A Difficult Name
Robert Wexelblatt
There’s a woman I know from work. A few weeks back we had lunch together and Julie mentioned that she’s particularly fond of pecans, that they remind her of her childhood. She likes them in pies but also on their own, will gobble them by the handful. I learned from her friend Giselle that Julie had a birthday coming up. When I asked for the date, Giselle smiled knowingly and wagged her finger. I ordered a couple pounds of nuts from a specialty company in Boligee, Alabama and waited. When the birthday was a few days off and the pecans hadn’t arrived, I phoned the company’s customer service number. They claim to be a small, family-run enterprise and that a woman took my call after just two rings proved it. Julie’s from the South but not the deep part. Her accent evokes the New South; the woman in Boligee sounded like the Confederacy with sugar sprinkled all over it.
“Well, good morning, dear. What can I do for y’all?”
I explained my concern and the woman apologized almost abjectly, with regret and undeniable good will.
“Darn. Those pecans really shoulda been there by now. Honey, any chance you got the order number handy?”
I did.
“Oh, good. The number’s all I really need to start trackin’, but it’s best to double check. Mailed to your address was it?”
I said it was.
“Fine. Now, just give me your name, honey.”
With a sigh, I did.
“Heavens! I’ve never heard that one before. How on earth do you spell it?”
I spelled it.
“My, my!” I pictured her placing her palm on her chest. “So many letters. Really hard to spell.”
“Yep,” I said. “Took me years to get it down.”
I’m not sure she got the joke, but maybe she did. It’s easy for a northerner to underestimate a lady with long diphthongs who calls you dear and honey when you haven’t met. I’ve got a prejudice from listening to a lot of bloody-minded, bigoted senators and sheriffs on TV when I was a kid—a sort of prejudice against prejudice.
The Boligee woman said all she needed was the order number so why did she ask for my name when the number was of use and my name really wasn’t? Maybe people who work at customer service, like hostage-negotiators, know that their unhappy interlocutors will feel better served if you call them by their names and release the women and children. The aggrieved customers may become loyal clients, joining the pecan company family and ordering nuts at regular intervals. But all that really matters is the number.
All numbers are prices; all names are stories. So Klaren Verheim claims in one of his better proverbs. Can you see it? On one side stand Econometrics and Logistics, clipboards and calculators at the ready; on the other, lounge Fiction and Biography preparing to take names and record anecdotes. Big organizations always replace names with numbers; it’s a necessary efficiency. The purpose needn’t be malicious dehumanization though it often is. It took a while to figure out the quickest way to tattoo the arms of new arrivals at Auschwitz; perhaps the same method was used to imprint their Blutgruppen on the limbs of the SS. No, assigning people numbers isn’t always wicked. Universities, hospitals, and the crowded delicatessens all issue ID numbers. The government, with no lack of goodwill, puts numbers on our drivers’ licenses and passports. Social Security numbers are benign—albeit hackable. After all, the number of names is finite and the number of numbers isn’t. Everybody can have her or his very own number which, logically, should feel more “personal” than one’s possibly widespread name. But, of course, this isn’t the case at all because Verheim’s approximation is more than approximate. We don’t think of ourselves as integers, let alone prices, as static, but as stories that go on up to the last moment. Ambitious young people aspire to make a name for themselves, a name to conjure with, one that might become a kind of shorthand for an exciting and triumphant drama. I know a young professor of philosophy whose dearest wish is that her name should one day be turned into an adjective. Names really can condense a drama. Think of King Swollen Foot, Oedipus. His name tells the story of his nearly lethal infancy when Laius (there’s another drama) had his son’s feet pierced before disposing of him on Mount Cithaeron. But the story of Oedipus went on; and his name has become a byword for hubris, shorthand for tragic heroes, a label that can be stuck on any man at odds with Dad and unhealthily attached to Mom. Even so ordinary and innocuous a name as John Smith can suggest a story, for instance one about hotel registers and adulterous trysts. John Smith is a name meant to conceal a story but that hints at it anyway.
My own name is outlandish, lengthy, even ridiculous, the opposite of John Smith, and it hasn’t helped me evade anything—on the contrary.
The trouble started, as so much does, in elementary school. Every year I would be seated at a scarred desk in a freshly-swept classroom. A pleasant woman greeted us with a welcoming smile, take her place at a wooden desk on which a green gradebook lay open, and proceed to call the roll. Though our surnames were hardly ever used thereafter, the ritual opening-day naming was inexorable.
In first grade, I felt no dread, only anticipation, waiting eagerly to release the word “Present” bubbling in my mouth. Mrs. Debeque looked down at her gradebook then up, her merry eyes sweeping over the class.
“John Berrigan. Sue-Ann Caulk. Warren Douglas. Marsha Hornung. Paul Jesperson. William Macintyre. Diane Noonan. Valeria Pinetto. . . .”
I sensed when Mrs. Debeque was getting close, very close. She looked down, raised the glasses that hung around her neck, bent, squinted, made a tentative noise, straightened up, and gave my name her best shot. She was unsure and her voice rose at the end, which made me feel like I was a question and not the excited six-year-old who had left the house that morning, climbed bravely on the bus, declined to wave goodbye to his mother because he was so grown up.
I said “Here,” though I’d meant to say “Present” like everybody else.
Mrs. Debeque made the matter worse.
She smiled humbly, sympathetically and asked, “Did I pronounce it correctly?”
Already feeling singled out yet not wanting to embarrass my teacher, I muttered, “Close”.
There were giggles behind me, too soft for Mrs. Debeque to hear.
“Sorry. Could you please speak up little more clearly?”
“I said close.”
Mrs. Debeque wouldn’t let the matter drop. “How do you pronounce it?”
I pronounced my name.
The class broke up—of course they did. That laughter directed at me made them a class, gave them the warm feeling of not being the kid with the preposterous name. On their first day in first grade, the nervous and the homesick achieved calm and solidarity at my expense.
Mrs. Debeque contrived to scowl and smile at the same time. She aimed her scowl at the class but it was really for me, a pro forma defense of the outcast; but the furtive smile was for Sue-Ann, Warren, Glenn, Valeria and the rest. To me, it looked like complicity.
A similar scene was repeated the following year, and the ones after that.
Because I was my name and, because my name was ridiculous, so was I. Devising innovative distortions of my surname was a popular pastime among my classmates, but it was the nicknames that stuck. These grew cruder and crueler as we ascended from grade to grade. An early and relatively innocuous one was Twister, from Tongue-Twister. As one syllable is better than two, so this was soon shortened to Twist. In the next year, Mouth became the one-syllable version of Mouthful, prompted by the pretty Ms. Roth’s saying, “Gosh. That name of yours is a real mouthful.” In fifth grade, Mouth morphed to Fork, short for Forkful, a sort of side-formation from Mouthful. In elementary school any one-syllable word can be an insult so long as it ends in a hard consonant (wonk, dork, dink, grind, jerk, dweeb, etc.). No need to say to what the more daring sixth-grade boys transformed Fork. Still, it wasn’t so bad. I only got into two fights and I won one of them.
Opening-day roll call in high school was much the same except that now I had different teachers for every class, so there were more of them to fumble my name and some of them resented me because it didn’t roll off their tongues. My peers’ laughter was more constrained but the giggles were not, especially among the girls. I was ridiculous in their eyes from Day One.
Mr. Erb, my homeroom teacher, was built like a Frigidaire. He was an ex-Marine with a Semper Fi tattoo to prove it. Mr. Erb was also the school’s football coach and I suppose he was accustomed to humiliating his players—of which, to put it mildly, I wasn’t one. An infamously nasty teacher of wood-working and mechanical drawing, he loved being called “Pop” Erb and bristled at nonconformity of any kind, including in nomenclature.
On the first day, he looked at the class list and called out, “What in hell is this one?” and proceeded to garble my name spectacularly. It was deliberate. He did the same every morning and appeared to relish mispronouncing it as if getting my name wrong were a proof of his masculinity and an inexhaustible gift of mirth to the kids in his homeroom.
In tenth grade, I was beaten up after school by a couple members of the football squad. One was a tackle; the other was the kicker. They didn’t invent any nicknames; they just laughed.
College was better. The roll was seldom called and campus norms didn’t admit of mocking people’s surnames; besides, I wasn’t the only one with a jaw-breaking moniker. There were foreign students. The Chinese had the most difficult names to pronounce, at least for Westerners; however, almost all asked to be called Susan or Kevin, Barbara or Bill. It bothered me that these young people should have adopted these names just to make it easier for the faculty and people like me; but then I learned Joe Chin (né Chin Hsi-wei) that these names had been assigned to them when they started learning English as toddlers. “It’s good. Easier to make friends,” said Joe cheerfully. Joe and I became friends when we went for coffee after flunking our first calculus exam. My name fascinated and flummoxed Joe. I told him a little about the problems it made for me. “So why don’t you change it?” he asked. I replied that I’d often considered doing so but decided against it.
Names are stories but the stories are not just our own. They are family sagas. The prospect of ridding myself of my albatross was appealing, sometimes nearly irresistible. I could recite a list of celebrities who’d changed their names to become celebrities, but I couldn’t do it. To jettison my name would be like denying my forbears because they weren’t affable or good-looking enough, because they were inadequately cool.
My father, who must have suffered as I did but never admitted it, once told me how our name was very nearly changed, though he said “lost”. His grandfather was among the masses processed on Ellis Island. It was common for intake officials who found some of the huddled masses’ names too long, too bizarre, too hard to spell or say to assign a new one. Why? The motive could have been contempt or kindness, even both. According to my father’s story—that is, my great-grandfather’s—the official was kind. He explained that such a name would make life in America difficult, that “Wolf” or “Black” or “Fried” or “Harrison” or “Tyler” would improve his chances of succeeding in his new life.
“But,” said my father, “Grandfather flatly refused. He insisted on keeping his name and spelled it out letter by letter for the official to write down on the form. That must have held up the line. So, we’ve kept it, a heavy suitcase from the Old World, an ornate heirloom yanked into the New. And so, you see, since it meant so much to him. . .”
One of the assignments in my freshman composition class was to write a short research paper on a subject of our own choosing. I chose the origins of Italian and Jewish names, though I was neither. What drew me to Italian family names was the number that were insults. I pictured peasants in the time of Dante and Machiavelli slapping nasty nicknames on each other, feuds that produced slurs that stuck not just to the hated neighbor or in-law but all their descendants. A lot of them were based on appearance, like Calvo (“Baldie”), Nasato (“Big Nose”), or Sanna (“Buck Tooth”). But I was amused by the more imaginative ones: Robasciotti (stealing dung), Pelarotti (rat-skinner), and Malfatto (badly made). My favorite was Mezzasalma (half a cadaver). Names to conjure with indeed.
If the Italian names were spawned by village vendettas, Jewish ones were the result of a pas de deux of private bigotry and bureaucratic assimilation. I figured that common Jewish names couldn’t have been Jewish to begin with. They would have had names like Asher ben Jehiel or Moshe ben Maimon, a biblical name plus a patronymic. It turned out that Jewish names thought of as typical were invented over just a few decades around the start of the nineteenth century. Joseph II kicked it off in 1787 with a decree that all the Jews in the Hapsburg empire take proper family names, German ones. They were allowed to pick their own though all had to be approved by Austrian officials. But, of course, many Jews never got the memo. In these cases, the officials had a free hand. The names the picked had nothing to do with those who got them. Some went for the positive: Freund, Herzlich, Fein. Others seized the opportunity to vent their anti-Semitism: Deligtisch (criminal), Geshwür (ulcer), Harn (piss). As I recall, one of the best, or worst, was Affengsicht (monkey’s face). The officials didn’t stint on ink. Many went for long, compound names, like Silberberg or Mandelbaum. Those in the grip of the time’s Romanticism liked themes from nature, such as Rosenzweig or Apfelbaum.
Austria was quickly imitated by Prussia, Poland, Hungary, Russia. Always the purpose was the state’s desire to assimilate and standardize—but sometimes also to stigmatize.
I attached an appendix to my required paper. It was a clumsy short story, barely three pages long, about a discontented Austrian official I named Jurgen Hassen. This Hassen couldn’t stand his wife, found his children exasperating, and believed he should be, if not a field marshal, then at least a colonel of dragoons. Instead, he was sent into the dreariest provinces with an escort consisting of a pair of superannuated cavalrymen and a commission to re-name Jews. Weary of assigning destitute peasants ironic names like Goldberg and Geizkragen, the better-off handles like Wucherer and Dieben, he loosed his frustration and imagination (as I was doing mine) by coming up with a thirty-syllable surname for a starving tailor in Galicia. I don’t have my paper any more but I still have my German-English dictionary. The name went more or less like this:
Schmutzigerblutsaugenderteufeldermiteinerfamilievonwanzenineinervoneinergottverlassenenödland (Dirty blood-sucking devil who lives with a family of bedbugs in a godforsaken wasteland).
The old escorts had a good laugh and Hassen congratulated himself on his creativity.
In the first week of my senior year I met the love of my life, an intelligent, tender, sweet-tempered, olive-skinned, long-haired, high-bosomed goddess with a name that suited her better than I hoped mine did me. Rose Bellante’s ancestors must have made no enemies in their Sicilian village.
As I came through the doors of Howell Hall, I glimpsed her halfway up the stairway. It was rare to see a student in a dress and her yellow one drew my eye like a lone daffodil left over from springtime. As it happened, she was making for the same class I was, Professor Klarmann’s popular seminar, Existentialism in Philosophy and Literature.
It was a week before I worked my nerve up to talking to her. I opted for an approach was that was scholarly, light-hearted, and course-related. I maneuvered to be beside her on the stairway after class and asked, “What do you think? If Kierkegaard was the Father of Existentialism, should we say Regine Olsen wasn’t its Mother?”
Rose didn’t laugh or even giggle. She just smiled.
In retrospect, it was ironically that I should begin with just this riddle about just that philosopher.
Together, we worked through not only Kierkegaard, but Heidegger, Unamuno, Camus, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. Professor Klarmann had the kind of foreign accent that pleases Americans, the intelligible kind. His Viennese accent commanded respect and his class was good, but neither was as wonderful as Rose Bellante.
We saw each other almost every day, then nearly every night. For Spring Break, I took her to New York City. We went to the top of the Empire State Building and took in a performance of Krapp’s Last Tape. We had onion soup at the Odeon. It was my idea to take the ferry to Ellis Island. On the way back across the harbor, I told her my father’s story about my great-grandfather. She looked troubled but I didn’t get the reason why. I thought it was a touch of seasickness.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded toward the Statue of Liberty.
“Look, there’s something I want to ask you—need to. It’s important.”
And then I proposed. Rose didn’t throw her arms around me. She looked sympathetic and thoughtful, said it was sudden, and asked for time.
We were subdued on the train back to school. It was when we got off that that she gave me my answer, right there on the platform, as if one of us were departing. She explained that, fond as she was of me, she couldn’t marry me.
“I know it’s shallow, but I can’t marry somebody with a name like yours.”
I thought fast, desperately fast.
“But you don’t have to change your name! In fact, I don’t want you to. You can go on being Rose Bellante. That’s what you’ll always be to me.”
She shook her head and began to tear up.
“Is there someone else?”
“I don’t know. Or. . . I’m not sure. Oh, this is too hard. Look, I’m really ashamed, but there it is. I’m terribly sorry.” She looked around desperately, then spoke with firmness, in just the way that, in class, she’d defended her paper on de Beauvoir. “I think it’s best we don’t see each other again—except in the seminar. Graduation’s not even two months away. This’ll be over and then we’ll go off to our lives. The real ones.”
So, just as with Kierkegaard, a veto was lodged.
Devastated, and without a plan for my real life, I surrendered to the strongest force in the cosmos, inertia. A university, it turned out, would pay me to do it, so I stayed in school until I had what optimists call a doctorate and pessimists the terminal degree.
Now to go staying in school meant finding an academic job and those are always scarce, good ones especially. It looked like I might have to broaden my professional horizons or be consigned to the proletariat of the spirit, the adjuncts and part-timers in forging a stunted and insecure career. So, I more than elated when my thesis advisor phoned to tell me about a plum position that had opened up and matched my credentials. “What’s more,” he said jovially, “the department chairman and I used to get drunk together at Yale. If you’re interested I can give him a call.”
“Of course, I’m interested. Thank you. Thank you,” I said stupidly, not even thinking how it used to madden me when my mother delivered her favorite proverb with complacent cynicism: It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.
“No guarantees, of course. We’ll see how it goes. You know there’s going to be a lot of competition.”
I sent in my credentials, three letters of recommendations, and the least stultifying chapter of my dissertation. It was in itself a triumph when I was offered an interview. It meant traveling and my bank account had shrunk from derisive to negligible. I had enough for a bus ticket and a cheap room in a B+B whose salient feature was mustiness.
I wore my Harris tweed to the interview, a light blue shirt with a dark blue tie. Rose had once admired the combination.
The Search Committee numbered no less than five serious academics, one well-dressed woman and four disheveled men. I’d read an article by the woman and books by two of the men. All of them were the sort of scholars who, in their fields, would never be surprised. They were all polite, but no one looked friendly. I was sweating in the tweed jacket and would have liked to loosen my tie. The challenging hour began just like first grade, with somebody squinting at my name and mispronouncing it. The Committee shot me a series of short, sharp questions. I had the sense that these came off a predetermined list to be asked of all candidates. The questions were designed either to stump me or get me talking. It wasn’t easy to cover up with the first kind and, with the second, not to go on too long.
I left the room in one piece, thinking I’d done all right; nevertheless, I wasn’t chosen. I was a disappointment but not a surprise. When the rejection letter came, I went to see my advisor to let him know.
“I already know,” he said, “and I’m sorry. My friend did me the courtesy to give me a call.”
“I hope I didn’t let you down,” I said.
He raised his hands as if I’d pulled a gun on him. “No, no, of course not.”
I hesitated. “Not that I expect or deserve a reason, but did your friend by any chance say why?”
My advisor, normally an imperturbable man, shifted uneasily in his leather desk chair. “Well,” he said slowly, “not as such.”
“As such?”
“Hmm, well, he did mention in passing that they had some trouble with your name. My friend said they thought the Committee thought it could frighten the undergraduates, but I’m sure he was just joking.”
All names are stories and it’s in the nature of stories that some will be happier than others. Some names will repel, others attract; some please the eye and ear, others grate; some are dignified, others laughable. Those officials in Austria probably knew all this, as did the ones on Ellis Island. My family’s name makes difficulties but these are themselves a part of my story and no insignificant one.
I could have changed my name and begun a fresh story. Generations of my family had that option but decided to do what another of Klaren Verheim’s approximate proverbs says: “The humble man holds on to what limits him.”
Who knows? Maybe someday I will achieve such great things that our unwieldy, ridiculous name will become famous, honored. Schoolteachers and undergraduates may even learn to pronounce it correctly. It might even be turned into an adjective. And if not me, which seems unlikely, perhaps some other who hefts the same burden. After all, I could still marry and have a child.
Meanwhile, I choose to do as my father and his father before him did which is to be an episode in a story much longer than mine. As for the problems caused by my stumbling-block of a name, I take some comfort from one more of Verheim’s proverbs: “Wood cracks with the grain, and so might we. Whatever is against the grain is what we were constructed to resist.”
Robert Wexelblatt
There’s a woman I know from work. A few weeks back we had lunch together and Julie mentioned that she’s particularly fond of pecans, that they remind her of her childhood. She likes them in pies but also on their own, will gobble them by the handful. I learned from her friend Giselle that Julie had a birthday coming up. When I asked for the date, Giselle smiled knowingly and wagged her finger. I ordered a couple pounds of nuts from a specialty company in Boligee, Alabama and waited. When the birthday was a few days off and the pecans hadn’t arrived, I phoned the company’s customer service number. They claim to be a small, family-run enterprise and that a woman took my call after just two rings proved it. Julie’s from the South but not the deep part. Her accent evokes the New South; the woman in Boligee sounded like the Confederacy with sugar sprinkled all over it.
“Well, good morning, dear. What can I do for y’all?”
I explained my concern and the woman apologized almost abjectly, with regret and undeniable good will.
“Darn. Those pecans really shoulda been there by now. Honey, any chance you got the order number handy?”
I did.
“Oh, good. The number’s all I really need to start trackin’, but it’s best to double check. Mailed to your address was it?”
I said it was.
“Fine. Now, just give me your name, honey.”
With a sigh, I did.
“Heavens! I’ve never heard that one before. How on earth do you spell it?”
I spelled it.
“My, my!” I pictured her placing her palm on her chest. “So many letters. Really hard to spell.”
“Yep,” I said. “Took me years to get it down.”
I’m not sure she got the joke, but maybe she did. It’s easy for a northerner to underestimate a lady with long diphthongs who calls you dear and honey when you haven’t met. I’ve got a prejudice from listening to a lot of bloody-minded, bigoted senators and sheriffs on TV when I was a kid—a sort of prejudice against prejudice.
The Boligee woman said all she needed was the order number so why did she ask for my name when the number was of use and my name really wasn’t? Maybe people who work at customer service, like hostage-negotiators, know that their unhappy interlocutors will feel better served if you call them by their names and release the women and children. The aggrieved customers may become loyal clients, joining the pecan company family and ordering nuts at regular intervals. But all that really matters is the number.
All numbers are prices; all names are stories. So Klaren Verheim claims in one of his better proverbs. Can you see it? On one side stand Econometrics and Logistics, clipboards and calculators at the ready; on the other, lounge Fiction and Biography preparing to take names and record anecdotes. Big organizations always replace names with numbers; it’s a necessary efficiency. The purpose needn’t be malicious dehumanization though it often is. It took a while to figure out the quickest way to tattoo the arms of new arrivals at Auschwitz; perhaps the same method was used to imprint their Blutgruppen on the limbs of the SS. No, assigning people numbers isn’t always wicked. Universities, hospitals, and the crowded delicatessens all issue ID numbers. The government, with no lack of goodwill, puts numbers on our drivers’ licenses and passports. Social Security numbers are benign—albeit hackable. After all, the number of names is finite and the number of numbers isn’t. Everybody can have her or his very own number which, logically, should feel more “personal” than one’s possibly widespread name. But, of course, this isn’t the case at all because Verheim’s approximation is more than approximate. We don’t think of ourselves as integers, let alone prices, as static, but as stories that go on up to the last moment. Ambitious young people aspire to make a name for themselves, a name to conjure with, one that might become a kind of shorthand for an exciting and triumphant drama. I know a young professor of philosophy whose dearest wish is that her name should one day be turned into an adjective. Names really can condense a drama. Think of King Swollen Foot, Oedipus. His name tells the story of his nearly lethal infancy when Laius (there’s another drama) had his son’s feet pierced before disposing of him on Mount Cithaeron. But the story of Oedipus went on; and his name has become a byword for hubris, shorthand for tragic heroes, a label that can be stuck on any man at odds with Dad and unhealthily attached to Mom. Even so ordinary and innocuous a name as John Smith can suggest a story, for instance one about hotel registers and adulterous trysts. John Smith is a name meant to conceal a story but that hints at it anyway.
My own name is outlandish, lengthy, even ridiculous, the opposite of John Smith, and it hasn’t helped me evade anything—on the contrary.
The trouble started, as so much does, in elementary school. Every year I would be seated at a scarred desk in a freshly-swept classroom. A pleasant woman greeted us with a welcoming smile, take her place at a wooden desk on which a green gradebook lay open, and proceed to call the roll. Though our surnames were hardly ever used thereafter, the ritual opening-day naming was inexorable.
In first grade, I felt no dread, only anticipation, waiting eagerly to release the word “Present” bubbling in my mouth. Mrs. Debeque looked down at her gradebook then up, her merry eyes sweeping over the class.
“John Berrigan. Sue-Ann Caulk. Warren Douglas. Marsha Hornung. Paul Jesperson. William Macintyre. Diane Noonan. Valeria Pinetto. . . .”
I sensed when Mrs. Debeque was getting close, very close. She looked down, raised the glasses that hung around her neck, bent, squinted, made a tentative noise, straightened up, and gave my name her best shot. She was unsure and her voice rose at the end, which made me feel like I was a question and not the excited six-year-old who had left the house that morning, climbed bravely on the bus, declined to wave goodbye to his mother because he was so grown up.
I said “Here,” though I’d meant to say “Present” like everybody else.
Mrs. Debeque made the matter worse.
She smiled humbly, sympathetically and asked, “Did I pronounce it correctly?”
Already feeling singled out yet not wanting to embarrass my teacher, I muttered, “Close”.
There were giggles behind me, too soft for Mrs. Debeque to hear.
“Sorry. Could you please speak up little more clearly?”
“I said close.”
Mrs. Debeque wouldn’t let the matter drop. “How do you pronounce it?”
I pronounced my name.
The class broke up—of course they did. That laughter directed at me made them a class, gave them the warm feeling of not being the kid with the preposterous name. On their first day in first grade, the nervous and the homesick achieved calm and solidarity at my expense.
Mrs. Debeque contrived to scowl and smile at the same time. She aimed her scowl at the class but it was really for me, a pro forma defense of the outcast; but the furtive smile was for Sue-Ann, Warren, Glenn, Valeria and the rest. To me, it looked like complicity.
A similar scene was repeated the following year, and the ones after that.
Because I was my name and, because my name was ridiculous, so was I. Devising innovative distortions of my surname was a popular pastime among my classmates, but it was the nicknames that stuck. These grew cruder and crueler as we ascended from grade to grade. An early and relatively innocuous one was Twister, from Tongue-Twister. As one syllable is better than two, so this was soon shortened to Twist. In the next year, Mouth became the one-syllable version of Mouthful, prompted by the pretty Ms. Roth’s saying, “Gosh. That name of yours is a real mouthful.” In fifth grade, Mouth morphed to Fork, short for Forkful, a sort of side-formation from Mouthful. In elementary school any one-syllable word can be an insult so long as it ends in a hard consonant (wonk, dork, dink, grind, jerk, dweeb, etc.). No need to say to what the more daring sixth-grade boys transformed Fork. Still, it wasn’t so bad. I only got into two fights and I won one of them.
Opening-day roll call in high school was much the same except that now I had different teachers for every class, so there were more of them to fumble my name and some of them resented me because it didn’t roll off their tongues. My peers’ laughter was more constrained but the giggles were not, especially among the girls. I was ridiculous in their eyes from Day One.
Mr. Erb, my homeroom teacher, was built like a Frigidaire. He was an ex-Marine with a Semper Fi tattoo to prove it. Mr. Erb was also the school’s football coach and I suppose he was accustomed to humiliating his players—of which, to put it mildly, I wasn’t one. An infamously nasty teacher of wood-working and mechanical drawing, he loved being called “Pop” Erb and bristled at nonconformity of any kind, including in nomenclature.
On the first day, he looked at the class list and called out, “What in hell is this one?” and proceeded to garble my name spectacularly. It was deliberate. He did the same every morning and appeared to relish mispronouncing it as if getting my name wrong were a proof of his masculinity and an inexhaustible gift of mirth to the kids in his homeroom.
In tenth grade, I was beaten up after school by a couple members of the football squad. One was a tackle; the other was the kicker. They didn’t invent any nicknames; they just laughed.
College was better. The roll was seldom called and campus norms didn’t admit of mocking people’s surnames; besides, I wasn’t the only one with a jaw-breaking moniker. There were foreign students. The Chinese had the most difficult names to pronounce, at least for Westerners; however, almost all asked to be called Susan or Kevin, Barbara or Bill. It bothered me that these young people should have adopted these names just to make it easier for the faculty and people like me; but then I learned Joe Chin (né Chin Hsi-wei) that these names had been assigned to them when they started learning English as toddlers. “It’s good. Easier to make friends,” said Joe cheerfully. Joe and I became friends when we went for coffee after flunking our first calculus exam. My name fascinated and flummoxed Joe. I told him a little about the problems it made for me. “So why don’t you change it?” he asked. I replied that I’d often considered doing so but decided against it.
Names are stories but the stories are not just our own. They are family sagas. The prospect of ridding myself of my albatross was appealing, sometimes nearly irresistible. I could recite a list of celebrities who’d changed their names to become celebrities, but I couldn’t do it. To jettison my name would be like denying my forbears because they weren’t affable or good-looking enough, because they were inadequately cool.
My father, who must have suffered as I did but never admitted it, once told me how our name was very nearly changed, though he said “lost”. His grandfather was among the masses processed on Ellis Island. It was common for intake officials who found some of the huddled masses’ names too long, too bizarre, too hard to spell or say to assign a new one. Why? The motive could have been contempt or kindness, even both. According to my father’s story—that is, my great-grandfather’s—the official was kind. He explained that such a name would make life in America difficult, that “Wolf” or “Black” or “Fried” or “Harrison” or “Tyler” would improve his chances of succeeding in his new life.
“But,” said my father, “Grandfather flatly refused. He insisted on keeping his name and spelled it out letter by letter for the official to write down on the form. That must have held up the line. So, we’ve kept it, a heavy suitcase from the Old World, an ornate heirloom yanked into the New. And so, you see, since it meant so much to him. . .”
One of the assignments in my freshman composition class was to write a short research paper on a subject of our own choosing. I chose the origins of Italian and Jewish names, though I was neither. What drew me to Italian family names was the number that were insults. I pictured peasants in the time of Dante and Machiavelli slapping nasty nicknames on each other, feuds that produced slurs that stuck not just to the hated neighbor or in-law but all their descendants. A lot of them were based on appearance, like Calvo (“Baldie”), Nasato (“Big Nose”), or Sanna (“Buck Tooth”). But I was amused by the more imaginative ones: Robasciotti (stealing dung), Pelarotti (rat-skinner), and Malfatto (badly made). My favorite was Mezzasalma (half a cadaver). Names to conjure with indeed.
If the Italian names were spawned by village vendettas, Jewish ones were the result of a pas de deux of private bigotry and bureaucratic assimilation. I figured that common Jewish names couldn’t have been Jewish to begin with. They would have had names like Asher ben Jehiel or Moshe ben Maimon, a biblical name plus a patronymic. It turned out that Jewish names thought of as typical were invented over just a few decades around the start of the nineteenth century. Joseph II kicked it off in 1787 with a decree that all the Jews in the Hapsburg empire take proper family names, German ones. They were allowed to pick their own though all had to be approved by Austrian officials. But, of course, many Jews never got the memo. In these cases, the officials had a free hand. The names the picked had nothing to do with those who got them. Some went for the positive: Freund, Herzlich, Fein. Others seized the opportunity to vent their anti-Semitism: Deligtisch (criminal), Geshwür (ulcer), Harn (piss). As I recall, one of the best, or worst, was Affengsicht (monkey’s face). The officials didn’t stint on ink. Many went for long, compound names, like Silberberg or Mandelbaum. Those in the grip of the time’s Romanticism liked themes from nature, such as Rosenzweig or Apfelbaum.
Austria was quickly imitated by Prussia, Poland, Hungary, Russia. Always the purpose was the state’s desire to assimilate and standardize—but sometimes also to stigmatize.
I attached an appendix to my required paper. It was a clumsy short story, barely three pages long, about a discontented Austrian official I named Jurgen Hassen. This Hassen couldn’t stand his wife, found his children exasperating, and believed he should be, if not a field marshal, then at least a colonel of dragoons. Instead, he was sent into the dreariest provinces with an escort consisting of a pair of superannuated cavalrymen and a commission to re-name Jews. Weary of assigning destitute peasants ironic names like Goldberg and Geizkragen, the better-off handles like Wucherer and Dieben, he loosed his frustration and imagination (as I was doing mine) by coming up with a thirty-syllable surname for a starving tailor in Galicia. I don’t have my paper any more but I still have my German-English dictionary. The name went more or less like this:
Schmutzigerblutsaugenderteufeldermiteinerfamilievonwanzenineinervoneinergottverlassenenödland (Dirty blood-sucking devil who lives with a family of bedbugs in a godforsaken wasteland).
The old escorts had a good laugh and Hassen congratulated himself on his creativity.
In the first week of my senior year I met the love of my life, an intelligent, tender, sweet-tempered, olive-skinned, long-haired, high-bosomed goddess with a name that suited her better than I hoped mine did me. Rose Bellante’s ancestors must have made no enemies in their Sicilian village.
As I came through the doors of Howell Hall, I glimpsed her halfway up the stairway. It was rare to see a student in a dress and her yellow one drew my eye like a lone daffodil left over from springtime. As it happened, she was making for the same class I was, Professor Klarmann’s popular seminar, Existentialism in Philosophy and Literature.
It was a week before I worked my nerve up to talking to her. I opted for an approach was that was scholarly, light-hearted, and course-related. I maneuvered to be beside her on the stairway after class and asked, “What do you think? If Kierkegaard was the Father of Existentialism, should we say Regine Olsen wasn’t its Mother?”
Rose didn’t laugh or even giggle. She just smiled.
In retrospect, it was ironically that I should begin with just this riddle about just that philosopher.
Together, we worked through not only Kierkegaard, but Heidegger, Unamuno, Camus, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. Professor Klarmann had the kind of foreign accent that pleases Americans, the intelligible kind. His Viennese accent commanded respect and his class was good, but neither was as wonderful as Rose Bellante.
We saw each other almost every day, then nearly every night. For Spring Break, I took her to New York City. We went to the top of the Empire State Building and took in a performance of Krapp’s Last Tape. We had onion soup at the Odeon. It was my idea to take the ferry to Ellis Island. On the way back across the harbor, I told her my father’s story about my great-grandfather. She looked troubled but I didn’t get the reason why. I thought it was a touch of seasickness.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded toward the Statue of Liberty.
“Look, there’s something I want to ask you—need to. It’s important.”
And then I proposed. Rose didn’t throw her arms around me. She looked sympathetic and thoughtful, said it was sudden, and asked for time.
We were subdued on the train back to school. It was when we got off that that she gave me my answer, right there on the platform, as if one of us were departing. She explained that, fond as she was of me, she couldn’t marry me.
“I know it’s shallow, but I can’t marry somebody with a name like yours.”
I thought fast, desperately fast.
“But you don’t have to change your name! In fact, I don’t want you to. You can go on being Rose Bellante. That’s what you’ll always be to me.”
She shook her head and began to tear up.
“Is there someone else?”
“I don’t know. Or. . . I’m not sure. Oh, this is too hard. Look, I’m really ashamed, but there it is. I’m terribly sorry.” She looked around desperately, then spoke with firmness, in just the way that, in class, she’d defended her paper on de Beauvoir. “I think it’s best we don’t see each other again—except in the seminar. Graduation’s not even two months away. This’ll be over and then we’ll go off to our lives. The real ones.”
So, just as with Kierkegaard, a veto was lodged.
Devastated, and without a plan for my real life, I surrendered to the strongest force in the cosmos, inertia. A university, it turned out, would pay me to do it, so I stayed in school until I had what optimists call a doctorate and pessimists the terminal degree.
Now to go staying in school meant finding an academic job and those are always scarce, good ones especially. It looked like I might have to broaden my professional horizons or be consigned to the proletariat of the spirit, the adjuncts and part-timers in forging a stunted and insecure career. So, I more than elated when my thesis advisor phoned to tell me about a plum position that had opened up and matched my credentials. “What’s more,” he said jovially, “the department chairman and I used to get drunk together at Yale. If you’re interested I can give him a call.”
“Of course, I’m interested. Thank you. Thank you,” I said stupidly, not even thinking how it used to madden me when my mother delivered her favorite proverb with complacent cynicism: It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.
“No guarantees, of course. We’ll see how it goes. You know there’s going to be a lot of competition.”
I sent in my credentials, three letters of recommendations, and the least stultifying chapter of my dissertation. It was in itself a triumph when I was offered an interview. It meant traveling and my bank account had shrunk from derisive to negligible. I had enough for a bus ticket and a cheap room in a B+B whose salient feature was mustiness.
I wore my Harris tweed to the interview, a light blue shirt with a dark blue tie. Rose had once admired the combination.
The Search Committee numbered no less than five serious academics, one well-dressed woman and four disheveled men. I’d read an article by the woman and books by two of the men. All of them were the sort of scholars who, in their fields, would never be surprised. They were all polite, but no one looked friendly. I was sweating in the tweed jacket and would have liked to loosen my tie. The challenging hour began just like first grade, with somebody squinting at my name and mispronouncing it. The Committee shot me a series of short, sharp questions. I had the sense that these came off a predetermined list to be asked of all candidates. The questions were designed either to stump me or get me talking. It wasn’t easy to cover up with the first kind and, with the second, not to go on too long.
I left the room in one piece, thinking I’d done all right; nevertheless, I wasn’t chosen. I was a disappointment but not a surprise. When the rejection letter came, I went to see my advisor to let him know.
“I already know,” he said, “and I’m sorry. My friend did me the courtesy to give me a call.”
“I hope I didn’t let you down,” I said.
He raised his hands as if I’d pulled a gun on him. “No, no, of course not.”
I hesitated. “Not that I expect or deserve a reason, but did your friend by any chance say why?”
My advisor, normally an imperturbable man, shifted uneasily in his leather desk chair. “Well,” he said slowly, “not as such.”
“As such?”
“Hmm, well, he did mention in passing that they had some trouble with your name. My friend said they thought the Committee thought it could frighten the undergraduates, but I’m sure he was just joking.”
All names are stories and it’s in the nature of stories that some will be happier than others. Some names will repel, others attract; some please the eye and ear, others grate; some are dignified, others laughable. Those officials in Austria probably knew all this, as did the ones on Ellis Island. My family’s name makes difficulties but these are themselves a part of my story and no insignificant one.
I could have changed my name and begun a fresh story. Generations of my family had that option but decided to do what another of Klaren Verheim’s approximate proverbs says: “The humble man holds on to what limits him.”
Who knows? Maybe someday I will achieve such great things that our unwieldy, ridiculous name will become famous, honored. Schoolteachers and undergraduates may even learn to pronounce it correctly. It might even be turned into an adjective. And if not me, which seems unlikely, perhaps some other who hefts the same burden. After all, I could still marry and have a child.
Meanwhile, I choose to do as my father and his father before him did which is to be an episode in a story much longer than mine. As for the problems caused by my stumbling-block of a name, I take some comfort from one more of Verheim’s proverbs: “Wood cracks with the grain, and so might we. Whatever is against the grain is what we were constructed to resist.”
