Casgliadau Arlein
Amgueddfa Cymru
Chwilio Uwch
Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Laraine Salamon
Oral history recording with Laraine Salamon collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.
I was born in 1941 in London, and came with my family to Bridgend in the mid ’50s when my father got work in the area. As a family, we didn’t have much of a Jewish background because we’d moved around so much when I was a child. I didn’t go to cheder, so I hadn’t had much formal Jewish education. When I was a teenager my parents were very keen for me to meet Jewish people my own age, so on Sunday evenings I went to the youth club at the Cathedral Road Synagogue. It was there where I met my husband, Wally, and we married in the Reform Synagogue in 1959, shortly after I turned eighteen. I remember Rabbi Graf telling me that I was the youngest bride he had ever married. Wally’s family were from Rohrbach, a small village in Austria. He came as a refugee to Britain with his mother and two brothers on 3rd September 1939, and the boys stayed with a railway worker’s family in Kent for two years. In 1945, the family came to Cardiff, where Wally’s uncle worked at the Aerozip factory in Treforest. Wally’s father opened a green grocer’s shop, which he gradually developed into a Continental delicatessen, which he ran with Wally’s mum. Wally worked in the delicatessen first at weekends and then full-time, after he left school at fourteen. After the delicatessen closed, Wally and I opened a new business in the Royal Arcade around 1981, called Wally’s, which went from very small beginnings to a very nice, successful, small family delicatessen and health foods store. I helped run the shop, and was always very busy with other things, apart from raising three children. Wally always worked very hard and all his life worked six days a week without fail. Even back pain or repeated heart attacks did not slow him down, and I think that attitude is what kept him going until the age that he reached. I have a real sense of pride in our achievement; that we had reached this place from nowhere because we had nothing, and we built up quite a wonderful life together and were very blessed. Our son Steven now runs Wally’s and has taken it to even greater heights. We’ve got very nice, loyal staff, who like working there, and even though it’s incredibly hard work, they get some kudos out of it. Everywhere you go, Wally’s is actually very well known. You meet people from South Wales on your travels, almost anywhere around the world, and they say, “Oh, do I know Wally’s! I go there, or my wife goes there every week and she spends a fortune and I don’t blame her because it’s wonderful.” This family business of Wally’s deli, together with his three children and numerous grandchildren, are a proud legacy and a tribute to the life of Wally Salamon, who passed away, aged seventy-one, in 2008.