Names

“Who is Paul named after?” my sister asked me the other day.   Paul is our brother.    Mother once told me, I answered, that she named Paul after a character in “One Man’s Family,” a radio serial popular in the thirties, because she loved the character’s voice.   I never knew when to believe her, for she liked to give fanciful answers to questions about her past.  In response to my queries as to where she and Dad married, for example, she never gave me the same answer twice, and I began to wonder if they had eloped or perhaps had never married at all, especially since their wedding photographs, if there were any, had never been produced.

Since Mother had a cousin named Paul and since it’s the custom among Ashkenazim to name a child after a dead relative, it’s likely that our brother was named after the same relative as that cousin.  “But what about his middle name?” my sister persisted, referring to Reuben, our brother’s second name.  He was probably named after our grandmother, Rebecca, I told her, who had died a year or so before he was born.  Ashkenazim typically give their children two names, at least one of which is a Hebrew name or its secular variant.  My sister’s middle name, for example, is Deborah which in Hebrew is D’vora (bee).

When called to the Torah, to serve as a witness, so to speak, while the Torah portion is read aloud to the congregation, one gives one’s Hebrew name.  Having grown up in a largely secular family, whose only religious observance was attendance at High Holiday Services and the prohibition of pork at home, I had never been called to the Torah, even when I became of age at 13.   Indeed, I didn’t know if I had a Hebrew name. 

The issue arose in the mid-seventies when my mentor and colleague, Joshua Fishman, and I were in Honolulu, teaching at the Linguistic Institute of America’s summer institute, held that year at the University of Hawaii.  We lived in the same hotel and I walked with him each Shabbat to services at an orthodox congregation.  “You know,” he said, “as guests, we may be called to the Torah.  What’s your Hebrew name?”

I told him I didn’t know, but since my first name begins with an R (in case you were wondering, people, Anchises is not my real name), I offered Rahamim as a possibility.  It’s not only a beautiful name but it has a beautiful meaning, compassion.  Joshua laughed.  “That’s no name for a boy from Vilna,” he said. (I, of course, wasn’t born in Vilna, but all four of my grandparents were.)  Rahamim is a name given to Sephardim, not Ashkenazim, Joshua reminded me.  So I chose the Hebrew name Aryeh (lion) based on my middle name, Leon.  When called to the Torah, I’m Aryeh ben Moshe ve-Leah , although I’m only guessing that these were the Hebrew names of my parents, Maurice and Lena.

For whom was each member of my family named?  What Hebrew names were they given if any?  What were the characteristics, the occupations, the history of our namesakes?  Why hadn't I asked while there was still time to do so?  Now there’s no one left to tell me.


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