Transcript of interview with Sonja Saltman by Barbara Tabach, August 18, 2015

i AN INTERVIEW WITH SONJA SALTMAN An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach The Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Sonja Saltman is a psychologist and philanthropist in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is executive director and co-founder of the Existential Humanistic Institute, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California that offers training in existential-humanistic therapy and theory. In 2003 Sonja and her husband Michael Saltman founded the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) William S. Boyd School of Law. The Saltman Center is focused on research, teaching, and public service related to "the advanced study of the nature of conflict and how to resolve it." A native of Austria, Sonja Saltman also serves as the Honorary Consul for Austria in Las Vegas. The Saltmans are involved with multiple charitable organizations and initiatives, both locally and abroad. Sonja Saltman has served on the boards of the Anti-Defamation League, Nevada Women's Philanthropy, and the Black Mountain Institute. Projects that the couple has supported include the rebuilding of homes and bridges is Bosnia, and Streetball Hafla, a basketball program to improve relations between Jewish and Arab teenagers in Israel. In 2014 Sonja and Michael Saltman were recognized as Distinguished Nevadans by the Nevada System of Higher Education. Included in this oral history are reminiscences of her personal non-Jewish heritage in Austrian, the importance of her grandmother in her life, and how she recalls becoming part of the Jewish community. . v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Sonja Saltman August 18, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface??????????????????????????????????..iv Describes being born and raised in Lower Austrian town of Pottschach, post-World War II as an only child. Talks about her father who was in German Air Force and her grandfather who served during World War I and was forced to register as a Nazi; also talks about her grandmother with whom she was very close. Shares her ancestors? contact with Jews in Austria, being raised Catholic, and going to live in England at the age of 18??????????????.1 ? 3 Talks about her musical artist friends; adapting to the English culture of the era; meeting her husband Michael in 1971. They eventually married and moved to the United States and to Las Vegas in 1975 for Michael?s work; recalls first impression of Las Vegas???????.4 ? 6 Attended UNLV and chose a career path in psychology; organizing her therapy business called the Existential Humanistic Institute; receiving award from the American Psychological Association (2015)???????????????????????????.?.7 ? 8 Explains how she, a non-Jew married to a Jew, became involved in the Jewish community; joined ADL, and briefly with Jewish Federation; celebrating Jewish holidays and raising their son. More recently involved with WBO. Mentions film Michael made in Israel [see Michael Saltman oral history] and her experiences and enlightenment during that time in Israel; how she became more pro-Israel??????????????????????????.9 ? 12 Talks about grandchildren and blended religious identities and dual-citizenships; social identity of Jewish community. Reminisces about visiting Las Vegas and her dislike for Strip but her enjoyment of the adventure; the opportunities that existed. Talks about raising their son here and choosing a school for him?????????????????????????13 ? 16 Speaks about Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution; son?s decision to live here and work with his father. Talks more about her heritage, a recent book entitled, All the Light we Cannot see by Anthony Doerr; minimal local anti-Semitism and closing thoughts???????..?.17 ? 24 Index???????????????????????????????????25 vi 1 This is Barbara Tabach and I am sitting with Sonja Saltman. Sonja, I'm going to ask you to spell your name so that we get it correct. I'll give you the first one, too, S?O?N?J?A. And the second one is S?A?L?T?M?A?N. Okay, a small town in Austria. In Pottschach, a small place in Lower Austria. Austria has nine states and Lower Austria is one of them. Nieder?sterreich. It was a pretty uneventful childhood, marked by postwar conditions but to me whatever that was like was just how it was. I was an only child. That was not unusual at the time. This was the years after the war in there and people had just one or two children. I had a Latin professor who had I think six children and we all thought he was sort of a sex fiend or there was something wrong with him: ?how could you have that many children?? And what counted as many children was any more than two. Anyway, I was an only and my best friend was an only. That was pretty usual. My father was in the German Air Force. He was so young when he entered that they trained him to be a pilot and then he was an instructor. So he was fortunate enough never to see any action. We had one Jewish woman living in our town that nobody bothered. She was married to the local tobacconist. I think the whole village just kept her under the radar. That's the story I heard. A story I also always tell is about my grandfather who was in World War I. I think he had disability by the time World War II came around. By the time the Nazis came into power, he was out of work. Those were horrible economical times for the country. He went and had himself registered with the Nazi Party. My grandmother found out and immediately marched up to the office and had him struck off the register. She thought they were bad people from the very 2 beginning and she was not going to allow a pact with the devil in order to get work. Oh, really? I was raised by her because my father was a prisoner of war after the war. I was born after the war, but he was a prisoner of war for quite a while. So I was a few years old by the time he came home. My mother and I lived with my grandmother and grandfather. So after he came back I think they had to reconnect and look at their marriage. So I stayed with my grandmother until they decided it was time to put me into grammar school at age 10 and then I went and lived with my parents. So my grandmother was sort of my mother and I was very close and attached and she was the character, she was very strong and very fearful at the same time. She loved me well and now that I am her age (when I was a child), I find characteristics in myself that echo her strength and determination as well as her complete devotion to those she loved. Another story I heard is that she had some alterations done with a Jewish lady and she was told by the Nazi regime not to pay her. And she said, "I owe her; I pay her." And she did. Then when my father came home, he was a bit of a hothead and he got in trouble. We were under Russian occupation and he got in trouble with the Russians who hauled him in. Again, my grandmother marched over and, after a lengthier negotiation persuaded the Russians to let him go. She was pretty amazing and I was very, very attached to her, loved her deeply. She was also very anxious and neurotic, a product of her childhood: she was two years old when her mother died. The family lived in Vienna. I think her father was some minor aristocracy but didn't have money. So he worked as an accountant and he didn't know what to do with a two?year?old little girl, and so he placed her in with the nuns. The result was that she hated the nuns, hated the church but was still following the rituals of Catholicism, i.e. we always had fish 3 on Friday and crossed herself frequently and prayed to God. All the remnants of the religion she was raised with but she didn't have anything good to say about the church. The nuns preached a punitive form of religion, I know she was made ashamed of her body. She was essentially in an orphanage. Then when her father remarried, he took her back to live with him. The stepmother owned one of the fashion salons in Vienna, and so my grandmother learned how to sew and make beautiful dresses. So she always made all of my clothes. But I don't think the stepmother and she got along well. Anyway, she was sent to the ?country? in her late teens and married the youngest son of a large farm family, a big farm family. I think he was the ninth kid. He inherited a forest. There wasn't much left. He proceeded to drink away the forest and to earn a living, he became a game keeper, something he loved doing. He would tell lovely, lovely stories about nature and jungles and loved animals and nature. I would go with him on mushroom hunting and fishing outings. He made his own fishing nets. Except for when he was drinking, he was a lovely quiet man. And then he would drink and became another person altogether. When it was time to start grammar school, I went to live with my parents who lived closer to the school. Then when I was fairly young I decided I wanted to?eighteen?I wanted to experience more of the world and went off to England. What attracted you to England? It wasn't that. At that point I was in probably my rebellious stage and I was hanging out with a lot of artists and I had a boyfriend who became the number?one rock musician in Austria. He translated Rolling Stones into Austria dialect. Michael [Saltman, her husband] has met him. He just died. I was in awe of his musical ability. And then through him and that whole crowd I met somebody from England. I went to England with him. And I loved England. Totally fell in love 4 with England. Felt I should have been born there and to be able to stay in England, I married. That didn't work out, obviously. I had less accent speaking English?English than I do now speaking American English. Isn't that interesting? I think I wanted to just sort of melt into the society and become one with the English. And then I met Michael fairly shortly after that. So what year did you meet Michael? We met in '71. What were the circumstances? We were working for this...It was an American startup, not exactly a startup, but an American company that was just gathering staff. So they were putting ads in the paper and they wanted German?English speaking assistants. I was an assistant. A woman from Germany and I were the first ones to be hired. I worked for the chief lawyer and Michael was hired to be his assistant. So that's how we met. A workplace romance, huh? I was twenty?four or twenty?five and he was two years older. The company ended up moving to Germany, to Munich, and I went with the company. Somewhere along that line I went back to England. I went back and forth a few times before Michael and I decided we were a couple. ?We lived together for four years in Munich and decided to get married so that we could both come to the US. What did you think about moving? It was very strange. I had been to New York and had only been to here, in Las Vegas to visit. Michael had a very good friend he met when working in Geneva who had some real estate 5 holdings in Las Vegas. This friend?s father had property in Las Vegas and in St. George, Utah and because of this friend, we bought into wilderness property that borders on Zion National Park. I thought it was a grand adventure. There were also a lot of uncertainties about this move and we really didn?t know what to expect so we thought let's give it six months. By that time Michael had lived in Europe for seven or eight years. So he was attached to Europe. I was ready for the adventure and also sad to leave Europe. So you came to Las Vegas in '75. Yes. Came from his work primarily? Yes, because this friend said, "Why don't you come here and we'll do something together?" Do you remember when you first came here what it looked like? Yes, I do remember because it was a sandstorm and this friend had a condo right across from the university that he lived in with his ex?wife who no longer lived with him. So he moved us into this bedroom upstairs and he had a cold water bed that we were sleeping on. Oh, it was awful. And I thought, oh, this is a nightmare. Oh, and then the woman who has since become my best friend , the Swedish woman who was this friend's girlfriend?by then ex?girlfriend?picked us up from the airport. I still remember she had these cushions in the back of the car with sort of the Zodiac sexual positions or something and I thought, oh, my God. And it was a big old American Cadillac. And she's Swedish, but she was so Americanized by then. I thought, oh, this is awful. I was such a European snob at that time. Anyway, she was an absolute doll and I love her dearly and she's still outrageous and wonderful. While I was waiting, and while Michael was sorting out what he could do business?wise 6 here, I decided to go back to school and just take classes. So I started taking classes. I went to the German department, sort of a given place to start. I mean the university was, what, ten thousand students or fifteen thousand? You're talking about UNLV. UNLV, yes. The head of the foreign language department, a German man, a character, welcomed anybody into a degree program if they showed any interest to study German. That was the time when Michael would call and Don Baepler, who was the president then, would actually answer the phone himself. It was a very different University and town than the one we know now. The town was...How many people? About 250,000 in population, very small and provincial. There were all these empty corner lots on main streets nobody had built on yet. I don't know how long you've been here. I came here in the nineties, early nineties. Well, back then it was...I remember writing an essay about it and how hot it was. There were shopping centers and then there were empty desert lots and then there was the Strip and that was the town, really. It was so unlike...And Michael told me, "Oh, wait till you see all the grocery stores; there's aisles and aisles of food." I went in there and I thought, well, there is, but there's nothing I want to buy. There may be a lot of choices, none of it appealing. It was a strange time. It was an exciting time because my friend Lisa, Lisbeth, the Swedish woman, showed me around town, took me under her wings. We would do a lot of lying out by the pool only putting coconut oil on and baking in the sun. I remember the place where the condo was and that Roger Thomas lived in it, too. He was also lying by the pool baking himself. I haven't talked to him about it. I mean I see him regularly. I have to remind him of 7 that time. What a time. It was the seventies. There was a lot of adventure in it since everything I did was so different from anything I had ever known or done. There was also this sense of opportunity that we could do anything we wanted, we just needed to figure out what that was. We spent some time in Salt Lake because we had friends there. Michael's partner went to school in Salt Lake City, Utah, and he had friends there, and we had the property outside of St. George. We spent a lot of time outdoors there. I got sort of roped into wanting to study more, which I did. So tell me about going to school at UNLV. You started out with a foreign language, which makes sense. And then, when I decided to keep going, I took a professional interest and aptitude test to find out what I really want to pursue. I scored very high on archeology, which I thought wasn't terribly practical. I wanted to go on digs, but who gets to do that? Not many people. What was the other one? Architecture also came out strong. But I am horrible at math, so I ruled that one out. Then the third one was the helping profession, the social sciences. I ended up taking more and more psychology classes and also literature. That's a continued interest in me, language and literature. So is that the career then that you pursued was in psychology? Psychology, right. So talk about your career. Well, I wouldn't even call it a career. I studied, I got the degrees and I practiced about 20 years. But fairly early on our lives had changed and was changing. So I could keep a private practice and I had that for quite a long time, fifteen to twenty years, but it wasn't a full?time one because I couldn't do that since we traveled a lot all over the world. Once our son went off to college, we 8 traveled even more. I had always loved seeing clients, learning with them and from them and being there for them. However, when I was coming home from yet another trip and found it difficult to do justice to both my personal life and my professional life, I realized I had to make some changes. I remember a couple of clients who finally said, "You're going where, what, when, for how long?" I had to look for alternate ways of staying involved with a profession I found fascinating. I engaged in a lot of training during those years and, as part of the training, I was involved with a group in San Francisco. We evolved as a group of professionals and I?m now one of the founding members of the Existential Humanistic Institute in the Bay Area. We have just started a certification training program. We have international students coming in. One is coming from Egypt. We had one from Dubai, two from China, Canada and from all over the US. They're coming from all over to train with us. I am good at certain kinds of teaching. What I like best is demonstrating what theories look like when practicing the rhetoric, pointing out, giving feedback, role modeling, etc. So this group, how would you describe? Existential. It's based on existential therapy. Existential Humanistic, but specifically existential. The psychologist, teacher, we all trained with was one of the better known existential psychologists, well published and well recognized. Our group of students ended up taking over the teaching and training after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer. We founded the institute and we had ten years of hard work starting an organization that would support our teaching. . So how many people would be training at one time? Around 20 at a time approximately. We have groups. We have a spring and a fall retreat where advanced students and even professional mental health workers come and train. It also includes a theoretical perspective which means our trainees write several papers to show their theoretical 9 understanding and proficiency. I find it interesting. I have a cousin who is Jungian trained. It's always interesting how a person approaches their type of psychology. Our group, The Existential Humanistic Institute is getting an award from the American Psychological Association for outstanding contribution to the field of Existential Humanistic psychology, a wonderful acknowledgment of our accomplishments. Well, that's great. Congratulations. Thank you. We're getting the award next spring in Colorado. That's great. Satisfying. It is. It is, yes. How many are we founding members? Four of us, I think. And then we've added to the board and we're going to continue adding to the board. We talked about you're not Jewish, but we're doing this as part of the Jewish Heritage project because many people suggested that if you talk to Michael, you've got to talk to Sonja. Why would people say that do you think? Well, because I have been super involved. Once we became involved with the community here, so many of our friends were Jewish. I don't know if that hadn't been the case if I would have been as involved. It?s an interesting question if we had continued living in Germany, would I have been as involved as I became here. I always wanted to honor Michael?s religion/ethnic belonging. Michael is not a religious person, but he has a very strong identity of being Jewish and all that means. We don't go to temple. I would have been more willing than he. He loves all the Jewish festivals for the food and he also has a strong sense of belonging to the group. I did not convert. I am not a person who believes in any particular religion. 10 When our son was two years old, I read a book that Michael just read again, and now it just went out the window. It was like "Sophie's Choice" sort of, along those lines. I remember reading the book and just tears streaming down my face and thinking, what would I do? What would I have done under those circumstances? I'm not Jewish. My son is; would have been; would not have been? How would that have played out? I'm putting myself more into what that must have been like, what people went through. And then when?I forgot her name, too. But a woman who started as an employee ADL [Anti-defamation League] here in town, she asked Susan Fine and me to come onboard. Susan and I were very active, in those early years of ADL. We did a lot, hands?on stuff, organizing the annual event ourselves. I remember we had one of these earlier events in newly opened the Fashion Show mall at FAO Schwartz when the toy store existed. I was involved with the Jewish Federation, but my heart wasn't as much into Federation. That was more sort of going through the motion and doing it because my friends were doing it. But ADL I believed in because it was anti?prejudice?that's what I believe in?and anti?discrimination and all that. That was closer to my heart. So is it easy for a non?Jew to be affiliated with the ADL? Yes, yes, because it's not so much religious basis. I would say I'm probably agnostic. I pray when I'm in an airplane, but that's the extent of it. I don't believe in any organized religion. With this project the idea of identifying Jewish isn't necessarily a religious, spiritual way, but a way of family tradition and ritual and all of that. Yes, yes, and I feel really strongly. I grew up Catholic and went through confirmation and all of that. The only sort of spiritual experience I would have is going to churches and sitting there and looking at the altar and having that sort of elevated feeling, that lovely feeling that was pretty 11 pure and not tied to anything besides the feeling itself. A self-created feeling of pureness that was all about joy and wonderful possibilities and elevated spiritual ways of being in the world. I still get that feeling at Christmas. Except it gets too commercial. I mean there's a spirit. It's fun. Some of the decorations. It can be lovely. At its purest it's lovely. But we also always had Hanukkah and lit the Hanukkah candles and still do. That hasn't changed. Our son and his family does it, too. So that carries on. I think in the last two years as I've become a little bit more interested in politics as well, I've become really angry what's happening, how Israel is perceived. We were just in Israel. We belong to a WBO global couples forum. We are eight couples and only one other couple is Jewish and had been to Israel a few times. One even has a cousin who is a rabbi in Israel. The rest weren't. We had a guide. Do you know who Abe Foxman is, the head of ADL? I know the name. Actually, he just retired. Incredible. We're not going to have a leader like him again. Very larger than life figure, very, very charismatic. Michael told you he made a film in Israel, didn't he? Yes. We had a guide whom we met through ADL whom we contacted. He was available to tour Israel with our group of sixteen people. He was very...Oh, my god, if you asked him how to make an omelet, he starts with how the egg was conceived. I said to him after the first day, "Please, maybe not so many details." But he didn't listen, he was so enthuse about telling us all who knew and he knew everything! The very first night he explained to us the history of Israel and where the borders were and the role of Britain, how they arbitrarily just shifted borders. He 12 was fascinating, the attitude of the questions. He said, "The only truly occupied territory," which I didn't know either, "Really occupied is the Golan Heights. They haven't made any effort to reclaim the Golan Heights from Israel. Then the second day of the tour we had a speaker?he was an Aramaic Christian?who came and talked to us. Again, the same question: what about building in the occupied territories? He had an incredible answer. A Canadian asked that question and the other one was an Englishwoman who had the most obvious. Let's face it, our media is so anti?Israel, which blows my mind because a lot of the media is Jewish. So I don't know how that happens. I would see the reporting and I say, "No, Israel did not just shoot the rockets," or whatever they did, "Because they have nothing better to do. They were attacked." You leave out that detail, and so the unfairness in reporting, which is exactly what ADL is against. The bias has become so strong because Israel is seen as the top dog. It's just like people are down on America. The minute you are seen as the top dog, somebody will go after you. It's totally unfair because when we were there, we met many, many people and we heard stories. For example, if you are sick, it doesn't matter who you are, you'll get treated in these hospitals, no questions asked. People help. So it is so distorted what the world gets about Israel and hears about Israel. It's pretty mind?boggling to me. So my maybe more pro?Israel sentiments are pretty strong right now because I'm feeling Israel needs a lot of help. We said to somebody who used to be the spokesperson in the nineties for Netanyahu, we said, "Your PR is terrible. You need to get these stories out. People don't know." And, eh, eh. I don't know if they think they're above it or it wouldn't make any difference. But they're not having a very good idea of what the world thinks and how they could maybe change it. 13 So going there is a great education. Oh, yes. Well, and if you have the right guide, but just going there. And he knew we had a lot of Christians, and so we saw all the holy sites as well as all the Jewish sites. I thought it was a fabulous trip and everybody in our group thought so, too. And the Englishwoman who was probably the most...She sees herself as sort of very liberal, in that prejudiced kind of way. In the end, she started to question and I think that was good that she even questioned her perspective on how she saw things and that was gratifying. My son is still not sure who he is. Both grandkids were christened, which was interesting. Alex also had a bris. So they're prepared either way. They are covered. They have a little Hindu and a little Buddha and they got it. The mother agreed to that and then she wanted a christening and our son agreed to that. It was hard for Michael I think not to have also a rabbi present at the wedding. We just had the christening of our granddaughter in Vermont and this time he didn't even blink an eye. He sort of figured, whatever. And the kids will grow up knowing all their inheritance. They're very loaded on the Austrian factor because the mother is half Austrian. Oh, wow. American mother. Father was Austrian. He died in an accident a few years ago, four years ago. I don't even have the Austrian citizenship anymore, but my daughter-in-law does and the kids have it. Isn't that interesting? Yes. They met in Tufts and found out early on that they each had an Austrian parent. She doesn't like Austria right now. So I'm not sure what's going to happen. She had a pretty nasty 14 Austrian grandmother and had other negative experiences with authorities there when her father was dying. Growing up I can testify that Austria has both the lovely charming Austrians and the giving, friendly, open, and then the redneck kind of Austrians. So you're very ecumenical as far as people of different backgrounds. One of the things that it's interesting and there's not a question I'm prepared to ask, but it's a topic that keeps coming up to me is that as I interview people for this project, they will say to me, "I wasn't very Jewish or didn't even really think about being Jewish." They may have grown up in a Jewish neighborhood in the northeastern part of the country or something. "But when I came to Las Vegas, I wanted to identify with a group." And so they sought out Temple Beth Sholom because that was the first synagogue. So I find that interesting that it's that cultural identification. Well, because there was such a community and a lot of the business community was also Jewish. So it wasn't necessarily that we were seeking out the Jewish community through the temple, but it was the business community Michael encountered through doing business here. We made friends fairly on with Molaskys, Greenspuns, Marcia and Howard Miller, to mention just a few families. They're still all really good friends. There's a ton of people who became friends who happened to be Jewish. People would go to temple for important occasions and I was there for many bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs and to observed Jewish holidays. It was also all very social...It was a social thing as well. Yes, maybe that's the word. It really was a social way to connect with people. Yes, yes. With shared cultural values. Right, right. Of course, we have friends, too, that were not Jewish. But there's a large portion of 15 the community of that core back then that was Jewish. So what did you know about Las Vegas when you moved here in the seventies? Not a thing. About the history of it or anything? Only the one time when I visited a few years before then and we went to this property in Utah. There was the Strip. I thought it was awful. I wouldn't even set foot in hotels in the first couple of years without getting depressed. I never saw Elvis. I thought he was just awful. If I would get into a hotel or a casino, I found it so depressing. It was all so artificial. Both Michael and I came to the US with a healthy dose of European snobbery about America. Now the young people think everything in America is so hip and so wonderful. But this is almost forty years ago. So back then, no, it was the ugly America and Americans were uncouth or they weren't sophisticated or fashionable. And here was the casino and all that very artificial environment. We were both definitely snobs about it, me probably more because I had that in me from birth and Michael a little bit from so many years living in Europe. But we also loved the freedom that Las Vegas gave us. It was such an adventure, such an outpost, no tradition, no history, no limits really. You could do whatever you wanted here. There was a lot of freedom in that as well. It seems like that's a consistent theme for people coming here. Freedom? Yes, that freedom, opportunity. People who come from back when. From elsewhere. From anywhere, wherever elsewhere is. Is that still the case now, people who come? 16 I don't know. That's a good question. That would be interesting. When we moved here in the early nineties I would say that definitely. But once the recession hit, if people came here since the recession that would be an interesting question to pursue. Because before the recession I remember talking to some younger people, "Oh, we love it here; we love it here." The recession has turned a lot of things around; I know that, too. Our son came back. Where did he go? Well, he went to Tu