The Sephardic Brother: Tell us a little bit about your background. What was it like growing up in the city of Thessaloniki? What was it like growing up in its post-War Jewish Community?
Dr. Albert Bourla: They were happy years for me. Keep in mind I was born in the 1960s, so it was already some time since the War ended. The Jews came back from the Holocaust, and those few that remained in Salonika had settled and made their normal lives. I was born into a middle class family, they had a good means of living. Father, mother and sister, and we were very close with my uncles and cousins as well.
SB: What are some of your favorite Sephardic customs and traditions? Do you remember any Ladino words or phrases your family would use growing up?
AB: At home, my father and mother would speak Ladino all the time, but primarily to themselves. Unfortunately, my sister and I didn’t pick it up. I actually feel a bit embarrassed about it. My entire generation, the post-Holocaust generation, has lost the langauge. Ladino was spoken for hudreds of years because there was a society that spoke it. Schools, synagogues, clubs; there were 55,000 Sephardic Jews in the city, and at one point in Thessaloniki, even more. They could cultivate the language in society normally. Suddenly, we come to a situation where there are only 700 people in the city, from a high of over 50,000. 2,000 survived the War, but many left for Israel or the United States. So the new generation didn’t have many options. I myself went to a school where I was the only Jew in the entire school for years. It’s difficult to preserve a language under those conditions.
Our parents also had some very traumatic experiences. My father, for example. Many Sephardic Jews who tried to hide during the German occupation of Greece found it difficult because they had an accent when they spoke Greek. They couldn’t speak Greek with the same accent of Greek Chrisitans because they used to speak Ladino at home as their first language, so it affected their speech. My father witnessed Jewish friends being caught and executed just because their Greek accents were poor, clearly demonstrating that they were Sephardic. My father made it a point to speak an excellent style of Greek without any Ladino-influenced accents. That was an additional reason that they were very reluctant to bring back their language to their children, which was in some ways one of the reasons they were able to hide and survive; they buried the language.
SB: Do you remember any specific customs you loved growing up at home? Maybe around the holidays like Pesah or Rosh Ashana?
AB: Yes. I remember all of these different holidays in the Sephardic way. We would usually go to my mother’s brother, my uncle’s home. Occasionally, we would have a Seder at the Thessaloniki Jewish Center, but in most cases, we would do it with just the family. My mother’s family were more religious than my father’s side, so they were much more knowledgeable of the traditions. Although we were a proud Jewish family, we weren’t very religious.
SB: What was it like coming to the United States as a Sephardic Jew from Greece? What was your immigration experience like, and what did you think of "American" Jewish culture compared with "Greek" Jewish culture?
AB: A complete shock; very different. Where I come from, we don’t even know the concept of denominations in Judaism: orthodox, conservative, reform, it didn’t exist in the Greek Jewish and Sephardic world. We are just Jews. The second is that we grew up as a very small minority. Remember, I was the only Jew in the school. So we developed the character of what typical minorities do. They try to look out for one another. They try to integrate into society without completely losing their unique identity, for example, their secret language. These are the typical things that minorities do when they think they belong to a special group, another group. When I came to New York, it was a completely different world. Jews took a much greater prominence in society; it was as if they ran the world.
SB: What motivated you to go into medicine and become a veterinarian?
AB: It was a combination of the fact that I loved animals, life science, and medicine. Bringing these together was very interesting to me. I always also tried to get my mother to buy me a dog as a kid, but she said no way. So I tried to get my revenge by getting many dogs through my work.
SB: Can you tell us a little bit about your parents' survival from the horrors of the Holocaust? How do you think this impacted you personally and your choice of profession?
AB: I have very strong elements of both parents' personalities, and I developed my own personality as well. My mother was a fearless woman, she wasn’t scared of anything. She was way more visionary and extroverted, and would get involved with everything in the city. My father on the other hand was more conservative and more thoughtful with his actions. He wouldn’t make a decision until he really put thought into it. He was certainly much more of an introvert. He wouldn’t go out like my mother, who would literally interact with anyone.
Both certainly carried the trauma of almost being killed in the Holocaust. But the traumas were theirs and not mine. They saw their parents, siblings, and extended family die. And they carried that with them. And they sometimes of course wondered, “why me? Why did I survive and not others?” They may not have verbalized this to me, but I could see it in them.
The most important thing, however, was tha they always spoke with optimisim and positivty about their experiences in the Holocaust. There was a famous Holocaust film called la Vita Bella - The Beautiful Life, an Italian movie that was heavily criticized because it approached issues like the concentration camps with humor as opposed to the traditonal seriousness. But it was very enlightening, and featured a wonderful story of love. This was the lens in which my parents would frame their Holocaust experience. With laughter, believe it or not. My uncles described their experiences in Auschwitz. My mother spoke of her experience in a German prison, then going before the firing squad, and being saved just in time. They would put a lot of humor into these difficult stories. The message was that life was here and good things can come out of war. This also drove me and convinced me that nothing is really impossible in life.
SB: Why do you care about your Sephardic identity? Why does it matter?
AB: I grew up being different, and I’m proud of that. It’s not always easy being different, especially when you’re growing up in school as a kid. You have to have a lot of honest discussions with yourself. Do you want to forget who you are and completely integrate into the dominant culture, or do you want to retain your identity while integrating into society? Or perhaps you want to completely keep your identity and isolate yourself from the world. So I chose the middle path, but I never hid who I am. Those who like it, great. Those who don’t like it, also fine. It is simply who I am.
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