A Rosenberg By Any Other Name

...Public because of his name...

...Further, knowing whether or not someone is Jewish can provide insights apart from stereotypes...

...It may involve, too, one's view of Jewry: are we sojourners only temporarily on these shores, or are we an adaptive tribe whose role is to reflect and interpret the culture around us...

...Though she hasn't done so yet, she toys with the idea of taking his surname, partly because she feels it would be useful to her professionally: she raises funds for a left-of-center political organization...

...Interestingly, she married someone named Blumenthal...

...In fairness, I must report that a Jewish friend who, like me, does not have a Jewish name—hers is run-of-the-mill Waspy—tells me she has felt cheated by the experience...

...When I dropped one of my own in response, he warmed to me as a fellow "Litvak"—hoping to win favor thereby...

...In fact, I even went to the trouble of seeking out an aged paternal uncle to inquire about the obscure origins of my own name, in part to determine whether it might have antecedents worth adopting...

...I would propose, however, that they not view those who do opt to Anglicize their names—a process that continues unto the present generation—as renegades inspired by shame...

...Of course, change of name is one thing, change of nose quite another...

...And thereby, I got a name...

...Consider, for instance, how one man's life might have differed if I had inherited not my father's last name but my mother's...

...He responds indignantly, with the righteousness of a fifth-grader whose teacher has just mispronounced Chanukah...

...But the choice of words is also intended to simplify matters generally...

...But, on reflection, I am struck anew by his strong emotion, feelings which obviously stem from a lifetime spent as what one could call a public Jew...

...It could fairly be said that my ethnicity has been in the ear of the beholder...

...And what is the value, two generations or so after the last crowds passed through the Ellis Island turnstiles, of retaining classic, identifiably Jewish names...

...It was a fact of life I learned early from childhood friends...

...Goldstein, however, does not see it that way...

...Needless to say, such information did not inspire emotional ties to my surname...

...Levy and Rubin, among others, can be traced to names of the 12 tribes...

...Howard Husock is Staff Writer for The Boston Phoenix, a weekly newspaper...

...Perhaps this is a new social doctrine: surname is destiny...

...In high school, she says, she felt her last name left her isolated socially, that a Jewish name would have given her a ready-made place in a circle of Jews in her predominantly non-Jewish school...

...In light of the personal experience of winding up with a relatively neutral name—through no design of my own—I think the answer can be yes...

...The appellation stuck only until he reached Brooklyn, where relatives were aghast and sent the perplexed immigrant back to authorities for a name more Jewish...

...There is no doubt that Jewish names do have their uses and advantages...

...How did it arrive at its present form...

...They are, in their way, announcements about background, if not faith...

...Jews always respond better to people with Jewish names," she reports...

...After all, many were acquired not that long ago during the Jewish sojourns through eastern Europe and Germany and would seem to be no more inherently Jewish than borscht...

...Yet he has apparently concluded on the basis of my name—one not recognizably Jewish—that I am not a Jew...

...As the conversation nears an end, I decide to wish Goldstein a "happy holiday," a culturally neutral salutation chosen, in part, out of habit ingrained by regular dealings with an Irish-Catholic state bureaucracy for which good yom-tov would simply not do...

...There should be little disagreement that the Cohens, Rosenbergs, and Goldbergs of our name-pool are more than neutral identifiers...

...But so what if Jewish names are arbitrary designations, one might argue...

...Thousands of us, wishing to avoid job quotas, typecasting or that greenhorn image, made the change...

...It makes a point, nonetheless...

...Not a problem on a par with the future of the West Bank—nor even the high price of smoked fish—but, nonetheless, a longtime cultural issue for American Jews, one with at least two sides...

...Names bequeathed us may not be worthy of being set in stone, nor even punched in plastic, as is more likely to happen first these days...

...There was a time when such scorn appealed to me...

...American Jews realized long ago that our names are so interpreted, evidenced by a tradition of name changing and shortening that began as soon as Jewish immigrants disembarked...

...And that her peers would have thought she was smarter...

...Some do have noble origins in antiquity...

...He has assumed, what's more, that I've taken his classic surname as a sure sign that he, indeed, is...

...They carry implications which social security numbers simply do not...

...The capricious-ness of the latter process is exemplified by the story of a friend's grandfather, whose long Polish name was changed by Ellis Island immigration authorities—perhaps at the end of a long day—to O'Reilly...

...I am not about to suggest which view should prevail...

...Happy holiday," he snorts...

...Still others came from a stock selection of Jewish names passed out arbitrarily by customs officials...

...Their son should not have any of the name-related problems of his mother, at least, not with the name Max Blumenthal...

...I'd have lost the option of whether I wanted to inform people about my religion as soon as I shook their hands...

...Even relatively formal phone calls end with obligatory holiday-related remarks...

...Is a cause really more meritorious if its fund raiser has a Jewish name...

...Or that the Italian boss I had on one summer job would not have expressed the view that Jewish women make good lovers because Jewish men do not satisfy them...

...Name-changing seemed just another manifestation of the submerging of eastern European Jewish culture, a repression that has seen the decline of everything from Yiddish theater to steam baths— and which I generally lament...

...That's what you Christians always say so you won't offend us Jews...

...The credit is apparently due some unknown Philadelphia schoolteacher who, upon asking my father's older sister—who spoke only Yiddish when she started school—to pronounce the family name, wrote down the response as H-u-s-o-c-k...

...They are assumptions of an ilk Goldstein likely makes all the time, half-unconsciously...

...And I'm certainly not about 16 urge the Shapiros and Blumenthals of the world to become Shaws and Browns...

...There was Strat-ton whose father had been Salz-man, Winston whose father had been Weinstein...

...Does Jew-ishness supercede other values...

...Goldstein, whose job includes public relations, is probably lucky I'm not the bumbling goy he's taken me for...

...Who can be sure what holiday an apparent Jew celebrates today...

...The cause of ecumenism would likely have been set back at least one "holiday" season...

...His work has appeared in The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review...

...He is also, clearly, someone with an identifiably Jewish name, a fact which is about to influence our exchange...

...Such Roots-style impulses as that which prompted writer David Wallechin-sky to take the old country surname of his father Irving Wallace seemed like healthy reactions to American homogenization...

...There the conversation ends...

...Consider the time when, interviewing a building owner suspected of arson, I overheard him drop a Yiddish phrase to his business partner...

...He was unsuccessful...

...Goldstein's faux pas prompts me to wonder, though...

...But how much of the camaraderie of Jewish names results less from shared values than from some sort of granfaloon—Kurt Vonne-gut's term for false extended communities like those of Hoosiers or Legionnaires...

...I'll leave that for someone else to defend...

...Inevitably, there would have been those who viewed me first as a Jew—and who perhaps did not look beyond...

...I was able to learn that Husock (pronounced Hue-sic) is actually a poor transliteration of a Yiddish name that was closer to Chusid...

...If my name were Howard Levine, for that matter, I would never have been mistaken as Czech in my native Cleveland (where the phone book is filled with names like Husak), nor would Boston secretaries have put me through to officials under the impression that my name was Cusack, a plus in an Irish town...

...My own family faintly scoffed at such changes with a mild scorn roughly equivalent to that directed at neighbors who hung red and green "Chanukah" decorations in their picture windows...

...They can, indeed, provide a sort of identity badge—a fashionable symbol in the current anti-melting pot era...

...I'd have been, in that event, one Howard Levine—and likely lived a life more similar to that of state official Goldstein...

...Is there any reason not to have one...

...As things go, however, I merely correct him and Goldstein, embarrassed, stammers an apology...

...They inevitably evoke a series of cultural assumptions...

...Most of us— like my older relatives who scrutinize the news in search of Jewish names—do so, in one way or another...

...We have never had a discussion that even remotely related to religion...

...I am finishingjust such a conversation with someone I'll call Goldstein, an official of a Massachusetts state agency and someone with whom, as a journalist, I like to remain on good terms...

...One can be relatively sure that the South Boston man I once interviewed in the midst of a racial disturbance would not have confided his feelings about Jewish control of the news media...

...If you accept the idea that one's actions, to an extent, reflect the perception others have of you, then being a Husock, not a Levine, has likely had a significant subconscious effect on Husock, inspiring interest in cultures besides his own...

...How many other gaffes, hasty conclusions or prejudgments are made in the name of names...

...Not perspectives I particularly agreed with, mind you—but ones I was interested to know exist...

...Perhaps all of this comes down to a personal decision about assimilation, about the extent to which one wants to maintain ethnic distinction...