Calvin Trillin On A Topic Close To My Heart
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posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 11:23 PM
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NY Times
November 15, 2013
What Cynthia Ozick Taught Me About My Grandfather
By CALVIN TRILLIN
Cynthia Ozick and I have long differed on the name of my grandfather. Every decade or so, we run into each other at some New York gathering, and after exchanging pleasantries, I say, again, that the first name of my paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Ukraine, was Kusel (pronounced k’SEEL.) She informs me, once more, that it was Yekutiel, a name I’d never heard before I met her. Our discussions have always been cordial. Considering the fact that she is someone who is celebrated for her erudite essays as well as for her novels, she has been admirably free of condescension. I would compare the tone of our disagreement to a respectful difference in interpretation by two scholars — or maybe between one scholar and another person.
Cynthia Ozick never met my grandfather. She grew up in the Bronx; he lived in St. Joseph, Mo. It’s true, I’ll admit, that I never met my grandfather, either — he died before I was born — but I was named after him. In America, Central and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who traditionally named their children in memory of a departed relative, concocted a custom of rendering the name in English with a name that begins with the same sound. A name like Shlomo would be passed on as a “Hebrew name,” but the birth certificate of Shlomo’s grandson would identify him as Sherman or Sheldon. From Kusel I became Calvin. I can’t remember which departed relative was responsible for my middle name, Marshall. When I’m asked where that name is from, I always say: “It’s an old family name. Not our family, but an old family name.”
Cynthia Ozick’s argument, laid out in a closely reasoned letter she sent me a dozen years ago, included the fact that Yekutiel was a common name where my grandfather came from. At the time, the Hebrew letter taf was pronounced in Europe as an “S” — a pronunciation that lasted throughout my childhood. After the founding of Israel, Sephardic Hebrew, which pronounced the taf as a “T,” took over — completely, by the way, without my consent. Kusel, she said, was a shortening of what would have sounded like Yekusiel. She even rounded up some distinguished Yekusiels, like Yekusiel ben Yehuda Ha-Cohen of Prague, a grammarian who lived in the 13th century.
My side of the argument would be summarized fairly, I think, as, “He was my grandfather.”
I assume Cynthia Ozick mentioned people like Yekusiel ben Yehuda Ha-Cohen in a considerate effort to soften the blow a bit when her letter made it obvious that I was wrong. She had no way of knowing that what Yekusiel ben Yehuda Ha-Cohen was to grammar, my forebears were to stubbornness. It is not our custom to admit that we were wrong simply because an overwhelming and indisputable body of evidence has been marshaled to indicate as much.
Enter Cousin Keith — an English professor in North Carolina whose Hebrew name is, of course, Kusel. Not long ago, Cousin Keith emailed me a picture of our grandfather’s gravestone. Most of the inscription was in Hebrew, but the first name was in large English block letters: Kusel. “Aha!” I said out loud.
Then I read the body of Cousin Keith’s email. He said that he had the Hebrew writing translated by his sister, who’s a rabbi — almost certainly the only female rabbi to come out of Salina, Kan. The Hebrew writing identified the deceased, “a humble and upright man,” as Yekutiel, son of Gadaliyahu. The world knew him as Kusel, Cousin Keith wrote, but Kusel was just a nickname. Our grandfather’s name was Yekutiel.
This left hanging the question of what I would do the next time I spotted Cynthia Ozick at some gathering. We are, after all, about due. “That’s easy,” I told Cousin Keith. “I’ll avoid her.”
“But I didn’t mean that,” I later told my daughters, in bringing them up-to-date on the status of their great-grandfather’s name. “I’ll have to tell her that she was right, even if that means being the first person in my family ever to admit having been wrong. Maybe she’ll at least let me stick to the non-Sephardic pronunciation.”
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” my daughter Abigail asked.
“What’s that?”
“You and Cousin Keith have the wrong names,” she said. “If you were named in memory of someone named Yekutiel, your names begin with the wrong sound.”
She was right. I informed Cousin Keith of Abigail’s observation in my next email. It began, “Dear Cousin Yancey.”
Calvin Trillin is a staff writer at The New Yorker and The Nation’s Deadline Poet.
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