What's in a name?
“Everyone has a name given to him by God and given to him by his parents.” Zelda
The thought hit me like a ton of bricks one ordinary
afternoon few days before Yom Kippur. I wondered, many times since, if the time
of the year had anything to do with it.
I always found those last days of September especially gloomy. The end
of summer ties in the Jewish tradition to many complicated religious rituals;
all have one thing in common. It is time to look back at the year that just
ended. It is time of reckoning, settling debts with god.
So on one of these ominous, thought provoking days, a
persistent nagging thought appeared from nowhere. “This makes no sense at all,
“it went on and on refusing to let go. “This” referring to the story I told
myself and others all my adult life about the origin of my name. Ariela, Levia.
Both names mean the same in Hebrew, a lioness. I remembered, vaguely, how my
mother explained it to me. Well, it was over fifty years ago so it was hard to
remember her exact words. She told me how she and my father wanted to name me
after my grandmother Livia, my mothers’ mother but were concerned with the old
ring it had and decided to change it to Levia, which was more up to date. And
then as an afterthought made another change and named me Ariela with levia as
my middle name.
I carried this
story with me all the years only for one flawed detail I did not pay attention
to till that afternoon. Jews do not name their children after live relatives
and my grandmother was alive when I was born. I clearly remember her sharing
our tiny apartment in Jerusalem. So if she was alive, who was I named after?
My parents died few years prior. My aunt, Leah, my moms’
only sister died shortly after. So there were no live relatives to ask, with
the exception of my cousin Miki living in Israel. I picked the phone up and
called her. “Miki” I said. And at that moment I realized, I don’t really know
where her name came from either. I pushed the embarrassing thought aside and
proceeded with my mission. I explained the name issue only to find out she knew
even less then I did and had no idea I even had a middle name.
We departed with a decision that each one of us will try
to find as much information as possible. She through her father, my uncle
Zerubavel (his name is another mystery waiting to be resolved) and I, by
talking to my two elderly aunts, my fathers’ sisters.
After the unfruitful phone conversation I dug out my
birth certificate, just to be sure. It was written there, black on white.
Ariela, Levia, born on March 1949 in Jerusalem. I also located, after racking my brain, a
box full of old papers and photos I took from my parent’s apartment in
Jerusalem, after my fathers’ death. It was found unharmed, tucked at the back
of the closet.
In spite of the clear displeasure of my husband, who kept
telling me that a name is a name and I am making a big deal over nothing, I
spent a whole morning sorting through falling apart yellowing documents. They were all written in either German or
Hungarian, none of which I could read or understand. I was searching for any
clue, running my eyes along lines and lines of incoherent sentences.
I found my mothers’ birth certificate and my grandmothers’.
I found my grandfathers’ wedding certificate and a picture of his grave in
Budapest. I tried to make sense of school papers, more marriage certificates
and piles of pictures of people I did not know.
None of these findings shed any light on the name confusion.
So there I was, stuck with a name I made my own for sixty
years and suddenly was not sure about. It made me sad and confused. I wondered
why this never came up in a conversation with my parents while I could still
talk to them. It made me want to tell my daughters “Hey, I am still here, take
a moment, let’s talk.”
But deep inside I was thinking, maybe my husband was
right and a name is just a name. The thought made me feel somehow lighter. I
could see the humor and fun in this strange situation. “I was free!!!” no
longer a captive of a name I did not choose. I didn’t have to carry on my
shoulders old unknown relatives with a long and troubled past .I could even
decide to change this old name and pick a new one. I could find a name that
will reflect my real personality better than the old one, a name that will do
justice to my sixty years of life experiences.
_____________________________________________________________________
I was toying with these thoughts since September
of 2009.
I did few things:
- I wrote
many pieces about any memory I could pull out.
- I
conducted a pretty extensive genealogical research that to my great
surprise produced plenty of information, including a possible answer to my
original question (my name).
- I made a
cd with all the information I found and gave it to my family members.
But, I keep thinking of gathering the entire
information, and writings to create one document that will encompass the whole
story as far as I know it.
So why not?
-
Not very original; it seems like
lately many of my age group, second generation to holocaust families, troubled
by the stories not told and the time running out are researching and
documenting either as non-fiction or fictional works. Sometimes this feels like
over indulgence. I almost want to say,
enough is enough, let it go. The never ending heaviness always on our
shoulders, the everlasting commitment to the dead, to the past, to the
ideology.
-
Technical issues; I have hundreds
of names but no faces. How can I write about people I don’t know without it
turning into a work of fiction. So maybe I know a lot but really not enough to
do justice to the story.
-
Who but me is interested? The few
times I approached my family (my daughters, cousins, and my brother) the reaction
was polite but definitely uninterested.
So why yes?
-
Because it is obviously important
to me.
-
Because not a complete story is
still better than nothing.
-
Because even if not interested
now, one day, one or more of my daughters (perhaps even a granddaughter) will
feel the need to know more and I will no longer be around.
-
Because I truly believe that ‘you
need to know where you came from in order to know who you are’ is not just a
cliché and perhaps there is not enough of it nowadays.
-
Because it’s a way to achieve
eternity (did I just say that…)
"Sometimes this feels like over indulgence. I almost want to say, enough is enough, let it go. The never ending heaviness always on our shoulders, the everlasting commitment to the dead, to the past,..."
ReplyDeleteThis struck me.
If there's any group in the world less likely to forget the past than Jews--whose religion is also their history--I haven't heard of it.
But the Holocaust is not part of any holy writings, any oral tradition, any debate among rabbis about the meaning of the Law. In the end, it's just something dreadful that happened: certainly worse than any pogrom, any persecution, any expulsion, any inquisition, any forced conversion, any of all the many torments Jews have suffered. But none of those things, including the Holocaust, are anything more than man's history with man, not man's history with God, not so far as we know.
Eventually everyone with first-hand knowledge of and experience of the Holocaust will be dead, as will their children and grandchildren, and the heat of the flames will necessarily burn less hot.
Harsh to say, but true.
But Jews, in my observation and understanding, do not let anything go easily and certainly not this.
But at a point, after a point, there is something unseemly about dwelling on the details. After all, they are not our details, and it is silly to imagine that we can really enter into someone else's experience, especially an experience so ultimate and extreme. Not all the testimony, newsreels, history, photos, museums, and tears in the world can really help us understand the Warsaw Ghetto, the death camps, the Einsatzgruppen, and so on. We give ourselves airs to imagine that we can.
The first World War showed us our stupidity and arrogance. The second, our insanity. What Hitler taught the world was that no imaginable cruelty or horror is beyond us; there is literally nothing so evil and wicked that under the right circumstances we will not do it.
That is not a lesson that needs reinforcing, though it has been reinforced in many places and by many people since 1945. Never Again? Pfeh--hundreds of times!
So, what is the point of dwelling on it any more? We've forgotten nothing, but we've learned nothing.
I haven't dealt directly with your writing, but I have at least paid it the compliment of allowing it to stimulate my thoughts in response to it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'll have more to say later.
I overheard two rabbis once, talking about the death camps. One of them said in a particularly pained way,l "Even the latrines were places of torment."
ReplyDeleteI'm still thinking about that. I understand his horror that in this most elemental way, dignity and privacy were forbidden. But on the other hand, given what else was happening in the camps, the torment of the latrines was just part of the system, and it's a little naive to wish, 'Oh, why weren't the Nazis kind enough to let the Jews take a shit in peace?'
In a way his distress could be seen as trivializing the world of the camps: so what, if the latrines were a place of torment--so were the boxcars, the selection, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the barracks, the assembly ground, and so on. In another view his distress could be seen as a way of symbolizing or epitomizing the camps.
Which goes back to my point of the previous comment. In the end, the Holocaust is too much for our imaginations, for our memories, for our daily sanity even. We should acknowledge that.
“So, what is the point of dwelling on it anymore? We've forgotten nothing, but we've learned nothing.”
ReplyDeleteIn the big spectrum of things that is pretty much how I feel, especially the –learned nothing – part.
And with that I am not referring only to the world at large but also to Israel and what is going on there socially and politically.
So here is where my ambivalence comes in;
If there is no point of talking about the past if one will never be capable of really understanding it, or is willing to learn from it, what are we to do?
And in view of that, is there a value to personal stories and “And thou shalt tell thy….”
Ironically, the more I write the more I realize what a big part of me is based on this religion that I do not exercise any more, on my heritage that I keep pushing and pulling at, on my country that I left for another. And yes, on my language that I kind of ditched.
Will writing my family’s story help me feel less ‘guilty’ more whole? Maybe. Is it primarily for myself that I am writing, probably, can anyone else benefit from it, one can only hope…
There's a point to studying history and lots of things can be picked apart, pinned down, and at least partially understood. I trained as an historian and spend a lot of time reading history, but this ("The never ending heaviness always on our shoulders, the everlasting commitment to the dead, to the past,...") is not history.
ReplyDeleteI certainly think the Holocaust should have history written about it. But memory is not the same as history, and what you describe above is a society ruminating on memories to the point of neurosis, just as individuals sometimes do.
There is a value to personal stories! But there is something not quite right about a society fixating on the sum of millions of personal stories--they become fossils, turned to stone, emptied of the original impulse that created them, kidnapped by other people for their purposes.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything that you said.
ReplyDeleteBut my questions about my possible' bigger topic' had few different layers, or so I thought.Especialy the one about crossing the line between non-fiction and fiction that is of interest to me.
"the more I write the more I realize what a big part of me is based on this religion that I do not exercise any more, on my heritage that I keep pushing and pulling at, on my country that I left for another. And yes, on my language that I kind of ditched."
ReplyDeleteI'd say you have your priorities backwards. Look at that quotation! It sets up at least four different stresses, four conflicts, four problems, four knots to be untied. Your family story comes in to these things but is there to help explain your story. It's ancillary, not primary.
Crossing the line? All nonfiction contains fictional elements, in that the writer chooses what to include, what to exclude, so one immediately is in a writing that is shaped by choices. The only question left is how far along the spectrum of fiction the writer cares to situate the material: do you want to create composite characters, do you want to tighten up time sequences, do you want to offer dialogue that you can reconstruct but never reproduce exactly, do you want to 'improve' stories slightly, do you want to speculate on motives you can't know for sure, etc etc. Your answer to each of these questions and others decides where on the spectrum your writing will fall.