Roberto Salomon: An Introduction

Roberto "Roby" Salomon is a celebrated theater director in both El Salvador and Europe. His unique background and fascinating perspective on war, the developing world, assimilation, acculturation, nation, and identity all contribute to his moving and sometimes revolutionary productions.

Roby is a loyal friend, son, brother, husband, uncle, father, and grandfather. In the past few months, the blog has featured quite a few back-to-back sibling interviews including Susie Baum de Khoury and Ruth Baum de Feldman and Leonor "Lore" Schoening and Ricardo "Dicky" Schoening. Now Roby is added to the mix as his sister Helene Salomon was featured only a few weeks ago. When reading these interviews, you might keep in mind the intricacies of emotional memory, physical identity, and assumed identity.

All questions in parentheses are mine.
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(So you were a very active child?)

Extremely active. I kept getting kicked out of school. I think what happened through my entire childhood is, I had two older sisters who were absolute models of everything. I mean, they were the best sportsmen. They were the best scholastically. They were the best civically. They were the best manner-wise. They were the most attractive. They dressed well. I mean, they were just perfect. They were perfect models of everything, especially my older sister, Andrée. I had no place to compete there, so I competed on the other end. I was unruly. I was ranting and raving. I was—the director of the grade school used to call me an outstanding student because I was always standing outside the classroom. And he was a real bastard that everybody loved except for me.

(How important were your friends at this point in your life?)

My friends have always been the most important thing to me. I have always had a lot of friends. I’ve always had—I think as a child I used to change best friends an awful lot, but my friends have always been extremely important to me. Not that I’ve really—not that they’ve been kind of shelters to whom you can open up with, but it’s just kind of a way of leading a parallel or alternative life that you wouldn’t have otherwise. But my friends are the most important people to me.

(And I understand that some of the friends you had when you were a child, a lot of them you’re still in touch with?)

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

(Do you think that’s what makes Salvador what it is for you, or part of it?)

Yeah, I think that’s what makes Salvador what it is. It is friends. For me it is. I mean, I live half the time, half the year I live in Switzerland, in Geneva, so I do see the great, great difference. Here I’m like a fish in water and over there I have a lot of—I lack the oxygenation that comes from constant contact with friends. I mean, I don’t have any friends that I phone with six or seven times a day like I do here. Which to some people is terrible, you know. I grow on that. I thrive on that.

(So as a child you had a rough time in school but you had these friends that stuck with you?)

I don’t remember friends necessarily sticking with me in grade school, no. In grade school I don’t remember friends sticking with me. But what happened was, when I was—my parents—because I was born right at the end of the Second World War. As a matter of fact, I was born, like, six weeks after Hiroshima. And what happened is that after the war, my parents for the first time had enough money to be able to travel, plus the fact that they had not been able to go to Europe. My mother had come over in ’39 and had not been able to go to Europe until after the war. She was eight years away from her environment without ever being able to go back. Then started these series of trips, like, every five years they would take us to Europe. In a young lifetime, that’s three times in fifteen years. The first time they took me I was two years old, so of course I don’t remember anything about that. But the following time they took us, I was between seven and eight, and we went for a couple of months. Which means, I lost my school year. And of course, what always amazes me is that these things were completely unimportant to my parents, completely unimportant. You never even talked about it. I mean, they never said, “We’re taking you on a trip. A trip is worth a lot more than a school year,” etc. Or, “Don’t worry about your friends. You’ll find them again.” No, just went, no explanation, and then came back and of course failed my third grade, which meant I was with a whole different crowd the following year. These problems of adaptation were never addressed. It was like—I’m not resentful about it, it’s just that there wasn’t any consciousness of it on their part.

And then the following time I went with them, I was in the seventh grade. Then they took me and my sister, my younger sister, to Europe with them for a couple of months. But our relationship was so stormy between the four of us, it was a horrible, dysfunctional family dynamic, and what they did was, instead of analyzing it or seeing what was wrong with me, they left me in a boarding school in Switzerland when I was twelve. So, you know, without warning or anything, just left me there for a year and a half, and came back to Salvador. So I used to be very resentful about that. Now I realize that it’s actually what saved me.

(How so?)

It got me away from my parents! (laughs) I mean, that’s probably why I was misbehaving so much. I needed to get away from my parents.

(Did you like Europe?)

Did I like Europe? I was—yeah, oh, yeah. Europe was the reference point for my family. I mean, my father adored Salvador and lived here for fifty-five years, was absolutely identified with the country, absolutely in tune with the country and very much, very much integrated. My mother never really got off the boat, because my father never helped her to get off the boat either. She came as a twenty-two-year-old and she was locked up in a house and made to spawn. (chuckles) As was the custom at the time. What happened is that Europe became like a reference point. But my father was an extremely ambivalent person. One of my earliest memories of my father is that one day you could be praised for something and the next day you did it, you’d get whacked for it, for the same thing, you know. It just depended on his mood. But Europe was the reference point when we were here. The US was like the New World. Growing up here was, “Aren’t you lucky that you live here and there are no more wars?” Brought up in this artificial paradise in which there are no wars, there’s no famine. Europe has been decimated. European Jewry has all but—they didn’t say that European Jewry had disappeared. They always said that Hitler didn’t manage to kill all the Jews, which is a big lie, because he did. I mean, you know, (chuckles) if Jewry exists today, it’s certainly not because of European Jewry. It’s because it was reinvented elsewhere.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.