Ricardo Rosenberg: On Becoming American

In this final installment, Ricardo remembers, amongst other events, the day he became an American citizen----and why.
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(After you’re married, you’re working for the IMF. You’re living here in Washington. How long do you stay in Washington?)

We stayed a little over two years. We were young and reckless in those days, so when our daughter Carin was born in July, we were already scheduled to go to Bolivia as soon as we could get ourselves together. We went to Bolivia in September of 1975, just about—I guess almost three years after arriving in Washington, but two and a half years after we got married. Carin was nine weeks old.

(You lived in La Paz?)

It was an adventure. It was going back in time a little bit. I sort of imagined that being in La Paz in 1975 was very similar to being in El Salvador forty or fifty years earlier, because things were a lot more primitive. You had to boil the water. There was no bottled water. Electricity went on and off. Water supply went on and off. I think electricity was not great. There were zero, none, supermarkets. We had one maid, and she went to the market once a week and she brought home a side of beef and somehow she was able to do the butcher work herself, to break up the side of beef into the different cuts of meat that would end up on the table. Everything was fresh. I mean, it was just like going back in time in every which way.

(Did you enjoy that change?)

Oh, I mean, I think we both were glad, both Nancy and I were glad, that if we were gonna go somewhere, that we would go to somewhere interesting, rather than going to another big city with a lot of traffic and not much to see. Bolivia had so much to see, in the area as well, in terms of the culture, and the surroundings were incredible. Nancy accused me of taking far too many pictures of the mountains. Being in the Andes was just incredible, the altitude, the sites around there, it was just remarkable. What a place!

(I actually have studied a little bit about the Jewish community in Bolivia. Did you contact them?)

Well, we were in touch—we had some contact with a few of them, and we had the impression that they also were like the community must have been in El Salvador forty years before. People dressed like the pictures that you might have in your mind about the way the Jews dressed when they were in the ‘30s and the ‘40s in Europe. We went to temple once or twice and it was sort of Orthodox, too. That’s about the only contact we had.

(Did you see a lot of similarities between the community in Bolivia and Salvador?)

I’m not sure. One thing that was different was that the handful that we met then, we got the impression that when the kids were born, the first language the kids learned was Yiddish, then German, and then Spanish. And I don’t think that was ever the case in Salvador. In Salvador, there was a lot of multilingual households. But Spanish was not relegated to a low place as it was in Bolivia at the time. And just as a sidelight, one of the interesting things that happened in Bolivia was that the there was an important Nazi there at the time, Barbie was his name, and it was an open secret. I mean, the government knew he was there. Everybody knew he was there. To the point that one of our Bolivian friends said that he was walking down the street with somebody from the US and he happened to see Barbie, and he said, “Hey, look, there’s Barbie.” And he got a phone call about two or three days later not ever to do that again, by probably Barbie’s henchmen. So that was Bolivia in the mid-‘70s.

But it was a fun time, and I was lucky. The IMF representative there had a lot of prestige, and it was almost an ambassadorial position. I was only twenty-nine when I went there. And because of the position of the IMF—not because of me—the IMF had all the key economic data that nobody else had because the country was not stable enough to have developed that kind of thing. So I met with the ambassadors a lot, because they were interested in hearing what we had to say, and routinely met with the attachés from the US, Germany, France, England and all the other countries that had economic interests there. About twice a year I had a one-on-one session with the President of Bolivia, and no other foreigner would have that. So it was a fun and challenging time in that sense, and also with none of the downside. Because luckily, we had just gotten the first oil crisis and Bolivia had a lot of oil and gas, so there was no need for IMF credit. I had a pretty easy time for that reason. Of course, there was hell to pay later on, because their policies were so poor that two or three years after I left they were in dismal shape.

Well, we did have contact with from Jews in Cochabamba and I think that we were a little surprised by the customs. I think they were Sephardic. When we arrived there, there were Egyptian Jews who had left in the ‘30s who had gone to Japan and to their good fortune, they had done some business with some Bolivians who didn’t pay. So they came to Bolivia to try to collect on their debts and that way avoided being in Japan during the war. They had a custom we had never seen before. When we got there for—I think we went for Rosh Hashanah—when they cut the challah, they threw the pieces of bread to everybody around the table, and our understanding was that that was a custom because you hand bread to a beggar, but to others, this is the way it’s distributed. Somehow, that stayed with me. So that was the other contact with the Jewish community down there.

(Your daughter Carin was born in 1975, July 12th?)

Exactly.

(And Adam was born—?)

May 10th, 1978. He was kind enough to wait an hour after my birthday, so we have back-to-back birthdays, and we both love it.

(It’s obvious that you’re very close to both of your children. How did/do they identify with that part of your identity? Do they enjoy it there? Do they feel like it’s a part of who they are?)

I think they enjoy knowing that I have that background. They’ve always been interested in it. I think Adam in particular likes that part of our heritage and has identified with it much more than Carin has. He just seems to be more drawn to it. I think he’s had better experiences just by luck. Carin spent a summer in Spain when she was fifteen and she spent junior semester abroad in Spain again, junior year in college. Adam spent the summer after his junior year in Chile and junior year, or junior semester abroad in Argentina. And Adam had a fantastic time, mostly due to luck, and with Carin, it was the opposite. So I think that probably had some influence.

The second thing is that Adam has a tremendous ear for languages, or almost anything else, to the point that he can imitate just about any accent out there. He’s got to be more comfortable with the language and I think has been more drawn to it.

(How does that make you feel as a parent? Is that an extra plus for you? Is that something you wanted for your children? Was it something that was just a nice surprise?)

Oh, certainly, that’s certainly an extra plus. And I think they consider it, too, a plus.

(Where does the name Carin—?)

“Carin,” with a “C.” Because she was named after Nancy’s mother Charlotte. Actually, her middle name had been Liebes, but I think with her married name she’s Carin Rosenberg Levine. And then Adam was Adam Eugene, still is. That was for my grandfather.

(Right. Of course. Now, you haven’t been to Salvador in a while, but you’ve visited and your sister lives there. Do you feel strong ties now to Salvador?)

No. I mean, I feel it’s part of my background, but I think since I left so early and I was never—I never really lived there as an adult. As time went on, when I was in graduate school, I would come down less and less because if I came down for two weeks, let’s say, my friends worked, so Monday through Friday I had absolutely nothing to do. I could play golf by myself or something like that, but my visits became shorter and shorter, and I’ve never actually lived there. I’ve never had my own place. I never had my own life. I never had a permanent job. So I became more and more distant from it. At the same time, my roots in the US became firmer and firmer, and I eventually became an American citizen.

Becoming an American citizen, I think, had a particular significance. The timing was unintended in the sense that I could not get US residence while I was at the IMF. So when I left the IMF, I became a resident. Then I had to wait—I couldn’t become a US citizen right away. I never was really thinking of it. But I think what really changed my mind was—or not changed my mind, what really accelerated the thought was that Nancy became involved with a gathering of Holocaust survivors that was pretty amazing. She was doing oral histories at the time, and she volunteered—this was before the Holocaust Museum was even an idea—no, it was an idea, but before it was in existence, and so she went down to the hotel where the conference was being held, and just by chance, she was interviewing a man who had the last name of Ain, which is not a common name, A-i-n. And Nancy said, “I grew up with somebody named Ain.” And this man, to his knowledge, had no family. So Nancy called me at the office so that she could get the—to get in touch with one of the Ains who was in town and she put them together, I think kind of reunited that family.

(So they were related?)

They were related, because they came from the same village in Russia, blah-blah-blah, the whole thing. And as a result of that participation, we went to the closing ceremonies of the conference. It really made an impression when—and it still sort of chokes me up—when the head of the convention spoke and told this story about how he had fought as a young man in the ghetto in Warsaw. So he said, spoke about how he fought in World War II, and then he said, “Never did I expect that I would be introducing the President of the US.” Reagan was the invited speaker, and Reagan spoke. That really moved me. It made me put together being Jewish and how welcoming the US was, and that was a very powerful impression it made on me. I think by then I was into probably the third or fourth year. So, I decided that I wanted to become a US citizen. Something funny happened. I went to take my test. You have to study all these things I’m sure that you have to study, too, questions about the Constitution, you have to name all your government officials, who was Governor, who was Senator. Congressmen and all that.

So I went ahead and had my test, and typically, at least then, it took, I don’t know, a month, two months, three months, something like that, to get your citizenship papers. And they said—this was in Baltimore—“You can either go to Rockville (near our home) and get your papers in two months or three months or whatever, or actually on Sunday, we’re having an ‘I-Am-an-American’ Day. There will be parades and speeches and all kinds of things. We’re also going to swear in about twenty or thirty people. Do you want to be part of that group?” And I said, “Sure!” So that’s what we did. We went to Baltimore and there was a handful of us who were sworn in and there were parades and all kinds of nice things.

One of the things that really made an impression on me was how moved people get to hear that, to hear—people gave me gifts. At work they had something with cakes and other people gave me mugs with something on it, all I think because they remembered their relatives, ancestors, who had become Americans. I didn’t expect that.

(Did you have to renounce your Salvadoran citizenship?)

No.

(Do you still have a Salvadoran passport?)

Yeah.

(So you still have—you do have a foot, sort of, not a foot, but you have that piece, still.)

Yeah. It’s still part of me.

(Do you feel Salvadoran?)

I feel more American.

(Why is that?)

The US is a very welcoming country. Its lifeblood has always been people from other parts of the world, and I think I’ve felt that, felt welcome here in just about every sense of the word. I think there was more in common that I felt with the values and the direction of the country and more—you know, I like the feeling of sort of common feelings and values at a certain level with the rest of the population. Not that I have the same values of each and every segment of the population, but I feel that I have—I feel more in common with what this country is about than in Salvador, for a number of reasons. Partly is, I think the Jewish community here is much larger and much more of a factor than it is in Salvador in terms of the community at large. But also, you are invited to feel as an American almost immediately, and I don’t think that’s the case in Salvador. I think that other people, my own friends, don’t always feel the way I do, but I think with a name like Rosenberg, there would always be a feeling that I’m not entirely Salvadoran, that I’m somewhat foreign. That doesn’t happen here.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.