Tany Banarer
Tany Banarer was born in Lima, Peru, to parents who were both from Poland. Her mother arrived in Peru in 1937 and her father in 1938, brought over by her father's brother, who sent tickets and arranged the paperwork. Her uncle had first fled Poland after a wartime experience that revealed the depth of anti-Semitism there. Her maternal grandmother came from Vienna, Austria. Growing up, Tany learned Spanish from the maids and the street, English at school, and heard Polish at home when her parents did not want her to understand. She was named after her father's mother.
As a child, Tany experienced exclusion from Christian and other schools because she was Jewish, and eventually attended a school led by former students of the Lima High School. She joined the Jewish youth movement her brother attended and developed a strong love of Israel, and she attended the city's only Jewish school, graduating in the late 1950s. After studying for two years in Switzerland, she returned to Peru, where she met her future husband, a pharmacist and university teacher. They married in 1966 and settled in Lima, raising three children. She later became a French teacher.
When her husband became ill and passed away, Tany's son, a physician who had come to Dallas for his residency, invited her to live with him and his wife. She spent a year preparing, giving away belongings and shipping treasured paintings and keepsakes, and moved to Dallas about fourteen years before the interview. There she lives within walking distance of several synagogues and helped raise her grandchildren. Her three children live in Israel, Dallas, and Stony Brook, New York, and she has many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She travels to Israel when she can and is proud that all three of her children remained Jewish.
Full Transcript
i'm joe reingold and i'm interviewing tony benner today today is thursday march 5th 2020 and hello tony how are you good this is for our uh latin american jewish program that we're going to be having soon take it away tony where are you from tell us where your family was from your grandparents your parents and then leading up to your childhood i was born in lima peru and my parents were both from poland my mother arrived in peru in 1937 and my father arrived in 1938 thanks to the generosity of my father's brother who sent them the tickets and who did all the paperwork to
get them into the country very good why did they pick peru do you think well my gran my uncle luis scalinstein during first world war he was the driver of a polish general and since he had blue eyes and he was blonde everything everybody thought he was a bold he was not jewish that's why he was a driver in the army so one day they were driving through the jewish ghetto and my uncle stopped the car and the general said why are you stopping the car he said there is a person crossing the door why you call a person a filthy jew and me a
polish general have to wait for him to cross the street just go on so my uncle went on in a very careful way and that day he knew he had to flee from poland so he went first to brazil and then to peru and were your parents both brought up there excuse me your parents were they from there also no no no my parents were from poland i'm sorry your grandparents did they go that far back also to poland no my grandparents were living in poland at that time okay and your parents were both from poland do you know what city what area they were
living in barcelona and i know my maternal grandmother came from vienna austria oh okay yeah those were tough times then so what year do you remember do you know what year they came to peru my mother in 1937 and my father in 1938. okay so you were born there i was born in here so tell us a little bit about your childhood what it was like there well [Music] when i was born my father was very happy to be able to name me after his mother failed tauba and then what i remember is that across the street we lived there was a christian church with a school and it was very convenient for my mother to send me to that school but they would not receive me because i was jewish and they were nice okay so then there was an english school in lima called the lima high school
where all the jewish girls used to vote and girls came out there from learning excellent english so when the time came for me to go to that school my mother took me and they wouldn't accept me because at that time there was president truman and he had forbidden the school to receive any more juice so we asked why are my other friends allowed so she said because they are younger sisters from students that are already there but we are not not accepting any new ones so they referred us to another school that was led by ex-students from the lima high school what were some of
your activities in school what did you enjoy doing i always left handcrafts languages were very very easy for me because my parents used to speak english at home they spoke spanish outside the house and my parents would switch to polish when they did not want me to understand so for me learning a foreign language was no big deal that's good did you learn it in school or outside of school another language or just just picked it up no i picked up a spanish from the maids and in the street and english at school right and i remember my first english teacher was english she was
from england miss mabel so you learned an accent in english that's good so tell me did you have any jewish activities growing up well i remember when i was the first jewish activity i remember there used to be the wits organization and they had an activity for pouring a bigger mess and we had in lima at that time we had a sephardic society which was very active so that kermes was at the sephardic society and i remember being nice as a small girl then when i was 10 years old 10 years old there were two main youth movements there was the vitara and the anorexia
knee so since my brother used to go to the vettar i used to go to the vetter and enjoyed a lot being among jewish children boys and girls do they instill in you love of israel israel programming yes yes yes and has that carried through most of your life at that age i would have loved to make aliyah if my mother wouldn't have a feet about it did they have did your parents have the same strong sense of israel well all i know is that i still own a quarter of dunam bought my by my father during the v campaign in 1948 well i still
have it and then well my father was not religious but he used to drive to school every every saturday we moved far and he used to go with his brother we used to celebrate passover uh did your parents have other family in peru other siblings okay so my uncle was the first to arrive then he bought a ticket for his bride then when his bride was expecting she decided to bring a sister and then he decided to bring a brother so my parents were married two brothers and two sisters and that was the whole family okay growing up we were always seven because i have
an older brother and my uncles had an only son so it was always the seven of us he could and you were close with them very close what did your parents do for a living and what kind of things were they involved in my mother used to always stay at home she was not at all social my father on the other hand was very charming very outgoing he told me that in poland he made all sorts of odd jobs he was not a learned person but he had lots of common sense he taught himself how to speak spanish by living by reading the newspaper he
could type invoices in spanish using a typewriter and his spanish dictionary and he use he would be able to sell you absolutely anything and that was his business so did he have a store no an actual shop no no no he did not have a shop but he used to deal with the jewelry then he would get things in auctions he would sell anything that came into his hand and your mom stayed home yeah raising you and my brother did they do you know if they joined anything whether civic or religious or jewish at all well there was the union israelita the synagogue there so
they were members of that synagogue uh my father would go every every single year to the jewish cemetery for in starting at the beginning of may because it was the commemoration of the holocaust and so far and i started going to the jewish school there was only one jewish school in 1959 when i was 13. and that's where you stayed graduated from there yes i graduated from there so tell us a little bit about what you did after graduation well i was very very lucky because i have only one brother who is five years older than me and he decided he wanted to study architecture in brazil so my father sent him to brazil when it came to me since i had always been a good student my father told me learn anything you want wherever you want so i decided to go study nice manners in switzerland okay so i went there for two years and then what after so the first
year i only learned french the second year i made a commercial diploma then i came back in peru end of december and we went i remember i went with a very close friend to the graduation ceremony of the jewish school and she introduced me there to my actual husband to my husband okay so i met him in december april was my birthday so he asked for my hand and we were married in july next year what year was that excuse me what year you were married in 1966 okay all right so where did you settle down we settled down in lima he was a pharmacist
he used to work for universidad nacional mayor de san marcos he was a teacher and he was a teacher all his life okay so tell me about those early married years and how did you when did when and when and where did you decide to leave when we got married my father bought us a house small and i lived in it until i i left lima to come here and we had three children the oldest one elena now lives in israel in ramadan i live here with my son salomon banara because he invited me to live here with his wife and children and the youngest
one the chabad rabbi she runs a habat house for the students of the university of stony brook stony brook yeah upstate new york near um east new york the east side right right you said you have three did i miss oh one's here and then okay got it all right so then tell us a little bit more about the family how it grew and what kind of life did you lead in lima and then how did you make your decision what happened for you to leave well we used to live in lima in lima there was not an open anti-semitism but there was a hidden
one so the best compliment my children could get is you don't resemble a jew that was the best complicated now all my life i grew up having jewish friends and non-jewish friends was the same for me it was not until 1989 when ori blumenfeld the habachalia came to lima that we really started to learn about being through aside that when my son was about to make bar mitzvah there was no escanasi rabbi at that time so my husband said i'd rather have you study for your bar mitzvah with the sephardic rabbi instead with the non-rabbi so he made a sephardic bar mitzvah until this day
we laugh about it was it very very different from an ashkenazic one well i must price rabbi benamo he was an excellent teacher and he taught him as much as he could okay unbelievable good okay and after that so um after that when my children all went to university and then i became a french teacher and then unfortunately my husband got sick he had hepatic psychosis so when he passed away my son called me and invited me to live here in dallas with him how did he get here why did he come here because he studied medicine in peru doctors gerb are very very underpaid
in peru so he decided to come to the states for his residency and he was matched to come here to dallas thanks to dr ezra borstein a very close friend since they were little so he came to dallas he married here miriam white and when my father when my husband passed away they both invited me to live with them so they told me okay you have a year to get everything ready and knowing my son when he said a year it meant a year so i made very sure that my daughter-in-law was adorable or agreed with that i thought you know it's very hard to
have your mother in law with you 24 hours a day in a row and this is a reversible think about it think it well well she said no no it's okay so thanks god it worked very well what did you have to do to get ready to leave well first of all i had a stamp collection so i started by trying to keep it in boxes and my pictures then when i tried to sell my belongings i realized that it was impossible because nobody gives you anything so i decided it was better for me to give them away to my friends to my brother my
nephew and i was very happy when i was able to to set to ship my some paintings and some things i loved so the things i valued most i was able to bring him and i did not get to sell the house and the car in a year but i left the keys and everything to my brother and he did everything for me oh good that was wonderful so is the rest of your family still there anybody else left my brother is still in lima with his wife and he has in lima two children and her daughter his daughter lives one one of his daughters
lives in israel okay in moscow do you get to visit israel yes i am fortunate i was in israel about three weeks ago i came back i had my third great-grandson so i was there for the greece i did not stay for the period event because it had been too long and then while i was in israel before nine months before because i had another great grandson so yes i go to israel whenever you can that's great wonderful so tell a little bit about what your impressions were of dallas when you first got here and then tell about how it's changed since then well i
am very lucky to live in a bubble because uh we still live in the same house two blocks away from moratora two blocks away from shari te fila two blocks away from young israel okay and what can i tell you there is the french school dallas international school close to us i used to work there for a little bit i used to to go to do some how do you call it replacements at torah day school but mainly i was at the house trying to help with my grandchildren which was wonderful so who are they how old are they and what are their names my
oldest granddaughter here is me hama hamaita she is 17 then esther she's 15 then marshall he's 14 and for arena is going to be but mitzvah in a week oh very good wonderful was it a difficult transition for you it must have been quite different from lima to dallas well the first thing is that when i came here it was like either i made it then or it would never happen so i just decided to jump into the swimming pool and thanks god it was a wonderful decision and there are lots of things that are different the main one is that in peru having mates
is very very inexpensive so i used to have a living mate the same one for almost 23 years and it paid me more having her and work than to do housework so here the first thing i had to learn is that you can be a jewish grandmother if you don't know how to cook and i still don't cook although i want to be a jewish grandmother but you really need to go did you learn you don't want to it's not that i don't know but it's not my cup of tea all right that's fair enough can you think of anybody through the years that was
uh important and really a good role model for you oh mrs battia epstein oh okay okay because um although ravi rabbi feidenbaum is a wonderful person i always felt better going to a woman instead so i chose to go to mrs epstein she has been my rabbits since i came she's just wonderful i love her now she's my granddaughter's teacher and she just loves her who does not laugh that's very good um can you tell us something that you are very proud of that you have accomplished in your life um well it was never in my plans to have three from children and all my
three children became full i ruined a conservative home but i wanted them to be jewish for sure but never orthodox and the three of them that's a good accomplishment how has your family grown since you've been here well my eldest daughter has six children in in israel okay my son has four here and the youngest one has ten oh in stony brook in stony brook wow my goodness and i have three great grandchildren in beautiful that's that's quite a growth have you seen any important changes in dallas the city itself since you since you arrived here since i lived in a bubble really not but
what i was surprised is to hear that someone snatched a friend's purse while buying at costco i have once my the radio of my car got stolen so it's becoming a little bit more sort of dangerous than 14 years ago some streets have been built as i said i live in a bubble pretty much thank you is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered well i would like to thank very very much mrs lea ornish because i think she was the one that had this idea and i thank you very much for your time and i hope this will be of
some use wonderful i do have one more question though um do you miss lima at all what do you miss about it if you do i still have my brother there you know the reputation of peruvian cuisine is the second best in the world after french cuisine so vegetables and fruits in peru taste different people are latin there's there sort of happiness and lightness but the few times i have i have been back to lima i i would have no wish to be back there i go visit yes okay well we're happy this is now your home so yeah thank you very very much been
delightful you