Wherefore art thou Rosenberg?

The idea that many people coming in from Europe in the early 20th century changed their names at Ellis Island -- or had their names changed for them by immigration — is a persistent one. Immigrants’ names were supposedly switched out for names that could be more easily spelled by Americans or that obscured their ethnicity (or Jewishness). 

Yet there is counter evidence, says Sara Lipton. "A fine scholarly book [A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: a history of Jewish name changing in America by Kirsten Fermaglich] … definitively proved that no names were changed at Ellis; they were changed by legal petition [by the immigrants themselves] between 1920 and 1960.” Nevertheless, Lipton also notes, “many [contemporary Jews] indignantly insist[] that their own family names were indeed changed at Ellis Island.”

“My own father openly told his children that he changed his name because of anti-Semitism,” says Lipton, clearly skeptical of those claiming the changes were imposed. “I doubt he was alone in being so forthright.” Those who changed names, then, wanted to be less a target for the haters. But wouldn’t it be particularly humiliating to change your name for this reason? Where’s your pride in your heritage? Would it make a difference if you felt little connection to the name you were leaving behind? That would make abandoning it easier, wouldn’t it?

“[I]t is worth noting that the names Jews surrendered … were of relatively recent origin. Eastern and Central European Jews only assumed surnames in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Austrian, Prussian, and Russian laws required them to do so. … [N]ames like Rosenberg, Greenberg, and Lefkowitz were surely not essential links to [honored forefathers]. Isn’t it possible that Jews fleeing persecution and pogroms might have felt little attachment to names imposed by the very governments that had persecuted them, derived from towns and landscapes from which they fled? That they might bear the name Rose no less proudly than Rosenberg?”

By the way, in reference to the Shakespeare-derived title of this post, “wherefore” doesn’t mean “where” but rather “why.” Thus the title post could be rewritten, “Why are you called Rosenberg?”

source: 

“The Jewish Authenticity Trap” by Sara Lipton

The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022, v.LXIX n.18

Jesus, failed writer

I wasn’t sure what to make of Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Much of the essay is stories of writers down on their luck, the implication being that’s the standard situation. He stretches that to include famous and bestselling writers by suggesting they, too, often feel undervalued and ill-done-by. Marche digs back into history for the misfortunes of Herman Melville and Jane Austen, then much farther back to ancient China when Tu Fu and Li Po (or Du Fu and Li Bai, as Marche’s choice of transliteration spells them) wandered the nation trying to put together a living, or even back to Confucius who, it seems, couldn’t find a new patron and, one gets the sense, starved to death. The essay culminates with a paragraph on the Son of God:

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud* to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

Well, that takes your thesis to the apex, Mr Marche. After reading the above I was even less sure what I was to take away. I don’t aspire to Jesus-level consequences for my work. I don’t even dream of paying the bills with my writing. I do suffer. Yeah. There’s that.

source:

On Writing and Failure

or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

by Stephen Marche

2023. Biblioasis, Windsor ONT Canada

*update 10/10/23: David in a comment notes that I posted this as "out lout" -- perhaps Jesus fans were trying to out lout each other? It was merely I typo so I am correcting it. Funny tho.

“the closest thing … to love”

There aren’t a lot of records of true gay love stories, the farther back you go, the fewer. And far back includes living memory. While browsing the stacks of the Doe Library at UC Berkeley, I came across A Union Like Ours, Scott Bane’s new biography of two men and their marriage-in-all-but-name. F. O. Matthiessen sounded vaguely familiar. He was famous in mid-century, a well-known and somewhat radical academic. He seems to be credited with the founding of American Studies, American history and literature as a worthy discipline, a change from the up-to-then taken for granted Europeward raptured gaze. The other man in A Union Like Ours is Russell Cheney, a painter who achieved his greatest recognition as a regional painter, of Maine mainly.

Frank (the F. of F. O.) and Russell met on a transAtlantic crossing, and quickly fell in love. They built a life together, which lasted twenty years. When Russell died of a heart attack in the house they shared, Frank was stricken. Says author Bane about Frank’s decision to remain:

Matthiessen acknowledged that being in the house was painful, but he opted to stay there instead of going away because, as he described to a friend, his pain was the closest thing he had to love.

Pain is a powerful sensation. I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer numbness, but philosophically I get it. 

source: 

A Union Like Ours: the love story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney

by Scott Bane

2022. Bright Leaf / University of Massachusetts Press, Boston MA