In front of the rabbi’s
Old Chevrolet station wagon
They saw engraved words on
The wall. They were the words
Of a minor prophet, a disciple
Of Isaiah’s, they later discovered,
A proponent of peace and ‘Walking
Humbly with your God’…they liked
The way the vowels rolled simply
Off the tongue—Little did they realize?
The annoyance, mispronunciations
And taunting that would follow
Later, there was a Bar Mitzvah and
My namesake’s identity came up
Again and I spoke to his philosophy
To the best of my abilities as if I were
Supposed to be an embodiment—
Outside of the synagogue, it was a
Different story, non-Jewish friends,
Teachers, librarians, strangers
Wanted to call me Mike, Michael,
Mikhail, Mick, anything but the two syllable
Sound that seemed so simple to me
When kids took Earth Science
In junior high, they learned of
Its’ other definitions—
I was the shiny crystalline stuff
They saw embedded in the sidewalk
Or the stuff they sprayed in their shoes
To ward off foot fungus
Either way, they would step on the shiny sparkles
That were me and laugh
Until I would openly smirk or grimace—
Upon reading this tale, someone would
Play me a miniature violin
Of melancholy and point a finger,
Yet, to this very day, people want to say
My name, no matter how obscure or popular
It might get, something other than what it is
Even my friend, Abdullah, and his name
Is Abdullah, and you would think he’d have
No excuse but to learn, calls me Mike no
Matter how often I correct him—

by Micah Zevin
Bronx, NY

The pseudonym Nickie was bestowed upon me by… I have no idea actually. There wasn’t much use of my given name, Nicole, in non-official circumstances until some time in junior high school. Official referring to a large array of situations ranging from botched boarder crossings to an agitated mother who uses the entire tri-nomial in extreme cases. Upon giving your child a handle doesn’t it seem prudent to stop and ruminate on the implications of said name?

Rhyming is the most basic - applying the term basic in every meaning possible - linguistic escapade that trickles in from the dark corners of the mind. Does Nickie rhyme with anything appealing to a pre-adolescent Homo sapien? Roll it over a few times and see what you come up with. I’m wagering a red shoelace and half a pack of cigarettes that there’s nothing complimentary to a pubescent individual that comes to mind in the first five seconds. Upon hearing a name we automatically run it through our own mental relational program to shape and attach it to something that we can remember whether it’s via flattery or humiliation.

The taunting was minor among my cohorts until vocabularies expanded and launched into new realms including words that relate to anatomy, sexuality, texture, and any combination therein. It just so happens that when a concept is new we try to apply it to as many aspects of life as possible. I must have had some grasp on that from an early age since, in the name of minimizing the possibilities of mockery, it became clear to me in the first inklings of adolescence that I needed to revert to my given name. Besides, only strippers are named Nickie.

Nicole “Nickie” Rane Edmison
Oakland, CA

Having a female name has never bothered me.
I cannot recall ever being teased,
although some folks I meet are confused,
thinking I couldn’t be Leslie
and wondering in what way
I presume to represent her.

Leslie as a male name wasn’t popular
even as long ago, 1945, as I was born.
Leslie, according to babynames.com,
peaked in 1902 at slightly less
than 2 percent of all names given
to boys born in the U.S.A. that year.

However, “there was a period before 1945
when more boys were given the name.” I ride
the tail of an echo! “From 1946 on,
increasingly more girls than boys
were named Leslie. In 1997, girls named
Leslie outnumbered boys by 18 times.”

I get lots of junk mail addressed
to Ms. Leslie Gottesman,
and my wife and I get commercial appeals
aimed at lesbian couples.

But I like the name Leslie. As a young man
I was known as Leslie.
I like Leslie better than I like Les—
though Les is okay and is how everyone
knows me, except bureaucrats.

Some things do bother me.
No matter what they guess my full name might be
(Lester? Laszlo?) almost everyone
who meets me riffs in some way on
the proposition “less is more.”
It seems to be irresistible, often
even apologized for, and then delivered!
I never know what to say to this icebreaker

My last name translates from German
as “man of God,” which I always, humbly,
annotate that no doubt one or more
rabbinic father-son franchises, dynasties even,
existed in every eastern European shtetl
such as my grandparents fled
to the U.S.A. from. But I think that more likely
flourished hard-core layabouts
supported and tended by wives and daughters
while they studied the Talmud, daydreamed,
and maybe drank. I’m sure
every shtetl had several of these,
stoners of their time and targets
of the sarcasm “god’s man.”

But my pettest peeve is my own
unsuppressable reaction
to the homonyms of Les and Leslie.
Whether it’s a meeting around a table
or an outdoor rally of thousands,
if the holder of the floor concludes
her remarks with “Lastly…”—I snap
to attention as though it’s me
who’s been directly addressed.

I have met another Les Gottesman,
Lester Gottesman, a doctor I saw
when I was taken ill in New York one time.
An affable, Irish-looking red-haired man,
he stared at pages in a folder on his desk
for a long time and shook his head.

“I’m not used to seeing my name
on that part of the chart,” he said.

by Les Gottesman
San Francisco, CA

Polly
Not short for anything
Just Polly

I’m looking at myself, staring right into my eyes, repeating my name over and over and over until I can’t stop giggling.  Maybe I am seven or eight.  I didn’t know any other Pollys.  They were either British actors or unhappy macaws from Costa Rica.  There.  They were either old birds or birds.

My paternal great grandmother was Pearl.  And as far as the Jewish faith goes, you name your kid after a beloved ancestor; if they are still living you cannot use the same name. I never met Pearl but her portrait at Gramma Harriet’s Beverly Hills apartment was lovely under stucco ceilings overlooking Beverly Blvd.  In an oval mahogany frame, milky white and graphite grey, her eyes looked back at mine.  Same eyes.  Polish, whatever that may mean.  A few times while watching the movies of Krystof Kieslowski, I noticed the same eyes in an actor who reminds me of my father, who reminds me of Roman Polanski.  Our last name was Sidkovedsky.  Oh, the Jewish “sky”, not “ski.”  Never liked skiing anyway.  That name was changed at Ellis Island.  The man in front of our ancestors was Hungarian.  Geller was shorter than Sidkovedsky.  I prefer the latter.  And still despise boats, Ellis Island, the harbor in New York.  Harriet told me that they had to stay at Ellis Island for one month when they arrived from Warsaw.  Like a prisoner, while everyone was checked for lice and anything contagious.  She remembered a teenage Jewish girl with long red hair whose head had to be shaved.  She jumped into the harbor.  Such a long trip.

Polly.  Makes me forget half of my Polish ancestry anyway. But growing up in Roma, it became Polli- you know, “chickens.”  Exactly.  Bird by bird.

by Polly Geller
Los Angeles, CA

Loretta Gail Morris was born in 1957, two months premature and small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. She was carried in a cardboard shoebox and slept soundly in a dresser drawer. I imagine day and night passed in irregular hours as the ceiling lamp sun and tan papered walls opened and shut periodically above her peach-sized head. Tiny fingers reached out, curled and reflexively retracted to avoid being trapped in the sliver between light and dark.

How large her parents must have seemed, a Mount Rushmore of towering new faces, their liquor breath as familiar as her mother’s skin. How loud they must have sounded, their familiar voices no longer muffled by the womb, and then muffled again when the drawer was shut. I wonder if the dark corners and wood smell calmed her, or if she waited in infant terror for them to return.

Loretta Gail’s mother and father raised her in rural West Virginia until she was removed from their home in the early 1960’s.

Loretta Gail McGlothlin became the least-valued new sibling in a family already containing two natural sisters, Patsy and Peggy. I imagine that as the house where she became fiercely religious, a Pentecostal Southern Baptist. She developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In one hand she held Him like an encyclopedia to explain all that had come before and in the other He was a shield she wielded to protect her against all that was to come.

Mama became Loretta Gail Shelton when she married in 1977 when she was 20, my father 22. They met in Virginia at a church group at which my father was the only man in the entire room with blonde hair and blue eyes. They courted for some time with frequent interruptions of military service until finally, my father asked Mama to marry him. Later he informed her that he had been prepared should she have said no. A date with a redheaded woman was broken by Mama’s affirmative response.

We three children will be born at the dawn of the Reagan era to young, southern military parents. Mama will begin making babies when she is just a baby herself, and will be broken into a grown up world through her responses to her children’s lives.

Her favorite name to be called by her children will be Mama. We won’t use it. Instead I will call her Mom. As I grow older she will become Ma, which she hates because she thinks it is vulgar and disrespectful. When I get particularly feisty I will call her Mother. This is far too formal for her taste and rings patronizingly like the use of a child’s full name when they have committed a crime. I will call her Ma long after I leave home until finally, without warning and without trying, I will begin to call her Mama. By then it is too late. She will be suspicious of me, sensing that I am ready to let her go. In 2007, the summer before Mama turns 50, I will.

by Dene Shelton
San Francisco, CA

One of the few lines I remember from Pulp Fiction is: “I’m American, honey. Our names don’t mean shit.” This is one of the first things Bruce Willis’ character says to his French love interest. I totally disagree. So does the writer; Butch is a boxer, which makes the line hilarious.

My first name is Lisa, middle name Jan. I prefer my initials and have since approximately 1996. No, I’m not transgendered. No, I don’t have anything against my parents. At this point, I’ve gone by L.J. for so long that some people don’t know what my full name is. But some people who do often resent my not using it on a day-to-day basis.

My parents, like most Jews, named me after beloved deceased relatives. My dad wanted to name me Jan after his cousin; Jan died at the age of 11 because she “had a hole in her heart” and besides this sad fact, she was rarely mentioned again. My dad wanted her name and her spirit to be continued. Suspicious family members considered this bad luck, so Jan became my second name. Lisa is for my Hebrew name Leah, after my great-grandmother, a small, tough woman who was nicknamed “The General” by her son-in-law, and possibly (shanda!) of some Italian descent. Her daughter, my grandmother, called me Leah-lah. Leah means weary. It also means ruler or mistress in Assyrian. Leah was a matriach for the 12 tribes of Israel. She had “tender eyes” and cried a lot, probably because she was a prophet. Maybe she was simply weary from having seven of Jacob’s kids. All sons, no less! People have asked me why Jews don’t simply give their kids the actual Hebrew names instead of Americanizing them; assimilation, I guess. I was this close to being Lena, or Lori, Lissette.

So, why L.J., after all this? After I graduated from college, I made an autobiographical 16mm film that was screened at NYU, on Manhattan Cable, and in the living rooms of my family and friends. Somewhere during the creative process that began as a music video concept and ended with my submitting the piece to festivals, I changed my name. Or rather, I reverted. My dad has always called me Lisa Janny and referred to me as L.J. when I was a very small kid. I associate the nickname with buoyancy and positive memories. When I sent the film out, I used my nickname to represent the part of me that is unfettered and creative. L.J. pursued what she wanted to without worrying about the consequences. After I moved on to new projects and jobs and relationships, I wanted to hold on to that essence.

What’s interesting, though, are the challenges that using a nickname presents. There are many people who will always call me Lisa and think L.J. is ridiculous, weird, or masculine. One ex-boyfriend says “L.J.” sounds like a truck driver. Another friend says it’s too southern for a girl from Brooklyn. (Although on Avenue X it made a hell of a lot of sense.) Plus, I’m not going to call my doctor and make an appointment for L.J. Not to mention I certainly don’t want to be called L.J. in bed. But now, Lisa sounds harsh to me. Incomplete, even.

Plus, nicknames are cool, let’s face it. I’ve worked in offices where there are 5 Lisas, but only one L.J. And, as crass as it sounds, in the competitive, narcissistic society we live in, having a brand for yourself is important. Our names represent us first and foremost, before any of our qualities can be assessed.

What has emerged is a tiered system. Naturally, my mom calls me Lisa. I tolerate certain old friends calling me Lisa and I don’t blame them; that was how I referred to myself when we met. With new friends I am L.J. but I always tell them what the initials reference. At work I always use my initials, which often requires support from Human Resources. I like close friends and men with whom I am or want to be romantically involved to call me Lisa Jan. It feels special and endearing. And of course, to my dad, I’ll always be Lisa Janny. (Or Munchkin Lady, or in honor of my long-gone pacifier, Nippis Pippis Van Flippis.)

Using my nickname makes me feel good about myself and differentiates me. But maybe more than anything, L.J. keeps my full name, and the meanings behind it, intimate.

by L.J. Fogel
Los Angeles, CA