I propose to examine so-called family names, which I will from the outset call patronyms, and their changes within a single family over the course of history.
Drawing on testimonies gathered in 2009 on the occasion of a documentary film I made — Et leur nom, ils l’ont changé (And their name, they changed it) — I will take the example of French Jews from families that underwent the trauma of the Shoah and that changed their name after the Second World War. This film was for me an occasion to revisit history and to hear the small story within the great one. These families taught me.
A great majority of French Jews who changed their name after the Second World War did so out of fear of being identified as Jews. Had there been no war and no collaboration, they would not have changed their name. These French citizens, or those about to become so, thought they were doing the right thing in protecting their children from antisemitism. They thought they would integrate in this way by bearing a nondescript name, thoroughly French, by stripping away all the consonants and complications of a name that immediately unmasked them as Jews. They felt free on arriving in France, and, at the suggestion (indeed, the pressure) of a prefectural clerk, they did not hesitate to have their patronym planed down so as to gain in Frenchness. Furthermore, some remained entirely Jewish while others lost their traditions.
What I would like to show is that when one changes a name, it is indeed the patronym one is touching, and this also has an effect on the socio-linguistic environment. To change one’s name is very often to change language as the trace of geographical displacements. The patronym is a name of tribe, of lineage. That is why changing it has effects on the lineage, which makes it possible to understand the desire for recovery on the part of the generation that “underwent” the change.
The Collectif La force du nom (The Power of the Name) was born during the preparation of a colloquium of the same name1. With Natalie Felzenszwalbe, who is a lawyer, Michel Wolkowicz, and a few others, we had the idea of creating a Collectif to put pressure on the Conseil d’État so that it might revise the impossibility of returning to a name that had been changed — on the twofold grounds of the immutability of the name and, a more than dubious argument, of its foreign-sounding consonance. One does not return to a name that has been francized because of its foreign consonance. In sum, let us be glad to have a francized name — that is what some made me understand. We had the good fortune of having a generous colleague struck by the question, Patrick Landman, not to name him, who was willing to put us in contact with the Direction des affaires civiles et du Sceau at the Ministère de la Justice. Natalie Felzenszwalbe and I were received in January 2010, and we were heard.
We received about a dozen requests from people who wished to return to their name, and some, thanks to the Collectif, obtained satisfaction, which already constitutes a reversal of jurisprudence.
Proper name, patronym, family name, given name. The language of names as the trace of places
It is first appropriate to distinguish several terms.
The patronymic name is a topological and linguistic designator. It designates geographical places; it has a socio-cultural value and not only a symbolic one, in the Lacanian sense of the Name-of-the-father. It can keep a sonic constancy from one language to another even though the pronunciation may differ, but this is not enough to guarantee belonging to a single family. One can bear the same family name without being of the same lineage, nationality, or religion. The family name designates a familial group but does not singularize individuals.
The proper name can equally be the name of the mother’s father. In transmitting it, the mother indicates more than her own father’s name: she performs an act of transmission of the name of her lineage. The mother says, too, that she has invested the name of her father and not only that of her husband. The proper name is something other than the patronym. As a name of tribe, the latter is more global, whereas the proper name is already invested by the desire of the father or the mother in the transmission to the child. The change of name therefore affects the patronym more, thus shifting the whole genealogy, the whole filiation, and so calls into question the names of the name… for a name necessarily has several names of history.
From one language to another, the name does not translate, it transposes, transfers itself, and that is its characteristic: one remains Monsieur Dupont or Leroy; the accent alone can make Dupont or Leroy vary. With each transfer of language, the name is preserved in its sonic structure. What is thereby conveyed in the name, as in the language that bears it, is the share of the untranslatable that moves from one language to another, an enigmatic share in each subject, a share of strangeness, of the foreign, whatever the place where he resides. It is also what makes him profoundly unassimilable. La force du nom — the power of the name — as I have dared to formulate it, refers to the power of the enigmatic that the ordeal of the foreign also entails. The name does not belong to us; it passes through us, conveying the history of a filiation.
Its pronunciation can vary from one language to another according to the accents of the languages; this is how the proper name will integrate itself into the language that welcomes it in its mouth. An example: Kaufmann [Kaofman] in its German pronunciation will become in French [Kofmane]. But the spelling makes it possible to recover the language of the name. By contrast, if the name is changed, it is more difficult to recover the place of the name.
We could say, then, that the accent is a trace of origin, of which the speaker can only with difficulty rid himself, a trace in the language and with his language, that one wears like a garment2.
The following generations do not necessarily pronounce their name with the accent of their parents’ or grandparents’ country of origin; on the other hand, they may pronounce it “the Polish way”: for example, they will pronounce [Milshtaïne] and not [Milstain] in the French manner, and this without knowing the language of the name. I will call this accent an accent of passage, which makes of the language a language from elsewhere. Present/absent, shown and hidden, the accent takes up the places in the mouth and does not forget. The changed name can only be forgotten. One will recall the story of that Polish Jewish immigrant3: it is the very accent of the language that will serve as a name. Ultimately each name is singular, since it is pronounced with an accent peculiar to the speaker. If the language is forgotten, the accent remains like an indelible trace.
Names carry a language as one wears a garment; the language gives them an air by hanging well on them. Names remake the language, especially when it has passed, has melted into the present one, French, but also when it passes from one generation to the next and one is unaware of it: the name restores it. Pulwermacher, for example: one is invited to say Pulvèremakhère with the jota when one knows where the name comes from while being ignorant of the language, but precisely the name shows us that we are not so ignorant of it after all.
The accent is a hyphen between languages, the passage from one to the other and the resistance of one upon the other. It makes it possible to keep in the mouth the place of the language — geographical, cultural, historical. To lose the accent is to lose the place from sight, to remove it from immediate memory, to withdraw it from the language like a distant landscape. When one pronounces a name from elsewhere, it brings out the languages that composed it, for very often a name evolves with the languages that pass through it (Finkelsztajn, Finkelstein, Haas, Hazé, Rubinstein, Roubinstein, Szapiro, Shapiro…). We are always strangers to our name; when it crosses borders, it becomes strange as we pronounce it in another language. And a name changes in crossing borders through its pronunciation, which reinvents a spelling. A name is from elsewhere when we move, and we Jews, we have names of great crossings. A language is a fertile encounter between sounds and meanings, between singular sounds and meanings that lean upon them. Thought feeds on these accents; even if they are not audible in the present, they resonate in the past, they wrap each word of the spoken language, they penetrate the meaning and bring out its savor. To speak with accents organizes an extraordinary succession of shifts, of intervals, of passages that explore the language, displace it ceaselessly, and invite us to think elsewhere4. The accent is a trace of the history of languages and of their evolution; it is a resonance of the displacements of an improbable geography that time sponges away over the generations.
A name is a password: “(…) since it serves quite simply to keep you from being killed.” We could say that the changed name is also a password, since it makes it possible to pass without being caught — that is what was attested by the people whose name unmasked them as Jews, hence the necessity of changing it. “(…) the password is that by means of which, not the men of the group recognize one another, but the group is constituted.”5 The name of the language is also a passing-name, since it allows the recognition and the inscription, within the group, of the place of the language of the name: by the name one identifies the rather Sephardic or Ashkenazi origins, in the case of French Jews for example.
The effect of the name change on the second and third generation
Changing one’s name takes effect on the second generation when the generation of the change is the one that directly underwent the trauma of the Shoah: rejection, hatred, discrimination, shame, and sometimes the deportation of part or all of the family.
These families, like many others, all francized their name after the war in order to allow their children to bear a name that would not risk identifying them as Jews and being once again victims of antisemitism. Léa Fazel evokes the difficulty of being a foreigner when one arrives in France, especially when one is called Fajnzylber. Rose Volcot and her husband cut the name Wolkowicz for social reasons but above all to protect their children and allow them to pursue studies without the risk of being unmasked as Jews. To hear them, their name carries the Jewish signifier, but this signifier/stigma is the traumatic mark of rejection, hatred, and death. Daniel Raimbaud says of his name: “it was like the black eagle that swooped down on us.” He suffered, in the Bordeaux region after the war, from an underhanded antisemitism, so much so that he says he had had enough: “I don’t want my children to know that.” He made the decision, with his father, to change the name for the whole family. He already used the diminutive Rubi, but he wanted a still more French name. His wife had a soft spot for Arthur Rimbaud, and that is how they chose their new patronym while keeping the first letter.
Fernande Stenay also evokes the difficulty of pronouncing the name of her husband David, which had 11 consonants and 3 vowels (Sztejnsznajder). She says her husband never had the right to his name; he was called David. After his military service, he decided to change his name to Stener, but the administration refused on the pretext that Stener was a name with too foreign a consonance still, and they were offered Stenay, a town in France in the Ardennes. They had a daughter who does not seem to be in difficulty with the changed name. It is true that most often it is the sons who react to the name change, not the daughters, who, on marrying, often abandon their patronym, whereas the sons transmit it.
Janine Franier, for her part, evokes the image of the monster Frankenstein that was added to the Jewish name. She and her husband took advantage of a decree that facilitated name changes toward francization. They proposed Frank, half of Frankenstein, thinking there was nothing more French than the Franks. This was refused them, and they had to choose from among six names: “the least tacky of the six was Franier.” Janine Franier thinks it was easier for their two children to pursue important studies (Polytechnique and an engineering school) being called Franier rather than Frankenstein. Only her son wanted to take back his father’s name, but he was informed that he could not go back to it. He then had a business card made up in the name of Franier with, as a watermark, the Frankenstein monster.
Some, like Madame Rosent (pronounced by her with the Yiddish accent “Roson”), say they regret this change, because if she had still been called Rozenkopf, deported family members, perhaps still alive, could have found her again. Her daughter took back Rozenkopf in the United States in order to “honor us.” But she evokes the “gap” of name between them now. When they announced to their brother Rozenkopf in Israel that they had changed their name, “he started to cry and so did we!” Rosent is a choice of francization, but with their friends they were always Rozenkopf. To my question, “Why didn’t you change to Rozen without the s, keeping half of your name?” she answers: “But I’m telling you: we were like little sheep!” She evokes with great pain this change of name, specifying that they did “a great foolish thing.” One sees above all that this change is like a loss of traces — not of roots but of letters serving to recognize the traces of language and thus the name of a decimated family of which only a few members survived. To lose the name is to lose the trace of a family, as if the new name no longer allowed those who might seek its members to identify them, to “locate” them.
Lucien Finel (Finkielstajn) has no regret, because he changed his name for his children, so that they could study in peace. He was in the Resistance and already bore several names, including that of Lucien Trévières, after the commune near Bayeux where he had been hidden during the war: “You couldn’t do better in the way of French!” he says. When he decided to go into politics, it was better, in his view, to bear a thoroughly French name: “you see my mug on an election poster with Lucien Finkielstajn above it — that doesn’t win many votes!” He had simply wanted to take Fink with something on the end, but his lawyer informed him that if it was going to sound like yet another language, he might as well keep his name, and he opted for Finel on the latter’s advice. He had difficulty letting go of the Judeo-Polish consonance. Today it is his daughter-in-law who reproaches him for it, because she is an artist and “to sign Finel is banal, whereas Finkielstajn is more original.” The second generation did not in fact experience the trauma of the war as painfully — the incessant state of threat that weighed upon them and the necessity of hiding. One understands the reflexes of concealment, but the generation that follows does not always understand it, as we will see in exemplary fashion with the Rubinstein/Raimbaud family.
For Madame Volcot, the past is very painful, but she does not feel any less Jewish in bearing the name Volcot. By contrast, we see very clearly the problem arising for the second generation, whose name was changed while they were adolescents. This is the case of Michel Wolkowicz, as of Olivier Rubinstein, both of whom undertook proceedings before the Conseil d’État without obtaining satisfaction. Michel (Mischa) uses Wolkowicz professionally; on the other hand he is Volcot known as Wolkowicz on his identity papers: a procedure is necessary in order to use the real name as a usage-name, like a pseudonym. As he felt wounded by the loss of his Jewish name, he joined to Volcot his wife’s name, Freeman; they thus became the Volcot-Freeman family and had a checkbook made up in their two names, Monsieur and Madame Volcot-Freeman. Mischa speaks of the importance of the desire to restore a heritage that has been broken into, indeed psychically swallowed up.
He says: “At the end of the première class, I was sixteen and a half, my math teacher, who was of Polish origin, came up to me and asked: ‘So now we’re supposed to call you Volcot?’ Although I knew that my father had undertaken a procedure to ‘francize our name,’ this idea had remained abstract for us, all the more so since he had been told, falsely, that his children would be able, in the same way as is done for dual nationalities, to recover their original name on reaching majority. The officialization of this change, thus announced directly by way of my lycée, added to the shock felt, and to the uncanny strangeness. My parents, advancing in age, had asked to change their patronym out of fear of what might happen to us, the children, because of antisemitism, with the ‘magical’ need to protect us: they who had lived through exiles, persecutions, deportations, mass disappearances: ‘if it comes back!’ In revolt, I had then imagined adding still more letters (Wolkowicz… kowski)” [sic]
Their son Eythan-David Volcot-Freeman, the third generation of the name change, has a different point of view. He compares the name to a fetus that would evolve according to displacements: “at first it was Wolf, which means wolf, then it was Wolkowicz, and now in France it’s Volcot.” A name, for Eythan-David, should not be a fetish, an immutable object one would not want to part with. Since we are no longer in the world of the ghettos, he says, one must also accept losing these references, and Wolkowicz refers, for him, to Poland and to the world of yiddishkeyt. He says his father clings to vestiges, and that Wolkowicz would be one, because he “likes to have a fiddler on the roof.”
To be a modern Jew, he thinks one must part from this past and adopt a name better suited to the country where one lives. Volcot suits him, and he does not wish, like his father, to return to his original name. Eythan-David poses well the problem of the identitary paradoxes: to be a modern Jew turned toward the future and to keep traditions and values transmitted from generation to generation over millennia. How to be a modern Jew is the whole reflection brought to the screen by this young man of 20.
Olivier Rubinstein — Raimbaud on his identity papers and known as “pseudo Rubinstein” — is, for his part, in a great anger toward the French State, which does not allow him, a French Jew born in France, to recover his patronym, that of his close ancestors. His grandfather was very proud that he had undertaken these proceedings; his father understands him but at the same time says he did it to protect him. Olivier experiences this name change as a “mystification.” In the documentary, he says vehemently: “If we no longer have the language, no longer the traditions, no longer a name, what are we going to transmit? What remains? (…) There’s no more name, no more language, no more rites — in three generations, it’s finished! (…) I’d really like us to put on our real nose now. (…) We are what we are.” As with Michel Wolkowicz, Olivier is the generation that “underwent” the name change; they sometimes heard and sometimes felt their parents’ pain, the rejection, the hatred toward them.
Michel and Olivier use their original names as usage-names; these are pseudonyms. Their real name is a pseudonym. They feel a profound injustice, all the more so as their name change was announced to them at middle or high school without their being able to say anything about it. “Henceforth you are Monsieur Volcot. Henceforth you are Monsieur Raimbaud.” French jurisprudence does not allow the return to a name that presents a “foreign consonance.” “Give me,” says Olivier, “the definition of a name with a foreign consonance? What is a French name? Why is Serge Lama allowed to call himself Lama? And I, a French Jew born in France, am refused the return of my name Rubinstein. Lama? Is that so French?” He recalls that had there been no war and no collaboration of the French, his parents, like many others, would not have changed their name. Olivier goes so far as to say that our names were taken from us as our furniture was taken from us, and that now they must be returned to us.
As for the third generation, the one that was born with the name already changed, it is torn between the desire to move on to something else or, on the contrary, to recover what was annihilated. But we do not have enough examples to make generalities of them.
I would like to end by citing Charles Lewinsky’s novel, when François and Pin’has search for the grave of Alfred Meijer: “The closer they came, the more often they had to bend down to decipher a name. In these few years the letters had already faded, as memory fades, in which a man is first a hero, then merely a dead man, a name, and after that nothing at all.”
The inscription of the name, sometimes the photograph of the departed6, is the only visible trace at the place of the dead, with his date of birth as if prolonging his name. The engraved name is like the last inscription of the living being now deceased, but this name carries a face forever engraved in the memory of the living who were close to the departed. A name for life that nothing erases, not even the ravages of history. And it is through the speech of the living, in the transmission of the memory of the departed, that the remembrance, the name of the one who was one of ours, is perpetuated. To speak the names, to put them in the mouth for the generations to come, to recall them like a necessary punctuation so that the language may find its breath.
It is with the ancestors that we move toward the future.
Notes
Colloquium organized under my direction and that of Michel Wolkowicz in Paris (Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme) as well as at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in October and November 2009 with the collaboration of the Université Paris-Diderot.↩︎
On the accent, cf. Alain Fleischer, L’accent : une langue fantôme (The Accent: A Phantom Language), Seuil, Paris, 2005.↩︎
“An old Russian Jew was advised to choose himself a thoroughly American name that the registry authorities would have no trouble transcribing. He asked advice from a clerk in the baggage room, who suggested Rockfeller. The old Jew repeated Rockfeller, Rockfeller several times in a row to be sure not to forget it. But when, several hours later, the registry officer asked him his name, he had forgotten it and answered, in Yiddish: Schon vergessen (I’ve already forgotten), and that is how he was registered under the thoroughly American name of John Fergusson.”↩︎
After the apt expression in a book title by Nicole Lapierre, Pensons ailleurs (Let Us Think Elsewhere), Stock, Paris, 2004.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
See our forthcoming book À la recherche du temps des vestiges — l’immémorial et l’actuel (In Search of the Time of Vestiges — the Immemorial and the Present).↩︎