The Naming Game

This

is part of my family.








This is what they looked like 100 years ago.

This is what they look like from outer 

space

AND

                          

This is what they look like when they all try to skype me at once.

So why, you may ask, am I the participant in a massive family skyping experience?  Well, today was my cousin´s baby naming, a Jewish ceremony to welcome a baby girl into the community and officially give her a Jewish name, done in a manner far less gruesome than the equivalent ceremony for Jewish baby boys.  I would tell you more about the ceremony, but unfortunately my skype connection died about five seconds after this photo was taken, so this is pretty much all I´ve got.

But, I thought I would talk to you a bit more today on the topic of naming.  So in my last blog, a few hours ago, I talked to you a bit about the Eltz family and how they have inhabited the same castle for 33 generations.  I was fascinated by this concept.  This one family has occupied the same parcel of land for literally centuries.  They know exactly what their ancestors were up to at every moment in history.  They even still maintain one third of this gigantic castle for personal family use.  In one room on the tour there were portraits of Eltzes going back to the 17th century, and next to them there was a photo of the Eltz family today.  Crazy.

It is basically impossible, practically causes brain trauma, for me to try to envision my family 33 generations ago.  See, once you go back a bit past the people pictured above, and a handful of others who are apparently camera shy, I just don´t know too much.  I couldn´t tell you where they lived, or what their jobs were, if they had enough food, what they did for fun, or even what their names were.  For better or worse, I suppose it is safe to say, we moved around a lot, or as my grandma once told me when I was a little kid, ´Our ancestors took a tour of Europe´.

Before the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, Eastern and Central European Jews didn´t really have last names the way we think of them today.  They had names like the one that my baby cousin received today, composed of a religious name and a name that identifies a person patronymically.  Hence I am Rachel, daughter of Kirk, or something like that.  Then Napoleon, and the Czars of Russia, the Prussians and the Habsburgs decided that it would be much easier to keep tabs on their Jewish subjects if they handed out surnames.  So they did.

Families like mine who immigrated to the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often changed names again, usually by choice or by immigration confusion.  Then some families, like mine, did some creative naming of their own in the mid 20th century (we are fun like that).  Today people have all sorts of new takes on names - hyphenated names, blended names, women who keep their maiden names, people who decide they don´t want names and take symbols instead of names and then change their symbols back into names (ie the artist formerly known as Prince and now once again known as Prince).

Some of us have clearly changed out names, countries, ways of life umpteen times in the 800 or so years that the Eltz family has remained the Eltz family living in the same house, smoking a 300 year old pipe, sitting under the same picture of great great great Uncle Ludwig from 1654.

But then again the Eltz family is clearly unusual.  Even their castle is unusual.  It is one of the few castles in Germany that has never been destroyed or required major reconstruction despite standing through two world wars, numerous revolutions, sieges and a crusade or two.  It is pretty impressive.

Most of the world just can´t seem to help but change.

On Thursday the BUKAs went on a field trip to the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, the State Center for Political Education, basically a state subsidized book store.  Among the many offerings were quite a lot of maps of Germany, one of which caused a bit of a ruckus.

This particular map included some neighboring countries of Germany, specifically a small chunk of beach front Baltic property which was listed in big letters as Königsberg, and in small letters in parentheses as Kalingrad.  It was noted on the map that this piece of land belongs to Russia.

The Russians were pretty agitated.  Kalingrad, FYI, officially became Kalingrad in 1946 after having been Königsberg since 1255.  So, I didn´t really follow their anger at first.
They explained: It´s basically like if some country that used to occupy part of your country made a map and listed a state with their version of the state´s name, and then made it sound like it was a territory instead of a rightful state.

Which country?  I asked.

It doesn´t matter.  They replied.

Well pretty much all of our states used to belong to other people.  We have some British land, some French land, some Spanish land, some Mexican land, some Dutch land, it´s all Native American land, and we even have some Russian land.

I was just giving them a hard time.  I understand what they are saying.  I am not that slow.  But we could spend the rest of our lives discussing what used to be called one thing but isn´t anymore and by the time we finished discussing everything would have changed names again.

Apparently there are even groups in Russia, and I presume other places, that dedicate themselves to taking back the names that their cities, streets, squares used to have, but don´t anymore.  They are pretty politically loaded questions to ask: When is a name no longer appropriate for a place?  Can a place have only one rightful name?

Names, I suppose, are just a much more emotional and tangible piece of our lives than they might seem.  In the names of our cities, streets, and of course, ourselves, information about us is encoded- where we come from, our culture, religion, politics, lifestyles.  And places, like people, who are constantly in a state of identity change, just might suffer some sort of identity crisis.