What’s In a Name
How we get them, how they shape us
A few weeks before giving birth to a baby girl, my daughter calls for a consult on the protocol of baby naming, Jewish-style.
The Jewish tradition is to name a child for someone no longer living. My daughter does not tell me any of the names she and her husband are contemplating. All she wants to know is how literal they have to be when naming their daughter after someone.
I tease her, suggesting this is a question worthy of Talmud scholars.
It’s only after the baby is born that I have fuller sense of her question. Judaism is a mixed bag of observance in terms of how strictly rituals are followed. That applies to everything from life events (the birth of a child, bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, weddings) to holiday practices.
Rituals may get diluted as generations pass, but when it comes to baby naming, we honor the dead by giving the baby a Hebrew name and an English one. Case in point: My daughter was named after my grandmother, Ida, an English name that just didn’t resonate. Once I learned her Hebrew name, Chaya Sara, my daughter’s was a no brainer: she would be Sara.
It’s not uncommon for an English name to be close enough to the Hebrew name without necessarily replicating it. What matters most is the spirit of the naming though Orthodox Jews are likely to be more strict in their practices.
So my granddaughter’s first name, Lexi, gets the ‘L’ from more than one person loved and no longer with us. Her middle name, Hannah, is solely for my daughter’s beloved grandmother, Helen, Hebrew name Chana.
The derivation of my own name is less nuanced and no one from my parents’ generation is around to explain to me how Devorah Esther became Deborah Estelle.
Devorah in Hebrew means bee. Esther was a queen, the heart of the Purim story.
Sara, I say with a smile, denotes princess.
So here we are, the queen and the princess (though truth be told, I’m more the hard-working bee whose name I carry).
I have a nephew named Dylan and a niece named Adira. Sometimes I think we give our children names to remind us of our own predispositions and the era in which they were born. Other times their names are meant to stand out, mark their uniqueness.
Family and friends from my early life still call me Debbie. Is the diminutive of names — Deborah/Debbie, Regina/Reg/Reggie, Howard/Howie, James/Jimmy — derived from affection or does it simply sound less formal? Even today, I can introduce myself to someone as Deborah and they’ll introduce me to someone else as Debbie.
It isn’t worth making a fuss over, and it wasn’t until my early working days that someone actually asked what I wanted to be called. ‘Deborah’ just rolled off my tongue. Maybe we outgrow childhood names.
I know of more than one person who simply changed their name completely, and not necessarily within the context of transitioning from one sex to another. Just woke up one day and decided the name they were given just didn’t fit. My husband, not happy with seeing his middle name on his driver’s license, had to go through the process of legally removing it from his birth certificate before the DMV would make the change.
Then there are nicknames. Initials that stand in for names. Pen names. Stage names.
— Born Mary Anne Evans, George Eliot is said to have adopted a male pen name to set her work apart from what she saw as “silly novels by lady novelists.” Reading Silas Marner in high school left an indelible impression on me.
— A contemporary literary hero of mine, Elena Ferrante, had the chutzpah to keep her identity out of the public eye when she took the publishing world by storm with her Neapolitan Novels. No interviews. No photos. Just a writer committed to letting the work speak for itself.
Based on investigative reporting, the consensus is that Elena Ferrante is in fact the Italian translator Anita Raja or maybe it’s Raja’s husband, the novelist Domenico Starnone. The plot thickens when we learn that her adopted name pays homage to the Italian novelist Elsa Morante.
— Bob Fusari, a producer on Lady Gaga’s debut album, “The Fame,” reportedly called her “Gaga” because her voice and style reminded him of the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga.” In a text to her early on, his phone did that annoying (in this case fortuitous) auto correct and changed “Radio” to “Lady.”
Gaga is said to have embraced “Lady Gaga” as a fitting name for her persona. And so much easier to remember than her given name, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
There are indeed stories in names. As Louise Erdrich tells it in an essay that appeared in Granta on how Native American women used to be named, “There once were women named Standing Strong, Fish Bones, Different Thunder. . . Everyone loved Musical Cloud but children hid from Dressed in Stone. Lying Down Grass had such a gentle voice and touch but no one dared cross She Black of Heart.”
Names are certainly evocative and perception plays its part. Whatever traditions we hold onto in naming our children brings some continuity to our lives, reminding us that we are not born into a vacuum.
Which brings me back to the the princess and the queen and the newborn moving in my arms exactly as she did in utero, albeit now floating in that twilight place between the nameless and the named.
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