As the city was celebrating the FIFA World Cup finale at the Showcase Atlanta celebration at Piedmont Park on July 19, Mayor Andre Dickens paid tribute to when Atlanta held the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games exactly 30 years earlier — to the day and almost the actual minute. “Today’s a special day for us,” Dickens told the crowd of mainly Spanish fans at Piedmont Park on July 19. “This is the 30th anniversary of the opening night of the ’96 Olympics, when Atlanta was also on the biggest stage in the world.” As an observer of Atlanta’s history, I’m lucky to have experienced both major global events marking our city’s place on the world map.
But my perspective actually dates back much longer, to growing up in an Atlanta of the 1950s when I knew what it felt like to be a foreigner in a Southern city. My parents, Ike and Nora Saporta, moved to Atlanta in 1948, leaving a war-torn Europe where they had experienced the Holocaust firsthand. My parents, Ike and Nora Saporta, spoke to my daughter’s class at Morningside Elementary School about the Holocaust during the 1997-1998 school year.
(Photo by Maria Saporta.) They were rounded up for questioning by the Germans on March 10, 1944, exactly one year after they were married while living in hiding in Athens, Greece. But my mother, her parents and her best friend, all Sephardic Jews, were captured and put on freight trains to spend a year at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp until the end of the war. My parents decided to move to Atlanta, where Papa became a professor of architecture at Georgia Tech.
My sister was born in 1952, and I was born in 1955 when Atlanta was truly a parochial Southern town. Maria (center) walking along Thessaloniki’s paralia with her mother (right) and Beatrice Modiano, her mother’s best friend during the summer of 1964. (Special.) Both my parents spoke six or seven languages apiece, and they strongly believed it was important to raise their two daughters with an international mindset.
And they spoke Greek to each other. They also both knew Spanish, Judeo-Espanol, Italian and English. My father spoke fluent German because he had studied architecture in Germany.
When I was 4 years old, my mother, my sister and I spent six months living in Europe (Greece and France) staying with rela…
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