Sunday, October 10, 2021

NAMES

My grandfather on my father’s side was born in Paris in 1879 and was named Barnet. The family name was Zarembowich.  In 1880 his parents emigated to the United States, entering at Castle Garden New York. A skeptical immigration official renamed his father Abraham Wolff and so, at least in America, we became the Wolff family. My grandfather was an active member of and a  leader in the Socialist party in New York City, and had a comrade named Abe Shiplacof. When my grandmother, Ella Nislow Wolff and Abe Shiplacof’s wife both became pregnant, Barney and Abe made a little agreement that the first one to have a son would name him Karl Marx. Abe’s wife had a boy, so when my father was born shortly thereafter he was named Walter Harold Wolff, a name of no significance. When the two wives became pregnant again, it was agreed that the first one to have a boy would name him Friedrich Engels, but once again the Shiplacofs won the race and so my uncle was given the name “Robert Ingersoll” after a 19th-century orator known as “the great agnostic.”

 

My parents’ first child was my big sister Barbara, who almost immediately was nicknamed Bobs.  When I was born, I was named Robert Paul, but it was impossible to have two children in the family named Bobs and Bob, so I became Rob. At some point during my growing up I declared my independence by announcing that I would be known to the world as Bob. To this day, I am known as Bob to my friends but Rob to my family – except for my cousins, the children of my father’s younger brother, Benjamin. For some reason, Barney and Ella did not give Ben a middle name and this lack apparently rankled so deeply that after Ben married Fanny, he gave his two children two middle names each to compensate.  The two of them, inheriting from their father an appreciation of the importance of middle names, always referred to me and addressed me as “Robert Paul.”

 

When my first wife was pregnant with our first child, we debated about names if it were a boy. We were both rather taken by “Jonathan Edward” but gave that up when we realized that the little boy’s initials would be JEW.  We settled, for no particular reason, on Patrick Gideon Wolff. Since I do not like the name Pat I called our son even when he was a little baby Patrick. Later on, I took to calling him by his initials PG and this morphed into “Peege” which was my special nickname for him. Nobody else in the world called Patrick “Peege” until he started as a teenager competing in high-pressure chess tournaments. The other young hotshot chess players heard me calling him “Peege” and they thought it was amusing so for a while that was what he was called in the chess world.

 

My younger son we named Tobias Barrington Wolff, the middle name coming from his godfather Barrington Moore, Jr.  Since he was a delightfully cherubic little boy, he quite naturally came to be known in the family as Toby. This ended one day when he informed me soberly that henceforward he would be known as “Tobias.” I took this as it was intended, not as a request but as a command, and from that day to this I have never called him “Toby” again.

 

So I was “Rob” to my family, save for my cousins Tony and Cora, to whom I was “Robert Paul” and I was “Bob” to the world. I became “Robert Paul Wolff” as a result of a series of comic confusions when I was a young man at Harvard. Starting when I was a 17-year-old sophomore and continuing on as a young Instructor at Harvard I made a good deal of noise about one thing and another politically and got confused with a very prominent, rather conservative, and also rather fat Professor of History named “Robert Lee Wolff.” To distinguish myself from Prof. Wolff, who by 1961 was chair of the Harvard History Department and publicly offended by being confused with a young left-wing whippersnapper, I adopted “Robert Paul Wolff” as my professional name and it has stuck to me for the past 60 years.

12 comments:

  1. Prof. Wolff,

    I assume that you and your son are aware that he shares his name with the writer Tobias Wolff, who is the author of numerous superbly written short stories, and whose memoir about his difficult childhood, during which he was psychologically and physically abused by his step-father, was made into the movie, “This Boy’s Life,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Tobias Wolff, and Robert DeNiro as the step-father.

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  2. Not only that, but for a year my son was a visiting professor at Stanford Law school, where the writer Tobias Wolff was teaching writing in the college. They were, I believe, the only two people in the United States named Tobias Wolff! Needless to say, it got rather confusing.

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  3. That's great. The writer Tobias Wolff is not 76 years old, and if they stood next to each other, I am sure people could identify which was the law professor, and which was the writer.

    I have a good friend who is a criminal attorney in Michigan. He has told me that his grandfather, Jacob Lifschitz, was the Secretary of the Communist Party in Michigan back in the 1920s-30s. I sent him your post about your grandfather, and he believes your grandfather and his grandfather knew each other. (The family has since changed their surname to “Leaf,” for obvious reasons.)

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  4. Correction: "not 75 years old" (which could mean he is of any age), should read "now 76 years old"

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  5. Regarding name confusions, I have two short (I promise) anecdotes about the subject.

    I have a name, which you and your readers know is rather unusual. There is another attorney in Michigan who has the same surname, and the same first name, except he spells his name “Mark,” and I spell my name “Marc.” For a period of years, I would receive telephone calls from people claiming to be my client, but I did not recognize their names. When they would call and ask me about the status of their case, I would break out in a sweat and ask to put them on hold, while I desperately searched my memory trying to remember what their case was about. When I got back on the line, I would ask them where their attorney’s office was located, at which point I told them, with relief, that they had the wrong M.S. This started happening with some frequency, so when it occurred I immediately told them they had the wrong M.S. and gave them the correct number to call. One day, I was attending a law seminar on, I believe, worker’s compensation law, and the moderator of the program announced that there was an urgent call from the office of M.S. Two people stood up, and we looked at each other and started laughing. (The phone call was for him.)

    My father’s family was originally from Connecticut and his grandfather was an Orthodox Jew. One of his sons was less religious and would work on the Sabbath, prohibited in Orthodox Judaism. So he was ostracized by his father and he moved to Michigan and married someone who was not Jewish. His wife prepared a genealogy of her husband’s family which went back to their roots in Moldavia, which was then in the Pale of the Settlement in Russia (where Czarist Russia confined its Jewish citizens). The genealogy was circulated among all of the relatives throughout the U.S. When I was attending graduate school in 1988 at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, at the beginning of one of my classes the professor was taking roll call and announced the name “Eric S.” I raised my hand and said my first name is Marc, not Eric. Another student raised his hand and said that he was Eric S. During a break I asked him if he had a relative who had prepared a genealogy of her husband’s family. Yes, it was his mother!

    That, that, that's all folks.

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  6. Names.

    I have my father's name with a 'Junior' attached. It has been both confusing and interesting at times. It has happened over the years that the Governor of my state has called me by mistake, and more recently the Mayor of my city. And of course there is the more famous former Governor of California that calls himself Jerry Brown also. I'm pretty sure I got to vote for that Jerry Brown for President of the United States in one primary election. Which is kind of strange I guess. Seeing your own name on an election for President is just weird. But I voted for myself (or him) anyways. I think he might have actually won in my state that year. Had he won overall, I'm sure it would have been more strange.

    I am happy to share my name with my father and Governor Brown, despite the occasional confusion.

    Jerry Brown

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  7. My experience is very different. I have never run into by chance someone with my last name nor has anyone ever confused me with anyone else because of it. My last name has been the theme of stupid jokes by bureaucrats and secretaries of doctors and dentists in several countries and languages who asked me again and again over the phone how to spell it and then inevitably misspell it in spite of the fact that I spell it for them slowly letter by letter.

    Spelling my last name might be a good test of the real literacy skills (not particularly impressive) of the mass of the population.

    If you google "Wallerstein", you find others with that last name, including the late Immanuel, who are not my relatives (or at least not known relatives), but there are not many of us. The world may well be better off for that (the last remark being a typical Wallerstein witticism).

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  8. s. wallerstein, the only problem I have with your name is when I want to respond to a comment you have made. And then there is a debate that goes in my mind as should I call you s. or Mr. Wallerstein or whatever. Which usually results in no comment whatsoever. Probably a good thing mostly.

    But I guess it is reasonable to ask how you would prefer to be addressed as in the future? 'Professor' is already taken by the way so don't pick that.

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  9. Jerry Brown,

    Whatever you feel good with is fine with me. Thanks for asking. That's very considerate of you.

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  10. Professor Wolff --

    This is a great post. Names are a tricky thing since it is a key identifier of who you are. My first and middle names are James Weston. The Weston comes from my father, which is his middle name as well. As a baby and young child, my parents gave me the nickname Jamie -- a popular boy name at the time. However, as fate or luck would have it, by the mid-1970s and early 80's, Jamie became a very popular name for girls. For me, this happened during those critical years of junior high and high school where having a girl name served as a prime target for incessant ridicule. It was at that point when I announced to my parents (and to everyone else I knew) that I would no longer go by Jamie -- it would now be Jim. I even ordered a high school jacket with the name Jim embroidered on the sleeve so there would be no mistaking the change. From that point on, the name Jim stuck and took root -- much to my relief. The sole exception was my undergraduate college room mate who for some unexplained reason decided to refer to me as "JW."

    Fast forward to about two years ago. I have since become part of a rather large Zoom/email working group where my name shows up as James. Therefore, everyone in the group refers to me as James despite the fact that I use Jim in my email signature. Sometimes things come full circle.

    -- Jim (at least for now)

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  11. I am sorry to have to tell you that regardless of family lore, immigration officials did not change names at Castle Garden or Ellis Island or other ports of entry. This is a persistent myth in American, particularly Jewish American culture, but it didn't happen. Genaologists have been trying to debunk this myth for years but it remains powerfully entrenched in culture.
    There is a recent book on the history of American Jewish name-changing by Kirsten Fermaglich, A Rosenberg By Any Other Name (NYU Press). https://nyupress.org/9781479867202/a-rosenberg-by-any-other-name/

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  12. Adam,
    Interesting.

    For those who do not have easy access to Fermaglich's book, Fermaglich cites two historians on this in an article she wrote about her research.

    Another, general-interest source, that predates Fermaglich's book:
    Did Ellis Island Officials Really Change the Names of Immigrants?

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