Why we moved.

Boris shares more details about his father's background along with the story about the family move to the United States.
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(Did your father ever bring anyone over from Turkey?)

No. No other person in the family came after him. He only had one sister. Actually, there’s one interesting thing that I’m gonna tell you. He had one sister who moved from Istanbul to France. She lived in Toulouse most of her life after she left Istanbul when she was also quite young. She would visit us in Salvador quite often. My father would visit her also, but she never moved. She had her life set in France, suffered the war and luckily survived. But my father tried—he actually built a room in the house in Flor Blanca to move his father and mother from Istanbul to El Salvador in 1947. I was a little baby. On the way to El Salvador, with the intention of staying in El Salvador for good, they stopped in Toulouse to visit my aunt, and my grandmother died there, suddenly. She died at a relatively young age. She was in her fifties. Her name was Blanche Weill.

My grandfather continued the trip by himself. He came alone to El Salvador, lived there for four or five months. I think I was one and a half or two years old, from the pictures I see. And he couldn’t get used to it. He was a physician in Istanbul, and he worked at Hospital Rosales doing charity work. He was already in his early seventies. My father tells me that he just couldn’t get used to El Salvador. He didn’t like the life in El Salvador, and he went back to Istanbul. I think he tried again a second time a couple years later, and once again it didn’t work out, so he never came back. He lived a few more years and then passed away.

(So essentially your father didn’t have anyone in Salvador immediately related—well, did he have this uncle that brought him over?)

It was uncle Edouard, his mother’s brother. He lived until the late ‘70s. He was way into his eighties when he died. He lived in Santa Ana his whole life. He was very well-liked, very beloved in Santa Ana. He married a Swiss lady. He was from Geneva, and he married a lady from Lyon or some place close to Geneva. Once again, this is one of the Jewish ladies that came to El Salvador that we were talking about that was not happy at all. At all. She hated it. And she went back. They had a baby girl who lives now in the U.S. She went back to Switzerland and never came back.. He would go there to see her, but she never came back. They never divorced, from what I understand. They lived separated their whole life. The girl left with her, was brought up in Switzerland. And he lived alone. He lived alone his whole life. I’m sure he had his fun. (laughs)

(Company.)

He had a pharmacy in Santa Ana, Farmacía Principal, for many years, one of the largest drug stores in town—and he had a comfortable economic situation to a certain point, and then towards old age it started declining. He died not poor, but certainly not wealthy.

(What did your father do in Salvador?)

My father started working with my uncle—he had at the time—it was not a drug store, it was a store, a general store. Eventually he moved to work as a viajero, which were people that traveled the country selling merchandise from larger companies, which is what he did for his uncle originally. He worked for a couple of companies. I think one of them was called Casa Abadí They were also a Sephardic family. The Abadis moved to Argentina and never came back to El Salvador. Eventually my father ended up working for Casa Mugdan, where a lot of the Jewish people in El Salvador worked.

At one point in 1941, which was fourteen years after he had arrived in El Salvador, he met with Saul Gun. Saul Gun apparently was looking for a partner to start a business, and they started one together in San Salvador called Gabay Gun & Cia. It was a well-known name for many, many years, until the ‘70s and even later. They were partners from 1941 until about 1973, when the Guns moved to Israel and my father bought his part in the business. I started working for my father. I had been working for him for a while before that, and then my father and I became partners. The business evolved from a general merchandise business, schmattes—

(Textiles.)

....textiles to furniture, import of sewing machines, white-line refrigerators, etc. It was a credit business, mostly furniture and things sold on credit, and also an aluminum furniture factory. And he went through other things. Glass, at one point they were very strong in glass, big glass, imported from Belgium. When we moved to Miami in 1979, he moved also.

(Tell me why you moved.)

Well, trying to make a long story short, we really didn’t leave El Salvador with the idea of moving. We left El Salvador to spend two weeks in Miami on a vacation. Since my father and I were partners in the business, we didn’t want to leave the business alone, so he left a week earlier. We overlapped a week in Miami, and the other person would go back—yet didn’t go back. My father got sick. He had a checkup. There was a tumor in his intestine, and he had to have an operation. It was something that was done immediately. He had complications from the operation. He was in the hospital for a month. I had to stay. My mother never drove, and I had to drive her back and forth. My wife went back, and eventually the situation in El Salvador got bad. My wife didn’t think it was as bad as it looked from Miami, usually from far away things look worse. But I insisted that she should come up and maybe spend some more time in Miami. So they did, with my kids, my two kids. The kids started school in Miami. This is twenty-six years ago, and here we are, still in Miami.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC