Moving Back Home?

In this excerpt, Daniel Cohen discusses his desire to return to El Salvador after spending the majority of his adolescence and young adult life in the United States.

All questions in parentheses are mine.
****************
(Did you always think you were would come back to Salvador, or did you think that you would live in the States?)

Didn’t think about it much. I did feel like I didn’t know my family, because I left when I was thirteen, and I was in my twenties and I’d never really lived with them, and I realized that, you know, during the holidays that I saw them, that wasn’t, like, their real life, that was just holidays, and since my family was happy to have me around, I was happy to be around with them. So it was kind of like a holiday time. It wasn’t real. So I did see that I didn’t know my family. I did kind of want to have that feeling of coming back.


(After Northeastern [University], you went to—?)

Dallas.

(And what did you do there? Did you have a job?)

I had a job. I worked for a family entertainment franchise, you know, like Chuck E. Cheese. It was international. A lot of their franchises were in the UAE and in Qatar and Saudi Arabia and all those places.

(How was that?)

My boss—the owner was Jewish, so he’d tell me, “You can’t go. I can go, because I know the partners over there and they’d take me in. But I don’t think they’d take another Jew in.” (laughs)

(And that just made you laugh?)

It made me laugh, because it was a Jew telling me this. It just made me laugh. He sent me to Mexico, to work in Mexico.

(What about living in Dallas? What was that like?)

Since I knew it was only transitional, it was fun. Dallas is really nice. The Texans are nice. It was nice. I was living there with a girlfriend. I moved there with a girlfriend. We were planning on getting married. We graduated together from college and then we were thinking about getting married and she said, you know, “Let me practice what I studied in the U.S. for a couple of years, and then we’ll go to El Salvador.” She’s a physical therapist. So we went to Dallas. We kind of closed our eyes and put our finger where it landed, and it landed in Dallas. Neither of us had ever gone there. So we went there, and then after two years she got cold feet and I was sad. But I was like, “You know, it’s better for her to get cold feet now than coming with me to El Salvador and then two or three years later, two or three kids later, her being, ‘I want to go back to the U.S. with my kids. You can come see them whenever you want.’” (laughs)

(So after that, you moved to San Salvador?)

Right. I went home. I lived at home.

(Did you join the business? What did you do here?)

Yeah. I got here on a Sunday, and on Monday morning I was, like, here, (laughs) at the office.

(And who was working here at the time?)

My father and brother Pierre.

(How was that, joining a business working with your father and your brother?)

It was good. It was fine. It took me a while to get used to. It took them a while to get used to me.

(And then what about the Jewish community? When did you start getting involved again?)

From the get-go. I got here and I started going to the synagogue. I don’t go that often. I didn’t go that often before. But I always wanted to be part of it. I always liked to go the Shabbat and to the holiday stuff. So since I got here, I just started going to the synagogue.

(And what about your wife? How did you meet her?)

I met her in college, like ten years before we got married.

(Really?)

Yeah. My wife’s family has been friends with my family forever. My grandmother tells me stories about my wife’s grandmother. So we actually met when I was in college in Boston and we started going out and we went out on and off for ten years.

(Was she living here at the time?)

No. She was living in Paris.

(Did she move here?)

She moved here eventually.

(So when were you married?)

In 2001.
(2001 you were married. You were married here?)

Here.

(Who married you?)

Gustavo [Rabbi Gustavo Kraselnik] married us.

(Your wife Nathalie was born to—?)

Gerard and Monique Schwartz.

(Did the rabbi make her go through some sort of conversion [since her mother did not officially convert to Judaism]?)

Yeah, confirmation. Before we got married.

(So what does that mean exactly?)

You know, She was like, “I’m a Jew, why are they making me do this?” She doesn’t like ceremonies, and this all involved going to the lake and being kind of like dunked in the lake. She didn’t like the idea. I would relate to it as, “OK, you know you’re French, but if you don’t have a passport, you can’t be French. So this is just like getting a passport. It’s just a piece of paper, and that’s that.” And she knew that she had to do it and she went ahead and did it. The good part about it was that she got a piece of paper that said that she got confirmed, so it’s put away. And she has a piece of paper that says she’s Jewish. I don’t. So she’s kind of like a documented Jew, whereas I’m not. That’s a funny thing that I find about the Jewish religion, is that you kind of go on hearsay. (laughs)

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.