"After returning to Salvador, I packed my bags every week."

This excerpt remembers Ruth's experiences in boarding school, college, and early married life.
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(What was boarding school like?)

There were very few Jews. Sunday, everybody had to go to services, except the Jewish kids, we were like fifteen and we used to have to stay in study hall all morning because we did not have a service to attend. Nobody would take us to Friday night service or
Saturday morning service. Instead of staying in study hall every Sunday I began attending different services every week with different friends. I had to be all morning, studying in study hall because I didn’t have a place to pray.” So I started going with different friends to their different services. I started learning about religion and realizing the beauty of religions. Those exposures took me on a road of deciding to minor in religion when I went to college. It made me a stronger person spiritually and more understanding the differences in people. It also made me stronger in my own beliefs. When I went to college I had no inkling what I was doing in college, because the only thing I wanted to do was to get out of high school, which I did in my junior year. I never was a senior. I just wanted to go to a kibbutz. My father said, “No, you’re not going to a kibbutz. You’ll finish college, and when you finish college, then you can go to a kibbutz.” I guess I hated high school so much that I decided, “Well, I’ll do whatever he says, I’ll go to college.” But I had no inkling what I was going to study. I didn’t know about counselors. My parents had never gone to college.

So I went to the college that I chose and hoped that the four years would pass fast so I could go to a Kibbutz.

SMU, yes.

(How was that adjustment? Here you were in Pennsylvania, now you were in Dallas.)

I adjusted well because college was so different. I liked the warmer weather and having my mind challenged. Remember, I had no one guiding me. So I chose Dallas, not knowing anything. I came by myself. My uncle just dropped me off in the front door there of that dorm.

I did not have the pampering of someone taking me to the dorm and helping me out. I had one trunk that we sent from Ellis, and I was on my own, by myself. The girl that lived across the hallway was a Jewish girl from Panama and it was her first time away from home. She was from a very religious Jewish family. She was just as lost as I was, maybe worse, because she had never left Panama. What we realized was that no sorority wanted us because we were Jewish. And there was no Jewish sorority, and it was a big sorority campus, huge. Not only huge sorority campus, but also you had to have oodles of money.

(Still is.)

Oh, it still is. I joined what they called the Independents. The Independents were all those who did not fit in with the Greek standards the Jewish students, Arabs and all the rest of American students who did not have the right credentials/. We had a lot of friends and I really had marvelous four years. To this day we still keep very close contact with friends that we made during those years.

(So it was a type of organization?)

No, it was—it was, very loosely. They just called us the Independents. We just had a mind of our own. —I couldn’t have functioned in a sorority . If someone had told me what to do and how to do it, how to dress, how to speak, and how to act, I would have run the other direction. I think I did the best I could with the knowledge that I had when I came in. I would have done probably much, much better if I would have had guidance, but I didn’t. It wasn’t the fault of my parents. They did the best they could. They told me, “There’s your school. Go for it.” That’s all they could do. They had no knowledge of what to do.

(When did you meet your future husband?)

I met him on the second night of Rosh Hashanah in a little synagogue outside Dallas called Mesquite, Texas. I went there under duress, because the guy who was driving refused to go to big, organized synagogues. He said, “If you want to have a ride, you come with me.” I went with my friend that always spent the High Holidays at my uncle’s house that was from Panama. So we went there together, and I saw this very good-looking guy in uniform. I told him, the uniform made it. I fell in love with the uniform. But what I really fell in love with was that all the little kids in synagogue were surrounding him, and that told me he was a neat guy. That’s where we met, and the rest is history.

(Did it ever occur to you that if you married an American man you might not be able to live in Salvador? Or you didn’t think that far ahead?)

I didn’t think that far ahead, I really didn’t. I didn’t even know at that time that I wanted to come back to Salvador, and to tell you the truth, my father went ahead and spoke to Paul, as I know him now, he’s a very adventuresome person, he will throw himself into situations. He’s one that thinks like me, you bloom where you’re planted, but he’s the one that takes the leap. My father spoke to him and he said, “OK, I will be down there for two years and see if it works.” I wasn’t here for seven years, so when I came down here, I packed every week to go back. I hated it. And the only one really at that time that was so wonderful and was always around was Andrée. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t drive. I got pregnant right away. I was feeling miserable. And lost.

We lived in our first house that was in the complex of the Widawers, who the average age there was maybe eighty-five to ninety. My neighbor was the mother of Niña Paulita and the sister, and they lived in another house there. All day long I would hear whistles all around, and I would say, “What’s going on?” And I finally found out that it was Don Alfredo that had a whistle around his neck, and if he whistled once it was for Doña Paulita, if he whistled two it was for the gardener, three was the maid, I don’t know, four was his sister-in-law—I’m not sure. But the whistles sounded all the time. We got out of there as soon as possible. We only lived there for about four months, and I said, “I better find another place to live.” And we did. We found a place where we lived for ten years, and all our three kids were born there before we moved to the house we built in Colonia Maquilishuat.

(How often did you see your parents?)

My parents? All the time, ere you saw parents all the time. My mother I saw all the time. My father would come in and out after work sometimes. And then at the farm we saw each other, because we lived under one roof when we first got there. Later we built another house. But when we first got there, we lived under one roof.

(You built another house at the farm?)

Yes, yes. Yes. And so then we had two separate ones. My kids really grew up with their grandparents, very, very close. Friday night they stayed to sleep at their house. We had Friday night dinner, and after dinner we would either go to a movie it was our own time. But our kids, every Friday night they spent with my parents.

(Now when you say you packed every week to leave, what did you hate about Salvador when you came back?)

I’d feel I was asphyxiating. I didn’t drive. I didn’t work. After having been in the States and having worked in New York City, and here I come to hear whistles all the time, and living the end of the world. I didn’t have any freedom to come and go. At that time, if there were four restaurants in this country, that was a lot. I was gone seven years. I didn’t know anyone. But little by little after that, through Paul, we made a lot of the new friends that became like family. We had our close friends in the community. They were always my constant connections but our new friends (now a 42 year friendship) have become family just like the Jewish community. Our horizons were expanded to greater dimensions and our lives enriched.

(In what way?)

I learned more about more people around me, and it was like a different family that you join in, with all their ins and outs. They really took us in and it wasn’t only one family but all the aunts, uncles, cousins etc... So we suddenly had our Jewish community and this enormous family outside.

(And what was in your opinion, how did they look at the Jewish community?)

Oh, we would invite them for our seders here at home. They would participate to the point that one family is so religious, Catholic, yet they would send their kids to live with us in the States. They knew it was the thing of family, how our values of family, our values of people. Our friend Carlos Antonio, he read in my father’s eulogy for his funeral. He was the one that was beside my parents when they were sick. He’s the one I would call and say, “Help,” and he was always there. So was she. That doesn’t mean the Jewish community wasn’t there, but they were the ones that were constant—and being a doctor, he was able to jump in all the time.

(I’m jumping a little bit, but we’ll come back. When you went to Dallas, were you able to have those types of relationships with different types of people, or did you find it to be more challenging?)

When I left after here? First of all, that first year was extremely challenging because I myself was in a very grieving mode. It was a year that was very traumatic. I had lost my Camelot. I was grieving. My kids were grieving. My husband was grieving. We had to quickly jump in. It was like being thrown into a pool and not being able to swim and saying, “Swim or drown.” And again, I had to see what I was going to do.

I was not in a very good frame of mind. We left in that year, ’78, the farm was lost. In February I had lost a fifth pregnancy of five months and had gone through a full delivery. I got to the States and was told that I needed hysterectomy right away. I had no help. I had my kids that were crying every night because they want to come back home. It was very hard especially coming from a place where birds sing and people used to come by the door selling oranges and everything. We used to have people in and out of our house, because I used to sell veal and all the fruit from the farm. We always had a commotion around. And I go to the States, where you cannot even hear a dog bark. You could go in the middle of your street, which was a beautiful neighborhood, in the middle of the day, and scream your head off in the middle of the and no one would come out. People in suburbia do not live there. I don’t know, they come in at night. It was traumatic.

So my survival was that—we laugh when I do trainings for new immigrants, I tell them, because I know how it was. I spoke with every salesman that would call. I tried the bread that became very big, the Home Pride, when it first came out. We used it for a month. I would see vacuum cleaners. I would see cooking utensils, everything, just to talk to people. Later I realized why in the States there are so many psychiatrists. People just go to them to be able to talk. There’s nobody to talk to. If you can talk to a friend, that friend can put you in even keel. If that friend is sincere, he can tell you, “Look, this is what I’m seeing in you.” So I said, “This is why they pay so much here. They need somebody to talk to.” You need to talk to someone. I used the salesmen that would call me on the phone.

(And what about your parents? Did they stay behind?)

My parents stayed behind. They moved out of the house, because it was dangerous, and they took an apartment in the only apartment building here in San Benito, and then they went to Guatemala for two years and lived there in an apartment. Mind you, again coming back with the closeness, when I moved out of the Widaures complex, I went to Escalón, and about a few months later, who moves in across the street from me? Yolanda. So we lived across the street from each other for about eight years that we lived across the street. Once again, it’s this thing of somehow the community-family is always there.

(When you were in Dallas, did you think that you would ever return to Salvador?)

I wished, I hoped. I guess a big part of me knew that one day we had to end up here, for our own sanity. Because look at this house. We never sold it. We could have, many times over. I just couldn’t do it, Paul either. And we decided that at one point—things worked out. I couldn’t tell you that I thought everything out, because I didn’t. Things just happened and we had to make decisions at the time they happened and move with it. And I think we’ve made the best decisions possible.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.