In a comment to someone who had written a beautiful essay remembering a Jewish friend, I told her about the Jewish custom of naming a child after someone you love who has died. It's not a strict custom; often the child is given a different name that begins with the same letter or has the same meaning, or is converted to the appropriate gender. My mother Marsha was named after her uncle Morris, and my brother was named after our grandmother Fanny. Her Hebrew name is Tzipporah, which means a bird, so in Hebrew he's Aleksandr Tzippor. (His first name is just one my mother liked.) It's a way of perpetuating a loving memory, to live on for another generation.
As I was writing, I realized somethign I should have thought about long since. My first and middle names are Paula Kay, after my great-grandmother Pauline and a Great-Aunt Kate (no one seems to be sure if Kate was short for Katherine and anyway her original name was probably in Yiddish). My Hebrew -- actually Yiddish -- names are theirs as well, Pesha Koppel. (That's a phonetic spelling, as Yiddish is properly written in Hebrew characters.) What I had never thought about before is that it's an old tradition. Pauline and Kate would have been named for their relatives, who would have been named for theirs and so on back, most probably for centuries. In all the upheaval that has accompanied the last two centuries of Jewish history, that will prevent me from ever knowing my family history over centuries the way some genealogists of some other ethnicities can, this is a strand that ties me to my history. I like that thought.
Posted by dichroic at August 13, 2004 10:18 AM