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May 24, 2012 6:08 pm PDT

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Tribe

December 3, 2009

Living the dream

by Mitch Paradise

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What you first notice about Santa Barbara’s Cuban-born Presser brothers, Leon and Abe, is a directness, warmth and sincerity.

Abe is the voluble one, the storyteller, while older brother Leon is a bit more reserved. But by any yardstick, one would be hard-pressed to find two men, two families — twin pillars of the Santa Barbara Jewish community — prouder of their Latino heritage and more devoted to the ideals of family, Judaism, education and community. 

Both are retired, but along with their wives they remain active across the spectrum of Jewish institutions in Santa Barbara and have built a reputation for generously giving their time and resources — whether the cause is their synagogue or Hadassah, the Federation or the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel or Moishe House. Together they have had a quiet but profound impact on their adopted home by the sea.

When it comes to expressing their gratitude to the United States for the opportunities it offers, the brothers are not shy.

“I really feel like I’m living the American dream,” Leon says.

Yet their journey to Southern California was anything but smooth. In fact, the families’ personal modesty belies a history of losing everything and then rebuilding.

Both brothers fondly remember their lives in pre-Castro Cuba where, despite their small and cohesive Jewish community, they were also well integrated into the non-Jewish world.

“Our father, who was 12 when he arrived [from Ukraine in 1921], really understood Cuba and got along very well with everyone,” Leon says. “His Spanish was perfect. It wasn’t a life completely free of anti-Semitism, but before Castro it was a wonderful country.” 

Their father, Nuña, and their uncle were strong supporters of Israel, collecting money from the local Jewish community and sending it abroad. And Nuña made himself available with financial assistance as well as personal and emotional support, Abe says.

Their father “was like the Hebrew Free Loan in Matanzas,” Abe says, referring to a thriving provincial capital east of Havana where the family lived.

Leon left Cuba for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1957 to study computer science after reading a magazine article about computers in high school. However, he had no idea what he would do with his education once he returned to Cuba; he was simply looking for the best possible education.

“Emigration was the furthest thing from my mind,” he says.

Abe had no interest in leaving Cuba for his education, but within a few years the revolution had driven many universities to strike. Castro was confiscating local businesses as well as imprisoning and killing “counterrevolutionaries.”

“Not a lot of Jews were rich, but a lot of the rich were Jews,” Abe says.

In January 1961, months before Castro declared Cuba a socialist state, 16-year-old Abe left Matanzas with his parents, who opted for life in Los Angeles after a brief stint in New York. Abe wound up joining his brother at the University of Illinois.

Leon graduated several months after Abe’s arrival, leaving him alone for the first time in his life.

Abe recalls it as a time of bruising loneliness at first, remembering one bitter experience in particular: being invited home for Thanksgiving by a non-Jewish friend, only to have the invitation rescinded when the parents discovered he was both Cuban and Jewish.

But he also remembers, just as vividly, the kindness shown to him: a Hillel rabbi who created a job for him and the few local Jewish families who competed for his presence in their homes during Shabbat and at the holidays. Abe promised himself then that he would pay back the kindness the Jewish community extended to him; the outreach and warmth of those experiences still inspire his support of Hillel today. 

“Believe it or not, one of these people was a Cuban Jewish doctor and his American wife. To this day — they’re in their 80s now — I still call them once a week, or they call me. We’re very close,” he said.

After the Pressers reunited with their parents in Los Angeles, the young men took what jobs they could while the family lived together in a one-bedroom apartment where sleeping arrangements involved taking turns on a Murphy bed. At one point the family even took in a high school friend of Leon’s.

“It was very sad for me to see my parents in those circumstances and the uncertainty they faced,” Leon remembers. “But I was still optimistic about my future.”

Leon earned a master’s degree at USC in 1964 and a doctorate at UCLA in 1968, working with a group that went on to do groundbreaking work in computer science and the formation of the Internet. Abe, meanwhile, got his MBA at USC.

Both brothers married highly educated women from the close-knit Jewish community in Mexico City within weeks of each other in 1969, and Leon soon moved to Santa Barbara with his wife Blanca to begin a computer science program in the Engineering School at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he led a research group that worked on software development methodologies and tools.

Abe’s business ambitions were derailed two years later when he was stricken with a malignant lymphoma and given eight months to live. Leon traveled between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles on weekends to be with his parents and his brother until Abe beat his cancer.

Leon remembers those days as if “living like you were driving in a fog — not knowing what was out there beyond what you could see.”

He left UCSB in 1976 to follow his entrepreneurial instincts, and in 1977 formed Softool, a computer company dedicated to the creation and marketing of software tools.

Abe, who had prospered in his own Asian food import business, joined Leon at Softool in 1985 as vice president of sales and marketing. It was the same year Leon was named by Software Magazine as one of the 100 people who had the greatest impact on the software industry, and in 1992 he was honored at the White House by President George H. W. Bush as one of a group of outstanding Hispanic leaders in the United States.

Together, the brothers grew the company into a major success and sold it to Platinum Technologies in 1995.

Today, Leon in his semi-retirement continues to invest in startups in different industries, and in January 2010 he will release his book, “What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur.”

Unfortunately, the move to Santa Barbara was not the end of cataclysmic events for the family. At the end of June 1990, the Painted Cave Fire swallowed up nearly 700 homes — one of which belonged to Abe’s family.

“We lost everything, all the photos and souvenirs from Cuba,” Abe says. “But we survived.”

What impressed him most was how the entire town came to everyone’s aid. 

“That’s when I knew we had a community,” Abe says.

He rebuilt, and six years after the fire, noticing there was no Hebrew Free Loan in Santa Barbara, Abe gathered some friends and created the Santa Barbara Jewish Community Foundation/Hebrew Free Loan, setting up a $250,000 fund to help with college grants and no-interest loans to assist with medical care, unemployment or down payments. Abe is still the group’s president, and they have since become a donor-directed fund of the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.

The Pressers have always held education — at home and in the community — as an important value, one passed on by their father.

The first memory Rabbi Steve Cohen has of the Presser brothers is of Abe bringing his two young sons, David and Eric, to Rosh Hashanah services at UCSB Hillel, the rabbi’s first posting after his ordination.

“In a discussion of the binding of Isaac, these two kids, not even bar mitzvahed yet, had brilliant insights in the conversation,” says Cohen, who is now rabbi at Congregation B’nai B’rith, where both families are members.

Leon and Blanca’s daughters, Liza and Anita, spent their preschool and early elementary years in an Orthodox Jewish day school before switching to public school

Both Presser brothers have taken an interest supporting the UCSB Hillel.

When Hillel began a capital campaign for a new center in 1993, Leon was among the first donors “to step up and say I’m going to be part of this, establishing credibility,” Cohen says. The effort eventually raised $4.5 million for the Milton Roisman Jewish Student Center that opened on campus in 2001.

Abe, who came to rely on Hillel as a support system at University of Illinois, and his wife, Molly, a local kindergarten teacher, have hosted UC students in their home for Shabbat, Jewish holidays or just a home-cooked meal. And Abe has mentored many students through school and into professions.

One of those students, David Cygielman, became co-founder and executive director of Moishe House, a nonprofit with 29 houses in 10 countries dedicated to keeping Judaism alive in the lives of young college grads. 

“There was always room for one more,” says Cygielman, fondly recalling the dinners at Abe and Molly’s home, as well as the organizing help he received from Abe in getting his enterprise off the ground.

In 2007, Abe was inducted into the UCSB Hillel Hall of Fame. 

Moishe House, Abe says, is an example of “paying it forward,” an idea he tries to instill in the students he mentors. 

Today, as a substitute teacher in schools that are overwhelmingly Latino, Abe is proud to present a role model of the success education can bring. 

Although the Presser children — most of whom are fluent in three languages, including Hebrew — are spread across the country, Leon’s daughters and Abe’s son David are raising the grandchildren in Spanish-speaking homes, and now the next generation is off to Camp Ramah, taking Hebrew classes, studying Torah, and bringing black beans, rice and tamales for lunch

“We never thought the American government would allow Castro to last more than a few months,” both brothers agreed. “We all thought we’d be going right back.”

Instead, they made a life in their new home far beyond what they might have imagined. Their grandfather, Zeilik, had fled the Bolsheviks in 1921; 40 years later the family again was forced to leave everything behind.

But the Presser brothers can continue to take pride in having lived and instilled in their children and grandchildren their father Nuña’s wisdom: “Money and material things can be taken by government overnight, but education, they can never take that away from you.”

Mitch Paradise is a writer and teacher in Los Angeles who blogs at Huffington Post and The Wrap.

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