to the situation.

(Do you have a theory as to why the community has never boomed, has sort of stayed at this very comfortably small population?)

In numbers?

(In numbers.)

I think that first of all, because it’s so small, there was a lot of intermarriage, a lot of mixed marriages. Already back in the ‘70s, when I represented the community in Fedeco meetings, I remember in the speeches we had more than 50% mixed marriages. I think it was growing, and then came the war, which just made the whole thing fall apart. Plus the fact that there was never a really strong assimilation to the country. None of the children became professionals. They all became businesspeople, either they went into the family business or they left. Most of the girls left. Most of the boys came back to the family business but studied outside until my class. We were the first ones that were Jews that graduated high school here. The others were sent to boarding school, the slightly older group. So there was not a great involvement in the country, which was the purpose of the parents, because they didn’t want them to marry locally.....

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC