Roberto Salomon: When I look at pictures of Afghanistan....

In this excerpt Roberto "Roby" Salomon remembers his first experiences as a student in Europe and then in the United States.

All questions in parentheses are mine.
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This is the message that we got. And how lucky we were to grow up here [Salvador]. And at the same time there was this ambivalent thing about, “Now, let’s go back to civilization. Let’s go back to where things are really real and this is real wine, this is real cheese.” I always joke—when I get back to Switzerland, I always take some Salvadoran cheese with me so people can taste what real cheese is like. (chuckles) I have this counter-culture approach to it. But basically, Europe was a reference, and the US was the reference for the future. In other words, we were at an American school. Everything that was good was in the States and for the future was in the States. I mean, there was never any question about where one was to go study, except they left me off at a boarding school in Switzerland. (chuckles) All these contradictions, constantly.

And so Europe was like civilization, and this was the sticks. Actually, I discovered Salvador when I came back from the university at twenty-four. That’s when I discovered what Salvador was about.

(Before we jump to that, when you were a child, eight or nine, before you went to Europe for the first time, were you aware that you were a minority here?)

Yes. Always. I was always very aware that we were part of a minority. We were told—I say “we were told” because I don’t remember who, whether my father or my mother told me, probably my mother, and my father just said yes—I remember—one of my earliest memories was going to First Communions and being told before going to the First Communion, you know, explaining to me what the First Communion was, and that we were not to kneel, because we were different, so we were to stand. When everybody kneels, we were to stand. I of course remember distinctly thinking that was ridiculous. I was gonna stay sitting down, which I did, and I’ve always done since. Every time I’m in a church, when everybody kneels, I just sit. Because I think standing is slightly arrogant way of saying—

(I was told to sit.)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You stand out of respect, because you don’t stay sitting down. Which is a way of looking at it, but I don’t see it that way. We were told that we were a minority. We were Jewish. We were different. We didn’t go to church. I had no problems with—I never had any problems with crucifix, Christ, etc. I mean, later I studied art history and iconography. That’s one of the reasons—I mean, I bathed in Catholicism here, as opposed to other Jews of my generation who I’ve talked to who did not really bathe in that Catholicism. I don’t know, I probably had religious maids or something like that. I don’t remember.

(When you say “bathe,” you mean you embraced it?)

It was around me all the time. I was never like, “Why is the man on the cross?,” that sort of thing. Jesus was on the cross, and that was it. I just took the things as face value like that. The—I lost where I was going there.

(Bathed in Catholicism, unlike others in that generation.)

But it was—yeah. I remember talking with André Guttfreund about that many years later. He was talking about anti-Semitism when he was little. There’s a year difference between him and me. I remember saying to him, “What? Anti-Semitism when we were growing up?” The first time I felt anti-Semitism for real was when I went to the States, when I went to college. And there I felt that all of a sudden it had never dawned on me to go to a Jewish fraternity. Fraternities were still de rigueur when I was—in ’63, when I went away to college. But when I got there, it was—it seemed it was evident to everyone at the university that that’s what I was joining, because I was Jewish. It’s the sort of thing that never, ever had occurred to me here. That’s the first time I became aware of anti-Semitism as an institution. I became aware of differences. The first time was when a group of two or three of my Jewish friends were going out with high-society Catholic girls in Salvador when we were about fifteen or sixteen, and all of a sudden I felt not as welcome in their homes as I had felt the year before, when we were all friends, you know, when there was a dating thing involved. I remember that. But other than that, no, I absolutely do not remember any, any—I was never ostracized for being Jewish. I think the American school was a place first of all where the Catholics that went to the American school were much more open-minded Catholics because they were going there because there parents did not want them to go to religious school, or because they wanted them to learn English, or both. But no, I don’t ever remember feeling ostracized for being a minority, but yes, very conscious of being a minority.

(When you went to Europe that first time, did you feel that you were suddenly—that people suddenly looked like you? Not that you fit in completely, but that you were in a place where—?)

The only time I have ever felt in my life that people look like me is when I see pictures of Afghanistan. (laughs) I have always felt a foreigner here, in the States, in Europe.

(Even today?)

Even today. Yeah, uh-huh. When I see pictures of Afghanistan, I say, “That must be where I come from.” Or with Iranians. That’s when I feel that’s where I come from. That’s where I would blend in.

(Let’s go to college. You graduate from high school—)

I came back after Switzerland, I came back to high school here after two years, speaking French, of course, and having learned reading and writing French, which was a great thing for me afterwards, because I’ve spent more years of my life around Lake Geneva than around any other place in the world. Which is where my wife is from and which is where I’ve lived for the past twenty-five years. I came back to high school here and integrated very well. I mean, I’m a very adaptable person.

(Was being Jewish a part of your life in Switzerland?)

When I was in school in Switzerland, when I was twelve to fourteen, no. It was the year of my bar mitzvah, and it practically went by unnoticed. I mean, my parents didn’t even come to my bar mitzvah.

(You had a bar mitzvah—)

In Switzerland, yeah. My parents left me there one month before my thirteenth birthday.

(You just went to the local synagogue?)

I went to a synagogue and this elderly man who had been my father’s boss here in Salvador, who had taken my father to Salvador, who was retired at the time, sort of oversaw the fact that I would attend synagogue on the day of my bar mitzvah and be called up to the Torah and say a prayer, which I had just learned the day before.

(What’s this gentleman’s name?)

Luciano Simon. He was—he founded—he was the person who brought over my father and Enrique Weill, or rather Enrique Weill and my father, since he came one year earlier. He was also from Alsace-Lorraine and had retired in Lausanne, which is near where the school was, which is probably why they left me there, because they thought he could look after me. Which of course he couldn’t. (laughs)

(When you came back here, you had French and you were in high school. Did you ever feel that there was a division in the community between the French-speaking Jews and the German-speaking Jews?)

No. I never felt that at all. I never felt that at all as an adolescent. No, no, not at all. Maybe I became aware, like, at Passovers, the way the families sat together, you know, the French families sat together and the German families sat together and there were, like, rings of power, you know. It was the Germans who were closer to where the rabbi was, and then the French were a little further, and then the Eastern Europeans were in the further circle.

(You graduated from high school here. Was it automatic that you would go to college in the States?)

Absolutely. There was never any doubt about it. It was an American school, and your junior year you applied to different colleges, and wherever you got in—we had horrible SAT scores, all of us, really ghastly. I mean, it was—we were just not prepared for them, and so you went to the colleges where you got in. I think more than three-quarters of our graduating class went to college in the States.

(And you went where?)

I went to Dickinson in Pennsylvania.

(It’s a small town?)

Yeah. Carlyle, Pennsylvania.

(And how was that?)

Great. I’m a very adaptable person. I have absolutely no problem with new places, new faces, welcome at every time.

(Did they have any problems with you?)

No. I completely integrated into college life. I had no problems with it whatsoever. I became very active in theater from the very beginning, and that’s really where I decided that I wanted to do nothing but theater.

(In college?)

Yeah. Uh-huh.

(And you studied theater?)

Yeah. No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t. I studied art history and French literature. Those were my majors.

(At this point in time, did you ever feel any pressure from your father to come back and be in the business?)

(laughs) Daily! I mean, there was pressure. That’s why I was made. This is what I was born for! I mean, I was created because my father wanted a son to go on with his business. If my sister Hélène had been a boy, I wouldn’t have been born.

(So it never occurred to them to ask their daughters to be involved?)

Oh, no, no, no. Not only not asked them, but also forbade them if they wanted to, which was Hélène’s case.

(So did you make it clear early on? Was it this obvious thing that you would not—?)

To me it was obvious always, always.

(But he never really—did he ever really accept it?)

Oh, when he was about eighty years old I think he accepted it. I mean, but you know, people don’t understand things like that. Even today in the best cases, I pass for a idiot. You know, renounced a life of wealth and power in order to become an artist? People don’t understand why you would want to do that.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.