How did she survive those first years?

In this second excerpt, Ruth discusses her earliest memories and her first encounters with anti-semitism.
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(Your mother came from a Catholic background?)

She came from a Catholic background after spending all those years in a catholic school.

(Did she have to convert?)

She converted. I think she was the first convert here in El Salvador. It must have been very scary for her, I would imagine. Lonely in a way, because all the other women that were married came from Europe, and they were Jewish from birth. She was, as far as I know, the first convert. Eabbi Alex Fréund did her conversion.

(I mean, here she is, the first convert. She comes from a completely different world than, let’s say, some of the wives that came from France or Germany.)

Right.

(How did she survive those first years?)

You know, I think that she was able to survive those first years because she had still connections with that beautiful neighborhood which was Flor Blanca and friends like Noy Gabay , who used to live across the street. Also Dra Estela Graboski, who did not convert, she was married with Herbert Graboski, my father’s friend. It was a nice community but she always felt like an outsider. It wasn’t because people wanted her to be an outsider; it was hard for her after having been raised in great poverty to feel comfortable in a different place. My father truly loved her and helped her adjust.

(Can you give an example?)
He tried to please her in all he could and tried to show her the world that he had experienced. He was proud of all her efforts. She went to the Centro Estados Unidos and learned English and taught herself German from records. She loved to learn about different countries and she was fortunate to travel to most places she had dreamed of going. My parents used to travel three months at a time. That was once they were able to do it financially.

She was always extremely careful of what she spent. She never threw anything away. It wasn’t that she required great china and linen and all that. It wasn’t something that was required by her. My mother grasped the Jewish religion with all her heart and to her last days she always was waiting for Fridays and Saturday’s services to go. Shabbat observance was very important to her and it was her strength that helped me through my father’s death. The first Friday after he died I was unable face the service at home without him. I asked if we could skip it and she said NO, we would light the candles, which she did and we did the Kiddush and the rest of the service. She asked us to sing the songs after dinner. It was the toughest service to sing and to this day I thank her strength. Since she died I began kissing the Torah twice once for her and once for me. As sick as she was at the end of her life she always wanted to go to services on Saturday to kiss the Torah. She and my father were always there, sitting, holding hands. And Friday night candles, and the Friday night dinner with white tablecloths was a must for her.

The Friday night before she died, she requested for us to go to her room, even though she hardly could talk. She requested for us to pray with her. We thought she was already unconscious but something inside reminded her that it was Friday night.

(So she really did connect with the faith?)

Oh, very much so, very much so. Many ways, deeper ways than what I am now. She was in a deeper way, in a different way, but much deeper, absolutely.

(Now, you girls were the children of the first convert in the community. How did that affect you?)

You know, I look back and I always ask myself. Kids could have been very cruel, but they were not. I’m only talking to you about my experience. I had a wonderful relationship with the kids in the community. I always felt that it was one big family. I never felt threatened or being out of place. We never went to other people’s home for Shabbat. We had our Shabbat dinner as a family every week. We always included inter marriage families. It was a community that felt like family with its pros and cons.. Everybody felt connected and everybody, I guess, was needed. We were the first generation and to the present we have close ties to one another. We call each other. If someone needs us, we’re there.

My father, even though he was a very, very tough man and rough man, he did beautiful things. He had time for us. I remember he always had time and always was teaching me something. The farm was one of our most cherished places, and he would take your mother, Hélène, Andrée, Arturo Falkenstein and many others. He would pick everyone up at 5:30 in the morning in his camioneta and we would go to spend the weekend riding horses, milking cows, swimming in rivers, etc. Arturo went on most weekends.

He always was with my father. When he died, my father really felt it so much. So did we, but he was very close to my father. On Wednesday nights he would take him to watch the soccer team practice. My father had a small part of the Santanita Soccer team. That was the big one then. Every Wednesday night we used to go and see them practice. We were fanatics of soccer. We used to go and see them train, and on Sunday when we could we would go to the games.

(Now, you mentioned these trips you used to take to Talcualhuya. All of the kids that you mentioned were all Jewish. Let’s say you had a friend, you had Yolanda, who is now Yolanda Cohen, and let’s say you had Yolanda Mayora back in that day, do you think they would have mixed?)

I think they would have mixed. We were a very mixing community. But somehow the children that were always going were the children of his friends in the community. They had experienced all the same traumatic experience of leaving everything they knew and coming to something so unknown, so it was like, the children of cousins or someone very close. We did take others outside the community.

(Did you realize that everyone was Jewish in the group?)

Oh, yeah, I realized everybody was Jewish, but we had a lot of friends who were not Jewish. We faced the world as the community that we lived in. We saw our friends as individuals and developed strong bonds. My maid of honor was Erika Michiels de Brodersen, she joined our fourth grade class when she returned to Salvador after World WAR II and she is a close friend of Ruth Reich Alpert. There were other kids that were from Arab descent, and we were close friends.

(You went to the American school?)

From kindergarten, yes.

(Until which grade?)

Until ninth grade, at that time we had to either go to Europe to a finishing school or to the States to high school. I had the luck to go to a boarding school, with Yolanda Rosenberg Cohen. Her grandmother Doña Irma de Liebes and my father drove us from New York to Philadelphia to school. I cannot say I enjoyed those years of boarding school.. That’s where I found anti-Semitism already. I did not know what that was.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.