Miguel Cukier, An Introduction

Back in January, I interviewed Miguel Cukier and his wife Delia within a span of three hours. It was a fascinating afternoon, one that illustrated the remarkable closeness of a couple with such dramatically different personal histories and backgrounds.

Miguel was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador. The son of two Polish emigres, his experience is a unique one.
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(Where did your father come from?)

From Strasbourg, where he was studying medicine. My mother came in 1936 with my father when they got married in Poland on one of his vacations. They used to have three months vacation every two or three years, something like that. ‘Cause they couldn’t—you had to travel by boat, so therefore you couldn’t go every year back to Europe. So they gave him one month, two months or so vacation. They took the boat and they went and they stayed two or three months at a time and they came back. He got married in 1936 and brought my mother. Two years later my sister was born, and six years later I was born.

(And where did they meet, what town?)

Kalisz, the oldest town in Poland.

(Was your father born in Kalisz?)

Yes.

(So he met your mom in his hometown?)

Yes. She was living in his hometown.

(And she was from Kalisz?)

She was from Warsaw.

(And both your parents were born Jewish?)

Yes, they were.

(And were they observant?)

Not at all. I asked Lily [a cousin] about my grandmother and grandfather on my dad’s side. You know, they would go to Yom Kippur and from time to time, but no, they would go to a wedding, a bar mitzvah in the town. They did not even live in the Jewish section of town or anything like that. They lived very close to the park, relatively walking distance to the factory, as a matter of fact, because the factory was on the outskirts of Kalisz. And from my mother’s side, they died very young. She was an orphan by the age of nineteen or twenty. I asked her, not religious at all, not at all. None of them spoke Yiddish at all. They spoke Russian, they spoke Italian, they spoke English and everything like that. My father had a teacher from England, brought from England to teach him English, a governess. She was English. Yiddish was not the language for them.

(Do you think they did that for their own protection?)

No. I asked Gustavo that. No, because with the name of Meissner, you know, it was a very Jewish name. It was not a Christian name at all. So I don’t think so. He [maternal grandfather] was a doctor. They were very, very—she was very wealthy, my grandmother. They traveled through Europe. My great-grandparents had an apartment in Monte Carlo and in Paris. They were very, very well-to-do people. As Gustavo said, I understand, they were not integrated with the Yiddish-speaking people that were—

(It was a different class.)

Class, culture. They spoke many languages, but not Yiddish. And they were not religious at all.

(So when they were married, they were probably married—?)

Under the chuppah, yes, they did.

(Oh, they did get married under the chuppah.)

Yes, they did get married, and then we found out in a paper that Lily translated for us from Polish that—

(Was that a ketubah, or not really?)

Not really, I don’t think so, it was not a ketubah, not at all. I can show it to her again and find out. But I don’t think so.

(So you’re being raised in Santa Ana, and your family is not observant, but you knew you were Jewish?)

Yes, yes, all the time.

(You went to school?)

I went to the American school, with your mother’s who’s ten years older than me. I’m not gonna admit to that age.

We were probably—there was confusion, because most of the people that surrounded us were Christians, naturally, you know. The maid, the people in the farms, the people in the stores, you know, but we knew, I knew I was Jewish all the time.

(And you were born in ’42, so right during the war.)

Yes, yes.

(Did your parents lose a lot of family in the war?)

Yes. The whole—everyone. Except for Lily, his mother. My grandfather, his father, had died of cancer in 1928 or so. My mother’s twin sister died during the war, which was very traumatic to her. Only my great-uncle, my grandmother’s brother, was living, lived, and I met him. They lived in New York. He married a baroness, but he became Christian, Catholic, because she was Catholic. He was president of the Red Cross in exile for Poland. But the rest, Lily’s father, Lily’s mother, my aunt, they were all—and Pupik, which was my father’s cousin he adored—they all died.

(Do you know where they were taken? Do you have any of that information?)

No, I don’t. Treblinka or Auschwitz. I don’t know. I don’t want to go to any of the concentration camps. This time we went, Lily didn’t want to go, so therefore I said, “Why am I going to torture myself going to something that I know I’m gonna be tortured by?” Because I was haunted by this all through my life.

(How so? Was it discussed in the home?)

We couldn’t talk much about it in my childhood because we didn’t want Lily to relive—

(Because she came to live with you?)

Oh, yes, she came to live with us.

(You were the only people she had?)

Oh, yes. That she says in the book. We were the only people she had. She came to live with us and then she married in 1952. She went back to the States and lived a very happy, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful life. Which is good, because she didn’t have it good when she was little. But why, that’s the question I always ask, not being pious—and I shall never be pious, never...—why kill somebody just because he’s from the same religion that Jesus was born in? For me, it’s baffling. That’s—they go to church, I say, and they pray in front of a statue that’s a Jew. And they killed them [the family] because they were Jewish, and they spit at them, and they discriminated. And the older I got, I got to think about that thing. Why? Why kill ‘em? You can dislike ‘em, just dislike ‘em. But don’t kill ‘em. Don’t make ‘em suffer, you know. I don’t know, my grandmother suffered, but she was not a bad woman. She was a very good woman. Why suffer, you know? But through the years it has haunted me. Why? And a lot of times when they ask me what religion I am, I say “Jesus’s religion.” Because it’s true. He was a Jew!

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC