The Art of Self-Naming
For the longest time, before I was married, I could never imagine changing my name. I thought the idea of changing your name just because you married someone was completely sexist and stupid and made no sense, and why would I ever do that?
At the same time I had some romantic notions (I still do), and meanwhile friends around me were doing this wonderful thing where they each changed their names to something completely new. I also started to recognize the value and loveliness of having a “family name,” and started to kind of dig the idea.
So when I was preparing to get married, my then-fiance and I talked about finding a name we could both adopt. He was Russian-born, had lived in Israel during much of his childhood, and when he moved to Brooklyn as a teenager, he went with a different, more Americanized last name for a while. So it didn’t seem like he had a huge attachment to his name. When it came down to it, though, he told me that he felt too identified with his name to give it up (as I recall he didn’t think he was “strong enough”), and so we never came up with anything. As an alternative, I decided to essentially take his name, but to do it Russian-style: I added the “a” to the end to take the feminine form.
The result of this has been interesting. Naturally, plenty of people get it wrong, which is fine; people have been getting my name wrong my whole life. But I’ve also had people find the combination of my first and (new) last names beautiful — liquid, melodious, many wonderful adjectives have been applied. I myself have found the name powerful for my Rubenfeld work, for acting, and for writing. My old last name always had a kind of clunky feel to me, with its hard Germanic tz and so on.
Yet since my divorce, I’ve had a weird relationship to the name. It still feels like mine, in the sense that it’s not wholly his, due to the feminization. Even his mother, who lived in Petersberg for half her life, doesn’t have the name; she went to the Americanized version (without the final “a”) when she came to the States. I appreciated it when the female judge corrected his lawyer, who called me “Ms. Dolinov” in court. But there are other weirdnesses. People think I’m Russian, for example, which I’m not even a little bit; this leads to me explaining that I’m divorced to total strangers. There’s still a strong association with him, and the connotative sense that the name originally has in its feminized form (essentially, that I’m his property).
And then there’s the fact that in the wake of our separation, I reconnected with a side of my family that I hadn’t seen since I was a child, and found that in fact, I’m far closer to my father’s people than I realized. They are the tall, strong, fair-skinned and loud-laughed lovers of life I had been waiting my whole life to spend Christmas with, eating and drinking and singing and geeking out and living life to the absolute fullest. Of course, none of the ones I’m close with have the name, either, since it’s mainly my father’s sister I’m thinking of, and she took her husband’s equally (if not more) Germanic name, and my magnificent opera-singer twins-separated-at-birth cousin kept it. But still, when my crazy German engineer uncle saw me for the first time since I was nine years old, the first words out of his Teutonic-accented mouth were, “Well, you’re definitely a Hutzley!”
And there it is: the name I heard throughout my upbringing as the undesirable set of traits: “that Hutzley laugh,” the discouragement from getting “husky” like them, my father’s mental illness and irresponsibility and shame. And it makes me want to reclaim it.
Going back to “Hutzley,” though. It’s so unglamorous. I don’t know. I remember how hard it always felt to say my whole name out loud, how awkward and ungainly it felt, how ugly.
My ex’s last name and its feminine ending added to my mystique, gave me a sense of being closer in my name to who I wanted to be in my life.
But now it feels like things are coming home, coming down from that place. Masks coming off. Maybe the need for such a name is no longer there: this made-up name from a made-up name. The name, even before my feminization of it, was (according to him) invented: a theatrical Russian Jew’s mask for his Jewishness, an invented Russian name meaning “valley man,” to shield him from persecution for what, to him, was a terribly ugly name, a name to get him killed. For that original Dolinov, that made up name was a life-saver; to several generations down the line, it’s romantic, but ultimately false.
The other weird thing is that I realize that up until recently, I’d been avoiding the Russian things that remind me of him. A week after the divorce was agreed, I made shchi (Russian kitchen-sink soup) again for the first time in years, and started thinking about doing a vodka shooting instructional — something I learned from him, but absorbed enough into my psyche to make it mine. And then, Rob Breszny — writer of the “Free Will Astrology” column, to which I’ve been subscribed now for…15 years, maybe? — wrote something oddly apt.
In his horoscopes (the only ones I read; his pronoia philosophy and crazy, Tom-Robbins-esque way of looking at the world keeps me sane at times), he usually has some kind of theme. At first, I thought that the theme was Russian authors, but looking at all the horoscopes that week, it seemed like there wasn’t much of a theme. It was only the three I look at for myself — the three that come right in a row in the calendar and happen to be my moon, sun and rising — that quote Russian authors and ideas specifically.
And so Libra, my moon (ruler of emotions), said to me:
Poet Barbara Hamby says the Russian word *ostyt* can be used to describe “a cup of _tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool.” A little birdie told me that this may be an apt metaphor for a current situation in your life. I completely understand if you wish the tea had lost less of its original warmth, and was exactly the temperature you like, neither burning nor tepid. But that won’t happen unless you try to reheat it, which would change the taste. So what should you do? One way or the other, a compromise will be necessary. Do you want the lukewarm tea or the hot tea with a different flavor?
Scorpio, the sign with which I’ve identified so strongly since I was 12, with its intensity and silence and broodiness and wow, my sun sign, said:
Russian writer Ivan Turgenev was a Scorpio. Midway through his first novel *Rudin,* his main character Dmitrii Nikolaevich Rudin alludes to a problem that affects many Scorpios. “Do you see that apple tree?” Rudin asks a woman companion. “It is broken by the weight and abundance of its own fruit.” Ouch! I want very much for you Scorpios to be spared a fate like that in the coming weeks. That’s why I propose that you scheme about how you will express the immense creativity that will be welling up in you. Don’t let your lush and succulent output go to waste.
And Sagittarius, the acceptance of which has made many things about myself — especially how other people see me, which I wasn’t very much in touch with until the last ten years or so — so much clearer:
Asking you Sagittarians to be patient may be akin to ordering a bonfire to burn more politely. But it’s my duty to inform you of the cosmic tendencies, so I will request your forbearance for now. How about some nuances to make it more palatable? Here’s a quote from author David G. Allen: “Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.” Novelist Gustave Flaubert: “Talent is a long patience.” French playwright Moliere: “Trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.” Writer Ann
Lamott: “Hope is a revolutionary patience.” I’ve saved the best for last, from Russian novelist Irène Némirovsky: “Waiting is erotic.”
So what is with all the Russians?? I remain utterly confused as to what direction to go in with this name thing, as I delve with my new therapist into childhood work, as I figure out who I am again, again, again. Meanwhile I begin to identify more and more with German things; it turns out I am approximately half German, if not more (my mother’s father was half German; my father’s father was half German, half Swiss German, so…?). My maiden name, it turns out, is Swiss German, with the usual Ellis Island peculiarities. I don’t know.
Perhaps some entirely new name will present itself. What experiences have you had with self-naming?
