Jorge Weill Part III: Educational Differences

After high school, Jorge went to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and then proceeded to enter an MBA program at MIT. He was only 21 at the time and had already experienced quite a bit during his short life.
********************************

(Did you enjoy it MIT?)

That I must say it probably one of the times that I least enjoyed. It was just so work-oriented, and I was very young. I was one of the youngest ones in the class. I wasn’t 22 when I entered, and I feel I wasn’t mature enough. I still wanted to carouse around and gallivant in Boston and everybody else wanted to study, so I was a little bit out of step. I got back in very quickly.

(Did you go home quite often to visit?)

What I did for vacation, I used to go for Christmas and spring vacation, and then I used to go to Salvador for the summer, except for two summers when I worked. I worked in France, one time when I was in undergraduate school and one time between my first and second year of business school when I worked in Paris in a consulting firm. And I must say I lost contact with many of my friends from Salvador. Most of them did not go to high school in the States, and although we were friendly we were not as close as we used to be, especially the ones who were not Jewish. So I must say I lost a lot of contact with Salvador and my Salvadoran friends.

(And how was your relationship with your parents?)

My relationship with my parents was excellent. I always got along very well with my parents. I used to go on vacation with them. I must say I was never the rebellious type. When I was at school, the only way we communicated was by mail, so I used to write a letter to them every week, and they would write me once a week, each one of them individually. My father would write me these very long letters, about two pages typewritten. He would always bring up a subject and expand on it, weave a little bit of philosophy into it. So it was always very interesting to get his letters. I read the letters I wrote my parents years afterwards when I was in boarding school, and they weren’t very interesting.

(To them they were probably very interesting!)

To them they were interesting, and they were happy to get them. I think that during the four years I spent in boarding school I only got one phone call from my parents, and when I went to college I also only got one phone call in four years. People just didn’t call on the phone.

(When did you decide to come back to Salvador? When you graduated from MIT?)

Then I went to work in New York for two years. And my father told me I had to make a decision—my father was older. This was in 1974. He was 65 years old. He told me I had to make a decision whether I was going to stay in New York or come back to El Salvador. And after two years of being in New York, I think I was very happy to go back to Salvador. So I came back to Salvador. He was primarily in the textile wholesaling business. So I came to work in the wholesaling business, which I must say was a cultural shock coming from New York.

(You lived here beginning in—?)

I came back middle of 1974, and I was very happy because the first year I lived with my parents. And then my good friend Jean Paul Joseph [son of Soeurette and Andre] came back and we rented a house in Santa Tecla.

(You’re working here. How did you meet your wife?)

My father’s business partner, George Salomon, had a nephew who came to Salvador on vacation. We became friends when he was here. He was a very charming guy. He was from Strasbourg. And when I went to visit my mother’s aunt, who was like her mother, in Strasbourg, I went to say hello to him. He had just been recently married, and Anny, my wife, was his wife’s best friend. And by happenstance I met Anny and from the start we got along very well, and we saw each other on vacation during a couple of years.

(So you would go and visit? Did she ever come here?)

She came here before we got married.

(What did she think?)

Well, she liked it very much. She probably didn’t know what she was bargaining for, because just after she came back, the revolution started and the war started. As a matter of fact, the first day she came to Salvador, we went for dinner to my parents’ house which was about two blocks away from the YSU, the TV station. For the first time a bomb exploded and it was placed at the TV station. And we heard the bomb explode only two blocks away. All of a sudden the TV channel stopped transmitting and everybody was calling each other to see what had happened. So she got acquainted with Salvador in a very quick fashion.

(Was it important for you to marry a Jew?)

At the beginning it wasn’t, but in the end I think it was.

(When did you get married?)

We got married in 1979.

(She came back in 1979?)

Yes, she came back in 1979. As a matter of fact, we got married at the beginning of April, and we were in Strasbourg a couple days before our wedding when they told us that Ernesto Liebes, who had been kidnapped, had been killed. So we heard the news while we were still in Strasbourg. Towards the end of April we came back to Salvador, and at the beginning of May, the guerrilla took over the French embassy, and Anny’s friends who had never heard of Salvador, all of a sudden read on the front page: “French embassy taken hostage by the Salvadoran left.” And they kept those French diplomats hostage in the embassy for a couple weeks. So she discovered Salvador the hard way.

Transcription by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC.