Ruben Perlmutter
Ruben Perlmutter's family roots stretch across Eastern Europe. His father's family came from Galicia, then the Austrian part of partitioned Poland and now western Ukraine, near Tarnopol, while his mother's family were Lithuanian Jews from areas near Bialystok and what is now Belarus. His father was born in Lodz and survived the Holocaust, enduring labor camps and hiding in the forests near Scala with his own father until Russian partisans liberated the area in 1944. His grandmother was killed at Belzec. His maternal grandparents fled to Cuba in the 1920s, escaping the Polish draft and the limits of shtetl life, and built textile businesses in Havana. His parents met at the University of Havana, married in 1957, and Ruben was born in 1958.
After Castro came to power and the family's businesses were nationalized, Ruben's father, who had already survived both Hitler and Stalin, spoke out and was warned to stay silent. The family left Cuba in October 1960 with 21 suitcases and a tricycle, settling first in Miami. His father found work at Rheingold Breweries, contributing to research that later became Miller Lite, and the family moved to Brooklyn and then Queens. His mother, who held a doctorate and had been the reportedly first Jewish faculty member at the University of Havana, gave up her academic career to raise her children. Ruben grew up in Jewish neighborhoods, attended public school and Talmud Torah, and became a junior congregation cantor at age nine.
Ruben attended Harvard College and Harvard Law School, spending twenty years serving as a high holiday cantor in Boston. He became a corporate lawyer, worked in New York and Philadelphia, and joined Bell Atlantic, later serving as general counsel for a cellular company in Mexico City, where his daughter was born. He met his wife Lauren, a Dallas native, through Israeli folk dancing. The family settled in Dallas in 2001, enrolling their children in Jewish day school and joining a synagogue where Ruben has led high holiday services for around fifteen years. He returned to Cuba in 2015 to trace his family's history, and treasures Cuban culture, food, and music while passing on the value of perseverance he learned from his parents.
Full Transcript
all right well today is thursday december 31st 2020. and i am cur my name is carl pisac i am interviewing reuben perlmutter for the one story at a time project viva shalom celebrating latin american jews in dallas good afternoon reuben how are you i'm doing well good afternoon to you and uh happy glacier um thanks for thanks for being on board um we're just gonna go through a couple categories to understand your your family history and for you to provide us with any any great memories you have and stories that you'd like to share and first off uh i'd like to ask uh what is the the origin of your of your surname if
we can start off with that uh the origin of the surname is uh it's from galicia which was the uh austrian section of poland when uh poland was partitioned a few times in the uh at the end of the 18th century uh it was partitioned amongst russia prussia and the habsburg empire and my father's family was in the austrian part so the surnames were dramatic and now let take us back for a second and tell us where your grandparents um are from okay um they're from three different regions my um father's family is from well you know galicia what was uh then eastern poland what
is now western ukraine um where they you were beginning from around uh from the late 18th century you know our family tree goes back as far as 1800 it was that which we know of um it's from an area you know 40 50 kilometers south of uh tarnipol uh so it's the tarnipol oblast if you will in ukraine um my father was born in scala excuse me he wasn't born his his father was born in scarlet poland and my grandmother uh was born you know maybe 15 miles southwest the name of the schwedel escapes me but it was it was nearby and as it turns
out she was my grandfather's cousin so um not uncommon not uncommon in the old country but my wife is horrified what can i say and so uh my grandfather's the promoter my uh grandmother was uh you know the father's surname was mexius um uh but uh given that jews often didn't have uh um civil marriages you know their last names were often the mother's last name which was friedman so uh regina uh friedman mezius and the jacob junckel pro mutter uh those were my grandparents uh on my father's side on my mother's side my grandfather uh betzawell um farber was born in uh dubrova of
the alice a town about 30 40 miles north east of bialystok poland and about 15 miles west of grodno which at that time was you know it was it was polish but uh um it uh uh it is now in belarus excuse me um rodno is now in belarus but uh del bravo bialystok is about 10 west of the belarus border um and uh my grandmother was born uh it when what is now uh belarus but poland uh in a town called davin which is uh right on the ukrainian border but uh there was you know the great fire of 1909 or 1910 and as
a result they the whole family moved to kobrini uh kobrin which is a town near bresch in uh now in belarus then in poland so uh they lived about uh that was 150 kilometers away from the roma so um my maternal grandparents did not know each other until they got to cuba so and what languages did they speak and how was that when they transitioned they spoke uh yiddish and of course you know given given the area they they you know my father's um parents also spoke a little bit of german and uh ukrainian so just to be clear my mother's parents were what's called
lit bucks they were lithuanian jews uh as opposed to the galiciano jews uh the more germanic austrian hungarian jews from the region where my father was um so but the the primary language in the house was yiddish got it um all right uh so then you said then they moved and they met in cuba you said so um i'll give you the the story of how the the multiple parts of the family got to uh on my mother's side my grandfather was born i guess in 1905 in 1923 he turned 18 he was going to be drafted into the polish army which was not a
good thing um as conditions were harsh so he fled the country and because of us you know he had he had a brother in montreal he had a brother in in new york because of uh restrictive immigration laws in the u.s he came to the u.s he couldn't stay so he went to cuba and there you know he developed you know the family business back in del bravo was uh was textiles they made rugs so he started uh textile business in in cuba uh my grandmother came to cuba in 1928 or so and that's because she couldn't stay in shuttle life um she didn't like
the fact that her education had to be stopped uh in fifth sixth grade after elementary school uh she wanted more she wanted more than she had a life she did not want the uh an arranged marriage so she left with the first cousin um you know to where other family members were as i said i knew there was going to be a call and she left with a cousin to where other family was and and and went to cure because she had a whole bunch of cousins who had ended up in cuba so she ended up i'm just gonna have to let this ring my
grandparents uh met in cuba uh they were married in 1929 1930 my mother was born in 1931 the first of three children so um that's that's how that family that my my mother's side of the family got to uh um you know to cuba unfortunately there weren't that many who who came um because of the depression in the 30s um they told other family members you know don't come the situation economically is not good in cuba um you know it's it's you know better for you to to stay where you are you have businesses there you can sustain yourselves obviously have they known that the
holocaust was coming they would have said something different but they didn't uh they did not anticipate what was coming and so um the bulk of the family um was was was killed um on my maternal grandfather's side there were seven brothers and sisters uh four were killed you know one one had been come to montreal before my grandfather went to cuba another came to new york but the other four were killed in the holocaust on my grandmother's side um two of her siblings uh followed her to cuba um and uh but several other siblings passed away in in the holocaust and my understanding is that
uh they all uh were aggregated in the garden of ghetto uh and uh um were were liquidated uh were killed there um on my father's side um you know again my father actually was in europe uh during during the holocaust during world war ii uh he was born in lodge uh western poland um come september 1 1939 in the german invasion uh they fled to scala to the shtetl my grandfather had the textile business uh but since my grandmother hated shettle life they settled in the city lodge was the second largest he is and still is the the second or third largest city in poland
after warsaw i don't know whether krakow was was larger than than it is now um um and they lived there and my grandfather spent two weeks in the business in the straddle of scotland and two weeks in in in launch come the nazi invasion they went to they went to scallock even though stalin took that part of of of poland as part of the molokai ribbon crop accords that basically created two years of peace on the eastern front to allow the russians to build up uh their army for the inevitable war and allow the nazis to focus on the west um so uh so they
spent time enlarged then in scallop um and then you know once uh the two-year treaty expired the nazis invaded they quickly uh came into um uh into uh scarlett and uh my grandmother was captured in in the first action of the shadow and was killed in beltsets um the belt's its uh death cam uh november 9th 1941 was it um it made in 1942 i forget the exact year i have to look it up um and uh my father and his father uh work in the labor camps um in particular too one called flubachek which was five ten kilometers north of tarnipol and then scala
itself the shuttle that they were in also had a labor camp and they spent the majority of time in that labor camp after family members who lived in tarnipol bought them out of lubachik which had um more the conditions were worse then the final action to liquidate the scala ghetto um you know took place i believe sometime in 1943 and um somehow my uh grandfather and father got advanced warning and they went into the forests surrounding uh scala and they hid there for you know nine months including through a winter um until russian partisans liberated scotland in 1944 um and so um this was a
ping-pong they went from hitler to stalin back to hitler back to stalin um and in time once the war ended they left scala back to poland they were intending to go back to lodge but one of their neighbors one of their jewish neighbors was killed trying to take back their their house their property from uh the non-jews who you know basically squatted in that property and so they were told not to so instead they stayed in job gengliw in in the southern uh part of poland my father graduated from high school there and then when the stalinists took over they left um uh they they
fled poland just as the border was closing and they you know train bust to paris from paris to london from london to new york where one of my grandfather's uh paternal grandfather's brothers lived we were they were in new york for six weeks and then went to cuba again immigration restrictions were not favorable to jews but they were able to go to cuba that was 1947 and they settled there my father had to repeat a couple of years of high school because he didn't have his diplomas and he also i guess had to learn spanish um um you know which he did so he had
to repeat some years of high um you know he went to the university of havana where he met my mother who was uh a student there as well they were they were the same age so you know they were in the same social group um they met they were married uh in 1957 and i was born in cuba in 1958. um did your grandfather also come to cuba on your dad's side yes my grandmother was killed at felt since my grandfather survived and was with my father you know in the uh in the labor camps in the ghettos um in uh in the forest and ultimately as they walked across um uh traveled across europe to escape uh ultimately um both grandparents were in the shemata business and textiles my maternal grandparents had a factory uh in marina which was a western suburb of havana and they made uh work pants dungarees under the brand names urakan and kaiman hurricane and cayman my paternal grandfather also was in
the textile business um and so when my parents got married they thought it was uh you know combining businesses and that just wasn't the case neither i mean both both you know we're capable of running the businesses my my mother has a keen sense of business my father studied engineering and knew how to cut cut cut cloth but uh both both chose academic uh careers in in instead um now can you tell us about how they were involved or what their jewish life was in cuba sure um neither was particularly religious uh my father a bit more so than my mother but you know that
that was that was your community in in many ways it was it it was like israel i mean it in the sense that in israel you don't have to go be religious to show that you're jew that you're jewish everybody there is jewish well in their circle of friends and their circle of business everyone you know was was was jewish but you know my grandfather belonged to the two schools there was a steeple in mariana that that they were members of and then in the early 50s 1953 1954 well let's take a step back in the jewish community in havana obviously you had your sephardic
community and your ashkenazi community they had separate institutions separate schools separate schools um the jews initially settled in old havana and then you know with the the that was the initial generation and as they to the extent they got more affluent they spread largely westward uh and also southward um and uh you know the initial synagogues at least the ashkenazi synagogues were were built in the first decade of the the 20th century there was one and then as usual there was some sort of disagreement so they split into two and they were actually next door to each other which is you know so typical um
and then in the 1950s as the community moving westward um the ashkenazi but both the sephardic and the ashkenazi communities opened up uh new complexes in what was called verado el verado which was a relatively affluent suburb about uh five kilometers west of of old havana and the ashkenazi synagogue was called the nickname was el patronato and it's a large complex that still exists today it was a synagogue a function hall and then there were administrative offices and classes the administrative offices and classes have since been sold uh sold to the human government which opened the berthold brett theater there they named the theater after
a jewish person uh after they essentially expropriated the um but it was a large complex open in the late 50s then of course the orthodox community also opened up a new shul in old havana um and uh and that opened you know right when castro came into power um so um and in any event my my maternal grandparents were members of both steeple and marina and and patronato my father's uh my father and his father lived walking distance from the patronage and were members of the patriarcha when it opened i would suspect that they were you know members of one of the ashkenazi schools in
old before they they opened the new branch but it's it's not something that i know of you know that they were members of the patronage that's where my parents got married in 1957. um and um with over 500 people um because you couldn't just invite family you had to invite all the business relations people you did business with and so they were they were big affairs um so um i guess what am i what what am i missing out uh oh yeah um and so um do you still have a family there i do not have family there there are people that you know know my family you know uh you know let's take a step backwards they're you know anywhere from 15 to 25 000 jews most of them in in havana um there's also a significant uh
community in santiago in the eastern part of the country and jews you know here and there um you know doing commercial activities around the country um you know the jewish community you know had their own schools had had you know their own infrastructure um so the jewish the jewish day school um which was patterned on on on a school in mexico city which was called the yiddish uh where you know they taught hebrew and spanish they put yiddish in spanish uh as as languages uh they opened one up in havana in old havana and in the 1950s it moved to a southern uh suburb now
just a southern neighborhood called santos juarez um and uh my mother was a student there and ultimately became a teacher there before moving on to a public high school she was a teacher of biology at the institute my mother had a doctorate she had a doctorate in natural sciences from the university of she graduated i guess in 1953 then took a year of graduate studies in in the university of miami um and then sort of returned i think my mother would have preferred staying and getting us phd on top of her human doctorate um but you know the pressures you know women don't have careers
they should get married and so i think my mother succumbed to that pressure and came back to cuba and um started dating we met my father and and ultimately got married uh but in cuba she had a career and ultimately she became a professor of uh comparative anatomy at the university of havana she was the uh reportedly uh the first jewish faculty member at the university of havana uh and she was able to obtain that position because of castro in order to get a position at the university uh during batista um and his predecessors you had to know someone it's there was a tremendous amount
of corruption not that pastor wasn't corrupt because communist party members got got favoritism but national exams and uh my mother scored first but after two communist party members she got the third slot at the university what i guess what i'm saying was it it was so much corruption that the foremost uh expert in the spanish language in could not get a position at a university he was not jewish he taught at the same high school as as as my mother um and became friends and i remember seeing him on on every time we we went to miami or we'll get to that aspect of of
of our lives um because he didn't know one and he didn't even didn't know anyone and he didn't pay a bribe right so in that sense meritocracy was not high in q and that was something that my mother hated but nonetheless she got a position with casper but that wasn't going to last long um on the other hand my father um you know he graduated with with an engineering degree but my had to buy him a a position he didn't get a job he ultimately got a job at goodyear um in in matanzas a town about you know 900 kilometers east of of uh havana
uh because my grandfather paid for him to get the job it wasn't that he wasn't qualified it's you have to know someone that everything was was was corrupt um and um so um you know so you know after then this happened after i was born after i was born um you know uh we went to to to matanzas then we came back to havana um and um um and then how did we get to the united states so we're gonna be right before we get to the u.s um uh this was super interesting to hear uh you know your take on how uh the world
event of castro taking over cuba and you know your parents and in a little bit of you having to go through that well let me put it this way the castro revolution had a tremendous amount of popular support because he wasn't uh overtly communist right there was a significant dissatisfaction with the corruption of the batista regime so people wanted a change so when castro came and and and his victory was miraculous because you're talking about 600 fighters this is how corrupt batista thousands of soldiers and they couldn't defeat 600 gorillas because because of the corruption lack of discipline and lack of willingness to sacrifice it
was it was there's no no way the castro should have won but he did um just because of the weakness and corruption of the victims division so it was it was it was popular uh but then uh increasingly it became clear that uh castro was being pushed left whether it was by che guevara or others i mean he was a socialist he was in the 50s he was arrested he was a member of the orthodox party which was socialist party but he wasn't big c communist yet but clearly he was moving in that direction and the american reaction uh to to castro pushed him further
to the soviet camp because they were his supporters uh they they supported castro as the us was trying to undermine him um and so once it became increasingly clear that um um you know that that you know this was this was going to be a a leftist communist regime that were taking away they were nationalizing businesses they were suppressing freedoms now my father had been through that he survived hitler twice he survived stalin twice and basically he said forget meanwhile my paternal grandfather thought that um the united states isn't going to allow this so he continued to build his business my maternal grandparents started diversifying
and they had friends in the united states who came and they took out casino winnings out of the country and uh stashed it in miami so ultimately uh um at the end of 1960 when we left cuba uh my maternal grandparents had some money to restart whereas my father's father had nothing but then again my father's father had had leukemia for 10 years and his health didn't allow him to restart anyway but you know so so our our at least my mother's side of the family started thinking about the future um you know their factory was nationalized their pan factory was nationalized they had real
estate that was was was um ultimately they left in um november december of uh 1960 separately my grandmother first my grandfather was detained for a while and came came later we left in october beforehand why did we leave my father doesn't repress his his speech believes in free speech and he was criticizing the castro government because he said i've been i i know what communism is i'm you know i went to uh you know to school in a stalinist country uh uh or a country under stalinist control i know what it is um this is not good and uh you know the block mayors if
you will members of the communist party who lived on the block went to him and said either you keep quiet uh or we're going to send you to cut sugar cane in the countryside my father left the next day we left 10 days afterwards with 21 suitcases in my tricycle on tourist visas to the united states uh and uh we were met not only by my father who had left 10 days earlier who had arrived 10 days earlier but a whole crew of my mother's classmates from um from the university of miami uh met us at the airport with several cars into which we loaded
our 21 suitcases and tricycles um so that's that's how we got to the united states an interesting interesting site one of my mother's classmates well not a classmate she was actually a younger um uh freshman or sophomore at the university of miami at the at the time um um that my mother was there and we became uh very good friends where my mother became very good friends with her was the mother of ron dermer the israeli ambassador to the united states who i remember in diapers because again we used to see um you know jaffa was the mother who was the classmate of my mother
we saw them every uh every year that we went to miami to visit my grandparents she married jay dermer who became mayor of miami beach and her one of her other one of her other sons became mayor of miami beach as well in the 90s and of course uh ron dermer is the ambassador to the us and it has long been an advisor to netanyahu um so um in 1960 we moved to miami in october of 1960. okay how was that transition on your parents and grandpa well you know the transition for the united states was very difficult on my mother and and and forever impacted her because my grandfather became a relatively uh affluent person and the lifestyle that my mother led was very comfortable you know cars chauffeurs maids cooks it was a very comfortable life she had to give it up and she she you know she knew she had to give it up but i don't think she ever fully recovered uh from it it's you know before you didn't have to worry about making ends meet and then for the first
you know 10 15 years until you know my father was more established you know it's you have to count count campaigns so um you know that that loss of wealth i think impacted um my mother for my father um first of all you have to put it in perspective he survived the holocaust when he went to cuba for him cuba was paradise not only did he not have to go and spend winters in the eastern polish now ukrainian forests freezing his ass off but you know there was food everywhere he wasn't starving there were food stalls everywhere he could have you know for him cuba
was paradise there was food there was warmth and no one was trying to kill him until castro came and not that they would have killed him but they might have jailed um so what for my father cure was paradise from my mother who is an intellectual and who firmly believes in meritocracy she was on the one hand very happy to leave cure because she couldn't stand the corruption and the lack of meritocracy that that that infected cuba so she always used to say i thank castro every day for allowing me to come to the united states but the flip side of that was i don't
think she ever recovered from from the loss of family wealth so um and now are how many siblings do you have were you the only uh no i have a sister i was the only one born in cuba i was born in 1958 okay um and i you know i left when i was two and a half right and again we lived in mariana and in matanzas in marina we literally lit the block from from my they had a nice house which is now divided into two and some general from the cuban army occupies most of it uh and my parents uh and i had
uh occupied an apartment uh um just a a block away and we live two blocks away from the famous tropicana nightclub excuse me all right um again i apologize that's going to happen very good time um so uh so i was born in cuba my sister was born in 1963 in in in queens uh you know i think my parents did want to have a child earlier but i think the stress of moving from cuba impacted my mother physically and that was not that was not possible how did how did they get to queens all right so [Music] as usual the first stop for you
know cuban jews is this is miami miami beach for six months while my father was looking for a job um and um it was an extensive search and he finally found a job at wrangled breweries and he was fortunate that the head of of research and development was a jewish engineer dr joseph awaities who has a certain amount of fame in the brewery business for reasons i will will tell and he took a liking to my father and and hired my father um because my father's engineering background was sugar engineering which was was was important in cuba and that sort of fit the the brewing
business relatively well and my father worked at wrangle for seven years from 1961 to 1968 and what dr awadis is known for and what rangold is known for is developing the first uh available light beer it destroyed wrangle because america was not in its diet phase and the idea of light beers were not popular until the early 70s so ranco went down the tank but the the the brand was gavilanders sold the formula for babblingers to meister brow which then sold the formula to miller brewing company and what my father worked on is now miller lite so um was it all in in queens it
wasn't brooklyn it was in brooklyn but black wasn't in uh uh in in in brooklyn along with several other breweries it was near the shaffer brewery plant all these brands that no longer exist as uh you know miller and budweiser have uh eaten up the market uh but uh i somebody may still have a license and still brew wrangled from time to time but uh how is that move on your mom it was it was a move i mean it's it was you know we moved in in 1961 my mother made a conscious decision not to continue her career and i think that was tough
on her um and as a result she focused on you know educating and raising of raising the kids so you know between the frustration of having to give up a career and not having uh the financial affluence that the family had in cuba the whole transition to the united was tough but it was never something that i don't think my mother ever fully um recovered reconciled with so um so i think there was some sadness some frustration and but you know hey from my father's perspective i'm in the united states i'm not being chased by nazis or communists i have a decent job you know
my father in an accent i think was a in that sense was it was a satisficer because of the holocaust there were certain other things that that were part of his psyche like you had to finish everything on your plate uh because he was starving in the forest children were starving in the opera and also things couldn't break if the car was dinged it was the end of the world again because five times he had to give up everything when he left lunch then when scarlett was liquidated then when he left wheat said uh and then when he left havana and it's it's you know
the the the notion of permanence uh you know became important for him in terms of tangible things right um so um so my father was was fine in in that sense although this is a non-sequitur he did not speak about his holocaust experiences until about the 90s it it took him it took him almost 50 years it took him 45 years uh in order to begin you know dealing with it um and uh in in queens he had you know one of the things that i think made the transition smoother in queens was that he had two first cousins living nearby right one he had
a good relationship with um and uh uh and and what the this was a cousin who live who was from carnival lived in tarnapole and um basically helped provide food when he was at blue butcher and also helped pay money to get him and my grandfather out of who butchered and back to to scholar so you know the close relationship they had done stuff for him uh uh during the war there was another first cousin where the relationship was not as good but my mother sort of bridged the gap basically saying you got to forgive what people did when they were young these were cousins
who when each time the germans had you know a sweep to sweep up jews and send them to belzet's to die um they tried to keep my my father and grandfather out of their hiding place because it was crowded ultimately my grandfather and father forced their way in but it wasn't until my grandfather my grandfather died finally leukemia at the end of 1963 and i don't think that the we socialized with them until after that i think my grandfather um never gave up the grudge he was angry remained angry till his dying day whereas then my mother softened my father and said you don't have
much family you lost most of your family in the holocaust this is the first cousin you know have a relationship with them and we did so but but having family in queens helped soften the blow um and again my father he was happy to have a job no one was trying to kill him so he was a satisficer in that way so it was fine for me i had transitional issues um identification you know it's it's one of the things that happened my maternal grandparents they took money out of cuba as i said and my grandfather worked at a wholesale retail store for a few
months and then bought bought the bought the store so he had a wholesale retail store in miami for 14 years until he died and uh um and so he had a thriving small business this is on your dad's side that's my maternal grandparents my father's grandfather had leukemia lived with us he did not reopen his business since he lost everything because he thought the u.s was never going to allow a communist to govern cuba and so he did not begin to divest his business he continued to reinvest in his business and he lost everything my grandfather took out um some money uh but again lost
not only his business but lost all the real estate that he had bought in havana or i should say my grandmother diversified and bought real estate unfortunately she didn't diversify geographically and she bought in havana instead of miami um so uh uh and so my grandfather had a wholesale retail store uh in in in miami and we used to go there uh every summer if not during winter break before i went to school and you know used to spend the summers in miami working at my grandparents store going to camp um and just basically socializing with cuban jews family and friends who were in the
miami area there weren't that many cuban jews in new york but there were you know classmates of my mother in school so we also had that social aspect um and you know one person who used to work for our family uh emigrated to new york and the you know so there was a group of cuban family there was a group of cubans uh and so in that sense the transition was a bit smoother uh for me um the identity issues were uh we used to go to the lower east side to buy merchandise my grandfather's i used to go with my my mother we lived
at that time initially we lived in brooklyn before going to queens and we used to take the uh j train uh into uh into manhattan and of course it uh crossed williamsburg and so you know the story is too young to remember but everybody tells me about it you know the hasidim you know get into the train and i go crazy mama espivel castro because they had the beer i also thought that everyone who spoke spanish was jewish so that it took a while to to disabuse me um one other aspect sort of a funny story when we emigrated uh as as uh my my
nanny in in cuba was a fidelista appeal supporter and so she's the you know have the radio playing his speeches or to the extent there was you know he was on tv you had the tv on with the speeches so when i got to miami airport at immigration apparently i started chanting which was you know cuba yes yank the americans know which was sort of the chant of of of finalists in in cula from the airport so you know there was an adjustment for me um and also an adjustment that you know it's i my mother tried to take the place of the nanny so
uh you know i didn't necessarily know how to do things for myself until kindergarten where where i was forced to uh you know to start learning how to do things you know for myself like tying my shoes and you know buttoning my pants and you know i quickly got the hang of it but uh you know that those were the adjustments sort of the identity because of the spanish language uh being jewish and and hispanic at the same time and you know sort of the transition from a family of affluence with the people who took care of you to uh you know being just the
you know middle class and you know having to having to support yourself and do things yourself so um next question sorry this is super interesting really um and and i forgot to ask did your parents uh have the opportunity to learn english before they came to america well my mother yes because hey she went to graduate school university of miami not only did you study english in school in cuba but she had a year in the united states where where she learned english my father you know being in poland which was always being conquered at school you know not only did he speak leadership you
know yiddish's as as the common language of the home but in school he learned polish and german and russian and then when he went to the you know the ukrainian um and uh um and then in cuba he learned spanish and then and in school there you learn english as well so he spoke multiple languages in our family initially spanish was the language of the home yiddish was the secret language when my parents had to tell secrets and ultimately a transition to english by the time i was five or six i could understand spanish but i really wasn't speaking it as much um but i
went to miami all the time and i spoke to my grandparents in spanish so and spoke to them on the phone in spanish so i was always speaking spanish but my uh verbal spanish was deteriorating with time so did you grow up how did you grow up jewish-wise well i'd like to say we i come from a long line of agnostics um culturally uh you know with a strong cultural and ritualistic affinity to judaism um you know my father's father was not particularly observant my father wasn't particularly observant you know my mother's parents my mother weren't particularly observant but hey they spoke b you know
in new york i guess you'd call us 11 day jews because come passover we had the two sets of different dishes yeah we had you know we didn't keep kosher normally but on passover yeah everything was clean sanitized and we had a separate uh felicia uh pacifica set of dishes pots pans cutlery and the milk at set um and so i would say from a cultural standpoint we were very jewish from a religious not so much but of course you know i went to public school and then i went four days a week to what they call talmud torah we were conservative jews um and
um you know i went four days a week um you know through sixth grade um where you know i thought what we learned about jewish history was good what we learned about jewish ritual was good um i thought that the teaching of hebrew language was was awful um what i learned how to speed read hebrew but the one thing that i did learn um was you know how to govern and that was you know that let's face it the you know my my mother and father both believed in high academic achievement and if there was a ward if there was an award to win you
go out for the award i found out after the first year you can get an award if you go to synagogue so i started going to synagogue every and you know my father was a singer and his mother was a singer um and i had the ability to sing so i became a hasan in junior congregation beginning at age nine uh and that has carried on because today you know i have been a high holiday canter since i was 19 years old so i'm 62 now so that's 43 44 years i started in 1977 at the high holiday canter um at the conservative service at
harvard um and i uh and then i was asked um by the reform uh tehila to you know rather than doing just the torah service during the high holidays for the conservative service i could be the the principal cousin at the reform service and so i did that for uh 18 years uh while doing the second day of rosh hashanah at the conservative service um and uh there for a few more years um and i so i was at harvard for a total of 20 years then we moved to mexico later in the story and i was a housing there for one year until they
switched rabbis and that rabbi wanted to do everything and then i came to dallas in 2001 and within a few years um i started i was i became the musa uh and uh called nidre like nitrate for congregation on shaytora and i've done that the last 15 years i guess so is that what brought you to dallas no what brought me to dallas was sort of my job my job and my wife and so yeah so how long were you in new york you said so i was in new york on and off for 30 33 years okay uh with seven years elsewhere in college
so i grew up uh you know we were in brooklyn you know two two blocks from from from queens then there was more family my my my mother had an uncle who lived a few miles away from us um um and then we moved into a neighborhood called kew garden hills which is a very orthodox neighborhood but then was you know 80 the conservative jewish 10 orthodox 10 other so having a jewish identity wasn't a problem because pretty much everybody there was jewish went to school and because the teachers the teachers were so heavily jewish and they controlled the teachers union you had you know
uh pesach such as the high holidays all off so it's very easy to to to be able to to feel jewish holidays and participate in in synagogue and ritual life uh you know so we were there and my father worked in in in wrangled until 1968 then he switched to a job in stanford connecticut but he was going against the traffic so it was an easy commute uh and then in in you know 1974 i guess he started a new job in wayne new jersey at gaf and he was going with the traffic but because i was finishing up my senior year in high school
you know he stuck it out to that year before they moved to jersey i went on to uh to college in in boston um i went to harvard college and worked for two years and went to harvard law school so i spent seven years in boston and came back to new york and worked in new york law firms for eight years um and um then in 1990 oh uh how i met my wife but in 1993 uh i got a job in bell atlantic um in their legal department and they were headquartered in philadelphia in those days they're now verizon and the reason that i
was hired as they were looking for a spanish speaking lawyer because they were about to purchase cellular property in new mexico um and so they needed someone who spoke that ended up being me um but you know i met my wife three years before my wife is a dallas native uh but she was working in washington dc my firm um um that i was working for uh collapsed after well their business suffered significantly um after the 1987 market crash so they sent me to their dc office to to do government contracts work which is not what i was trained to do or was interested in
doing but um um because there was no real business i was able to to to do more social things and one of the things that i did was israeli folk dancing first initially at uh at the 92nd street y and at columbia university in new york and um then when i was sent to washington dc i continued to do that in dc and met my wife israeli folk dancing which is apparently the the way my family found finds uh spouses because my sister met her husband um at israeli folk dancing as well um so i met my wife in washington dc in 1989 and sort
of i was about to get a new job but i postponed it until i was certain that uh you know i wanted to continue um with the relationship and that began a long period of commuting uh you know sort of we commuted between new york and washington dc um you know we we got married in 1990 um in dc i couldn't find it here in dallas at sheriff israel and then i found a job in philadelphia there were no i'm a corporate lawyer there were no real corporate jobs in dc at the time you know corporations headquarters didn't move to dc in the late 80s
early 90s uh in in the in the number that have subsequently moved there so right now it would be much easier for a corporate lawyer to find a job in d.c but back then it wasn't but i was able to find uh the job at bel atlantic uh in philadelphia which was at least halfway there and my wife was working for a government contractor uh whose office at least the office of that unit was just outside of philadelphia so philadelphia was a rational place to get together but we finally moved in together in 1995 uh just before our son was born and then as soon
as that happened i started going to mexico a lot more often um as that investment was uh difficult and ultimately the atlantic took control of that um of that entity and i moved to mexico city to become a general counsel of that mexican cellular entity group would use the cell uh my family joined me there my son had been born your wife is she also uh spanish speaking or her background she should be what she so i'll i'll let me take a step back but my wife is uh lauren bush um her mother was carolyn lipschi her father sylvan bush silver bush was from philadelphia
karen lipschi was here in texas um and uh lauren was born in dallas uh went to green hill and then um uh i guess what is a wt white high so she's a longtime dallas native uh she was a member of temple shalom when she grew up um and uh so ultimately so all her roots her family were here in dallas so ultimately when i ended up professionally back in lauren said this is home this is where family is we're going to establish our roots here so um when verizon after mexico sent me to dallas because they're international by that time they had merged with
9x and merged with gte um gte took over control you know management of the uh international unit the international unit was based in las colinas uh and so i started working in la salinas uh you know for two years until it was obvious that i i i didn't feel that they knew what they were doing in latin america they didn't understand the culture and they weren't um they weren't receptive to cultural advice sort of uh you know the principal piece of advice being you know they're trying to run it like an american unit oh let's give the latin american entities autonomy if there's a problem
they'll tell us no that's not how it works you know there they want to be independent they don't want the gringos controlling them and they're going to try to hide stuff until the last possible moment you have to have not spies there but you have to have involvement you have to have engagement because the only way that you're going to find out when there's a problem is if you have established relationships if they trust you if they know you're there to help and not there to control uh and you know that's how i developed that you know my relationships in mexico and you know was
there in mexico for for four and a half years and i felt the same thing was needed in the other latin american countries but they didn't want to do it that way they believed in a hands-off approach and as a result they kept on you know ultimately they wrote off eight billion dollars uh and it was a it was it was a failure of it was a failure to understand latin american culture uh but i left i left verizon uh before that because i didn't want you know i didn't want to participate in selling my babies i felt you know i i just i was
angry uh that i felt they had mismanaged and i just you know i wanted to control where i was going next so um but you know the point is i got kicked upstairs from mexico once gte the gtu merger uh closed they didn't believe in expats i enjoyed my expat experience it was time to come to the united states anyway since my son was ready to go to kindergarten um how many years were you in mexico four and a half years my wife and son joined us um joined me about the eight months afterwards and our daughter was born in mexico so uh i you
know my wife lauren uh and and i have have two kids um uh my son was born in philadelphia he was in mexico from age one and a half age five uh you know he went to you know the yiddisher which was the model for my mother's for my mother's uh jewish day school in and he ultimately went to that that same that same um school uh because you know to me sending my children to jewish day school is very important um my daughter was too young she went to she would have had my stage she would have gone to the yiddish but uh um
you know we left when she was three years old um and so you know we came here and and enrolled our children in uh at that time chapter which ultimately became levine academy um and you know i had always been a proponent of public schools but coming to dallas how can i say this i won't be necessarily diplomatic jesus is really big in dallas and so i felt that it was very important to have a countervailing force and that countervailing force was was schecter i don't think schechter was a good choice particularly for my son uh you know nurturing environment the individual attention uh was
very good i think for my daughter you know ultimately uh the class became very small and she needed a more uh a larger group of people more social environment and so after fifth grade we moved here to public school but for both of them i think the schecter education was an important foundation uh for for their you know jewish life so um very happy we set them there that's good and then in what ways when you came back to dallas were you involved in in the community or the the involvement was was you know through synagogue um no how how how shall i say this
um we did not join sheriff for two reasons one they're an established institution right they a hazard or is outstanding i was not going to be a cousin there i i like being a high holiday fuzzer so um we we were looking for an alternative um and uh so that was the primary reason but also uh and and frankly you know anchay had had you know its congregation the demographics were were our demographics there were people our age a little younger with children with the classmates for my kids so that was the logical place to go for social reasons and so we joined there and
you know ultimately i you know started uh leading the high holiday services which as i said is something that i've done since 1977 so that's amazing uh is your is your son gonna follow suit as well neither of my children can sing i blame my wife's genetics but let's not discuss that any further no but my son has a very deep sense of of being jewish and he is in israel right now at hebrew you in a master's program studying what uh he's uh it's a masters in islamic uh in islamic studies is he he he was a russian studies major at vassar and then
he given that the middle east is such an important um area of u.s russian confrontation he thought it would be useful and i think it has been useful to uh understand um you know russia's involvement but from the other from both an arabic and israeli so that's what this this uh here in israel is giving him also he's you know you know he's he's been in israel before before this program he was uh at an old pond for five months in the books and um and he's continuing his hebrew studies and his uh um and studying arabic as well so uh my son's an academic
and you know he enjoys this but uh ultimately he'll go back to russian studies but he feels that this year has been very important in giving him context for the middle eastern aspects of russian foreign policy do you speak with them spanish do they know any spanish well i did when they were kids because they were fluent you know as fluent as a three-year-old and a five-year-old bee uh but but you know for my son once he came to dallas um they basically said well none of my friends speak spanish and he made this statement no one in dallas speaks spanish of course that's not
true i took him to stores and showed him that you know half the people here speak speak spanish uh and then you know one of the you know coincidences in life um at schachter they they hired a new nurse who had been uh you know a school nurse who had been a school nurse in mexico and she comes up to me one day and says do you have family in mexico and i said no but we were in mexico no but you know why um and she said well because i remember a sold in pearl mutter in mexico and i said well i don't have
family in mexico but that was probably us at the yiddish uh and she said yes well you you my son was your patient in that school too so it's it's it's a small world but that also didn't impress my son we tried all of the babysitters spoke spanish with all of the vhs's and the dvds that we had of disney movies where the spanish language version we tried to reinforce spanish we sent you know my son to spanish camp uh you to to to um uh you know savannah to minnesota and even to mexico for two weeks to try reinforce the spanish but it it
didn't take uh until later in high school he spent he spent uh a year of high school uh in latin america and uh so he reinforced his spanish then um and uh so so he's in israel and your daughter you said my daughter my daughter she misses mexico she has this this nostalgic sense of what mexico represented she misses her nannies she misses the drivers she misses her best friend monsie and has never forgiven me for moving moving from mexico so anytime i spoke spanish to her it made her cry because it made her remember of everything remember everything that she lost in he was
young no sort of i i was repeating the trauma that i supposedly experienced i was i was inflicting that on my children apparently so my daughter i think she understands spanish but is reluctant to speak it and she studied in high so and with coming from cuba um although you were you know little uh what i guess cuban jewish cultural traditions or you know family traditions have you maintained whether it was food holidays that you rooted from your family well you know it's it's the cultural influences the holidays are the holidays we celebrate them in in in you know ashkenazi style it's not as if
uh um you know we became sephardic and said let's have yellow rice on on passover um i've been thinking about it but that we haven't uh we haven't done that but um i i think that in the day-to-day food you know you see you see that whether it's you know we have more black beans than than the normal american family has because in cuba you have black beans and rice with everything so you know yeah we have um of course my favorite dessert which is not particular not readily available outside of miami is nathia which is a vanilla custard which is just outstanding it is
it's it's it's it's great uh but it's not rather readily available here but when i go to miami when i go to miami it's it's it's you know they're two soul foods you go to a deli and you have soul food and go to miami or cuban restaurant and my other soul so so um the culinary aspects of cuba are are are very important um musically um you know the influence of human music has always been that you know other people might have liked the rock and roll i always enjoyed rhythm more um yeah so while other people were listening to the beatles i was
listening to motown just because that was more uh rhythmically similar to to to to latin music um you know i'm sure i did israeli folk dancing because i enjoyed dancing because that part of of of the culture and i have you know taken lessons in in salsa dancing and i know how to cha chan rumba and the you know which are our human dances um yeah so i i think in that aspect um you brought the culture with you we brought the culture here i'm very proud that that that i'm hispanic um although i had to fight for that identity too i remember i remember
in high school you know people whose parents were born in cuba who were not jewish were basically you know first of all you're not a real you know i'm saying you're not a real cuban you can't be jewish and cuban okay well one is is is is religion um although being a jew is peoplehood it's it's mixed but you know you don't have to you know you can be a human without being catholic um but they said i wasn't a real cuban and i used to i used to not fight fair because what i responded was okay where were you born but the bronx where
was i going havana who's the cuban but again i'm revisiting the same trauma on my daughter who was born in mexico is mexican but if she meets uh uh you know the chicanos they're going or mexican-americans here in texas who are fourth generation you know texans they're gonna say you're not really mexican because you're jewish but she was born there and uh and of course my mother was born there as well so you know where we're you know we're now going on three generations of uh family members you know born in in latin american countries whose latin-ness is uh is in question so and have
you been to cuba ever since yeah we were we went uh for eight days i think at the end of 2015 was it um and just in the havana area we spent four days seeing the sites and then four days trying to track down where everybody lived and worked so you know and that included the hospital i was born my grandparents houses the schools that my mother went to and taught at um you know where my uncles uh lived and had their businesses um you know the jewish you know the synagogues uh the the jewish cemeteries that took four days and with some repetition because
it took you know i may not have been successful the first time but then you know i figured it out called one of my uncles here in the in the states and uh yeah uh made the necessary itinerary corrections to find the places that i couldn't find the first time so yes um i enjoyed it uh yeah cube is dilapidated um but uh so much potential the people i thought were were wonderful um you know you know they spirited not downtrodden by you know cubans like the clash they they complain and as long as they complain i think they're okay but everyone seemed to be
fed they were closed um you didn't have beggars on the street uh actually unfortunately the only begging that i experienced was in front was by by poor orthodox jews in front of the orthodox city um you know we did you know we did i did go to shabbos services at the paparazzo there which is sort of one of my bucket list things um but uh how can i say this i i wasn't particularly fond of the director of the synagogue who was a communist apparatchik and um you know i i understand the political position that she's in but uh and you know her basic role
her role is to try to raise as much money as she can from the joint distribution committee and visiting jews and try to stave off the government from taking any more of the synagogue so you know her focus is politics not uh you judaism sense that in speaking with her so um that's a dull dwarf who's uh may still be the head of the community but uh um has the nationalism like um has has it died down over there and in terms of like the corruption and it taken over businesses well no they nationalized everything under castro things were less corrupt but you have to
be a party member uh you didn't have any political freedom if you expressed dissent you were jailed and you know they've killed uh you know the 20 plus thousand people in the 50 years of the castro regime what um you know but what's left unsaid you know in batista's last seven years of power they killed 3 000 people the differences batista killed leftist students and castro tilled uh you know dissenters who were not necessarily right-wing but not not not on on the left um but in both cases there were murderous regimes but under batista you could right under castro it wasn't that you know that
wasn't that easy to leave after after march of 1961. although you know the people there in terms of the jewish community there um the jewish community was relatively relatively well treated why because there were so few of them the jews that remained were mostly poor or mostly for a pro-castro so they were small they weren't political opposition so pastor could treat them relatively well and demonstrate to the world see i'm a tolerant man look i allow the jewish community to survive um and yeah within you know within limits but um you know the the the membership of of at least the patronage is you know a lot of people are just rediscovering their jewish roots
and one of the reasons is because they can go there and have a good meal once or twice a week because their shop is dinner and shabbos lunch and in the country where the average worker makes you know two dollars um you know a a a a day excuse me um that's that's significant so you have you know you have a big crowd friday night and and saturday because people stay for the meal non-jews too no they have jewish roots telepathically they may not be jewish but they have one jewish parent and they're they deem themselves jewish or you know opportunistically decide you know i
want to have a chicken meal so i'm going to be jewish but you know they're they're learning they're relearning uh you know ritual and you know they they don't have a permanent rabbi uh they're at least the patriarchal there is a permanent rabbi in the orthodox uh ashkenazi um and but there is a sense of community and food attracts them and also the fact that that the paparazzo has the best pharmacy in all of cuba really because the joint distribution committee sends you know a lot of pharmaceuticals they're very well stocked um so um but no you have uh you know 150 people on shabbos
both friday night and saturday saturday morning that's amazing i've always wanted to go i heard it's uh it's fascinating and you should go before um you know in another 10 years i suspect the biden administration will remove whatever restrictions trump re-opposed um and cuba will get a lot of investment and will modernize and i think it's it's good to go before they completely reconstruct and redevelop cuba i heard it's like going back in time when you when you do go yes you know 25 percent of the cars are crushed from the 1950s it is spectacular um well reuben um i just for last comments i
just wanted to ask you of all the things you know your parents taught you or you learned from them what do you feel was the most valuable that brought you to where you are today you know perseverance uh you know my parents have to go through um my father in particular i had to go through a lot of challenges challenges that i don't know that i could you know that that i could face i mean my father was facing death you know for every day for for for three years uh you know starvation cold uh nazis stalinists um and yet he he persevered and he
lived uh uh you know a good life uh and my mother also sort of you know losing everything once not not uh you know four times like my father um and you know sort of still you know even with the frustration and the sadness you know pushing on and continuing and and building a good solid life uh in the and uh you know we're thankful uh very thankful that that you know we found a place that we could live and thrive a place we could live as jews without um too much hostility you know dallas in 2020 is much less hostile to jews than it
was you know in 1970 um and uh you know it's it's uh you know so i i guess you learn that no matter how bad things are there is in fact light at the end of the tunnel and just get through it and rebuild and that's it well uh reuben uh thank you again for sharing all these really thoughtful like interesting and thoughtful stories um is there any any other stories that you wanted to share that we didn't get to i'm trying to see at the question list yeah and no i we covered everything i appreciate the opportunity and uh thank you you for letting
me go up on tangents and i i appreciate it yeah well have a very happy new year likewise you