“For ten years now, I have been seeking the solution that would give me back the sky of my name and of an identity. Now there is hope. To change one’s name is sometimes a form of flight. One chooses to flee, but the violence that provoked that flight was not chosen. To re-stick the part of the name that is missing from me would allow me to recover myself as I am, and would take nothing away from my French identity — on the contrary, perhaps; it is important to make that clear. Without my Sky, I have difficulty sliding down the slope of time.”1
A family name often identifies its bearers. It indicates the languages of the name and the geographic origins of families. In other words, it delivers characteristics, always singular and collective, about persons. Families have applied to francize their names in order to conceal their origins, their languages, their identity. These francizations sometimes saved these families. One thinks of the Jews of France who had to conceal the “Israelite consonance” — such was the term in use at the Conseil d’État — of their names, since it constituted a real threat of death during the Shoah.
Even after the war, families wished to francize their names in order to protect their children and to look “more French,” and thus to escape an antisemitism that was still present. However, antisemites are not fooled; they never fail to “unveil” the original Jewish name, “hidden” behind the French name, as for example Marcel Dassault, born Bloch. This francization of the name had as its object the casting off of the weight of history and, in a certain way, of effacing oneself by concealing one’s name.
Recovering one’s name
In this historical configuration, the fundamental stake was not only an “integration” and a strategy of social promotion; it was also to protect oneself against the disastrous return of a tragic history, the genocide of the Jews, the Shoah during the Second World War. Thus the Rosenkopfs became Rosent, the Rubinsteins Raimbaut, the Garfunkels Garel, the Djaouis Dajoux. Certain Jewish families who hid their names after the war always took care not to forget the other name, the one beneath, the one that could be recovered.
It so happens that one, even two generations after having changed name, Jewish families wished to recover the name of their forebears, but the justice system stood in the way on the double grounds of the immutability of the name and the “foreign consonance” of the names. One does not change a name that has been francized. That is why the collective “La Force du nom” (The Power of the Name), created by myself and the lawyer Natalie Felzenszwalbe, waged a battle so that these families might reclaim their fathers’ names. They obtained satisfaction from the Ministry of Justice. In 2011, requests to return to the name were thus able to succeed. This signals a reversal of jurisprudence.
Some wished to recover their father’s lost name in order to save it from disappearance and to bear it as the remnant of a wounded history. The name would thus testify to the world of the disappeared.
For those who have now taken back the Jewish name of their parents or grandparents, what matters is to hear the effects of this return to the Jewish name. How do they live what they consider to be a “reparation”? Do they feel themselves to be more Jewish? Do they have the feeling of having reconnected with the family history and with great History? So many questions to which the families I filmed have tried to respond2.
The patronym (since the names of the families interviewed were all transmitted by the father) is called “Jewish name” in the sense that it could be attributed specifically to Jewish families. In all cases, this name often designated them as Jews, hence its francization, its change3. One had to protect oneself, for oneself and one’s family, against an eventual resurgence of antisemitism, but also to cast off the weight of the past. Before the Shoah, the reasons for changes of name in France were of a linguistic order (names with multiple consonants were unpronounceable for the French) or else ideological (Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe idealized France as a country of freedom, of culture, of security, even of avant-garde: the old Yiddish saying, widespread at the time, declared “happy as God in France / gliklekh vi Got in Frankraykh”4). The adoption of a patronym with a French consonance (sic) legitimized integration into this dreamed-of country (we have already questioned the assessment of French consonance from a linguistic point of view, given the onomastic transformations across the history of France5). One had therefore to find coherent linguistic sonorities (sufficiently harmonious for the administration) without entirely losing the trace of the initial name. Thus, for example, the ending that might be suspected of Jewish origin (-ski, -blum, -wicz, -kopf, -stein, -vici, etc.) is abandoned so as no longer to be identifiable as Jewish, rather than out of any abandonment of belonging to Judaism. It was a skillful compromise between a certain pressure from the administration, a will to blend into Frenchness, and on the other hand, the wish to keep intimately one’s faith or, more often, one’s belonging to a community of destiny. But the generation that inherits the new name (before or after birth) also often inherits a lacunary history haunted by the shadow of the disappeared. The holes in filiation resonate within the very name severed from the dead as from the living (to which the descendants likewise testify when they have the impression of having been severed from their history and from their forebears).
To escape the round-ups, the harassments, Jews were constrained to adopt as discreet a borrowed identity as possible. The francized name was then more a choice of protection for families. In the testimony, the persons interviewed in the documentary I made indicate that the motive is indeed the protection of children from antisemitism. The name being then “stigma, identifier, and vector of discrimination, of denunciations and of persecutions”6. It should be recalled that the Conseil d’État, in 1947, evoked very explicitly the “Israelite consonance” as a legitimate motive for change of name7. “In order to prevent the recurrence, should the case arise, of the persecutions and deportations to which Israelites, French citizens, were subjected during the period 1940-1945, it has been decided to grant the requests presented by persons bearing names with an Israelite consonance”8. From 1945 to 1957, two thousand one hundred and fifty Jewish name changes were granted9.
To return to a Jewish name is, for many of the families we interviewed, to repair history and to recover the thread of this wounded family history. Through the recovered name, the families thus think they can (re)weave the tie with the dead and with the living, re-weave the fabric torn by the Shoah. This tearing of history and within History, the consequence of a genocide, has devastating repercussions not only on entire societies but also still more durably on families across several generations.
To try to understand what took place, as Legendre says, so that the institutional dimension is not effaced. “The Shoah remains an institutional acting-out (…)”10. He also speaks of a “gesture of State instituting parricide.” One thus understands the full importance of the name and of the fierce will to make the names disappear. It was the “principle of filiation” that Nazism attacked, “the accomplishment of a reified, ‘butcher-like’ conception of filiation”11 — a putting to death of the Ancestor of the name; it is indeed the “symbolic dimension of the murder of the Father in culture that becomes a perpetrated crime”12.
What do the families say? How do they live their return to the name?
We shall focus on the story of David Fuks called Forest (formerly Forest)13.
We present first his oral testimony transcribed, then his written testimony.
I had to resign myself to a compromise and make do with it. Forest in town, Fuks for the registry office. Doctor Jekyll and Mister “Hide.”
It is a “great happiness” for him to have returned to his name of Fuks.
There has not been a single day when I have regretted this choice. We present first his oral testimony transcribed, then his written testimony.
And further on: “The landing conditions were very difficult and very abrupt: it arrived quickly, I rushed to my father to tell him the news; he was completely incredulous, he did not seem to believe it. He was happy for me — for himself, I don’t know. Was there pride, a revenge over history? I am not certain.”
David testifies to his desire to thus resurrect the dead, and speaks of a “vengeful undertaking,” of doing justice…
One idea is recurrent among petitioners: the idea of taking revenge over history, over Hitler. However, doubts persist as to being the sole bearer of the name Fuks.
After the decision, there was a phase of secrecy, procedural steps owing to formalities, with the necessity for example of obtaining a certificate of non-opposition from the Conseil d’État14. At first, “it was secret”; the decision remained within the circle of close relations. Then, David evokes a period of becoming aware that translated into a “phase of panic” in which he would have liked to defer this decision, for the time of waiting to be prolonged a few more weeks. He had not thought it would come so quickly: “it was almost too rapid”15.
He had to have his identity card changed, and he asked for Forest to appear as a name in use or pseudonym, but the registry office at first refused.
“At least the rupture is clean and clear, and I requested a notarial act confirming that ‘I am indeed the same person,’” that “David Fuks and David Forest are indeed the same person” (sic…)
David corrects himself because he realizes that he is using the plural “are” to speak of the same person, “his” two names as if he were finally split between two different persons…
Another question arose: the pronunciation of the name Fuks: “I had to train myself to pronounce it. I insist that it be well pronounced and well spelled. I insist on this ‘k’: ‘How am I to pronounce myself [he corrects himself], present myself…?’”
David reports psychic effects that translated into psychosomatic symptoms following the change of name. He notified his professional Order and agreed that he would continue to practice under the name of Forest, since it was not possible to practice with two names (the Order cannot manage two names).
“The name Forest has followed me like a cast shadow.” He finally obtained the possibility of inscribing the name Forest as a name in use. But David changes professional orientation and becomes a civil servant under the name of Fuks, and obtains from the administration the possibility of inscribing Forest as a name in use on his identity card. “The identities have been reconciled, but it took time.”
He took Hebrew lessons, began a university diploma in Jewish studies, and goes to the synagogue for the holiday of Kippur16: “I wanted to inhabit my name better.”
His father dies in 2014 and, as the eldest of the siblings, he finds himself head of the family, and it is he who will write the obituary. He then poses the question of his own death and of the name under which he would wish to be buried, probably Fuks called Forest.
His father did not choose to take back the name of Fuks but, says David, “it was a source of pride for him that I should make this journey; he was proud and happy that I was setting out in search of these buried traces, that I had this desire”…
Here is David’s written testimony17
“First, there was the relief, that of having finally written this petition that was to allow me to resurrect my father’s birth name in order to make it my own. This undertaking had largely mobilized me, prompted me to exhume documents buried for ages in the family archives, to understand them and try to fathom the intention of their authors, to question my father about a period that had been kept silent and that was painful, and to dig in the folds of my memory in search of impressions, of diffuse memories of this phantom name and of the one I still bore.
A few close friends had been let into the secret. Some manifested their encouragement, saluted my undertaking while remaining incredulous. Why, on the threshold of forty, thus upset — and to what extent? — the course of a relatively well-established existence. Others, more skeptical, dreaded some sort of ‘teshuvah’ that would soon lead me, no doubt, to don a black frock coat and refuse to shake women’s hands. Still others decidedly did not understand this desire to erase a name that had promised to my grandparents and to their descendants integration and serenity.
Then there was the time of messianic waiting, for it promised to be long, judging by the feedback from experience. The candidates often had to wait several years before obtaining a response, the time for their request to travel through multiple administrative channels, to be weighed and re-weighed before being the object of a duly issued decree. This circuit surrounded the operation with an unfathomable mystery open to all interpretations. This had not deterred me, and if I had to wait, it would be a transitional and passing period that would each day sustain the hope of the return a little more. I therefore set this aside for a time, confident and still astonished at the energy I had deployed — I who, a few weeks earlier, would never have envisaged, even in a dream, such a step.
There was, finally, the time of deliverance, a few months later. Informed that a registered letter was waiting for me at the post office, I did not for a moment imagine that it might be the response of the Chancellery. My surprise was total. I ran immediately to show it to my father, who could not get over it. I see him again, holding the decree, rereading it to be sure he had read correctly. ‘Congratulations,’ he said to me laconically. That was the term that accompanied all good news.
The thing was, I was caught off guard — what to do now? Why so quickly? And it was necessary to undertake without delay a new administrative process made of registered letters, of explanations to multiple administrations, to apply also for the rectification of my civil status. ‘Forest’ is struck through there, replaced by ‘Fuks,’ deemed to be my birth name in the eyes of the law, the only one that holds authority. I thus verified the force, the violence too, of the juridical fictions that govern us with the ambition of designating us.
There remained to inform the Order of Lawyers of the Paris Bar, to which I had been registered for nearly ten years. I was received by a colleague responsible for professional practice who had difficulty concealing his surprise. He clearly wished to know more about this new name, my motivations as well. What I had taken for a simple administrative formality seemed to me to turn into a police interrogation. I was on this point deceived by the memories of my forebears, gripped by an ancient fear of revealing a contraband identity. My colleague, simply curious, was also well-intentioned and concerned with finding a viable solution, for — what I had not anticipated — it would not be possible for me to practice under two names at once, one of which had been demoted to a pseudonym. ‘The clients, you see, must know whom they are dealing with.’ So which to choose? Disappear for one’s clients and, worse still, for one’s readers? I had refused to anticipate the difficulty, thinking it of little importance compared to the stakes, and that the solution would impose itself. It was not so.
It was conceivable to keep Forest to the exclusion of Fuks by analogy with the situation of women lawyers who practice under their married name. To practice under a pseudonym ultimately amounted to concealing — once again — the recovered name. By contrast, this maintained a continuity in my identity. I had to resign myself to a compromise and make do with it. Forest in town, Fuks for the registry office. Doctor Jekyll and Mister ‘Hide.’ My small notoriety as an author had to compose with my re-name. I now inherited at the same time a literary pseudonym. For several months, I had to face a sort of identity panic, not knowing how to introduce myself according to contexts and interlocutors. Was I a lawyer? Then it had to be Forest, especially not to make a mistake! Getting used to pronouncing Fuks to designate myself was no small affair. Often I stammered Forest before correcting myself. This new name required not only an apprenticeship but also to be tamed.
Six years have passed without my regretting my choice for a single day. This name is now mine, and it pleases me to spell it for my interlocutors, to correct its pronunciation if need be, even to translate it — ‘fox’ — to show its familiarity.
My father is no longer here. At his grave, I evoked the secret pride he had felt six years ago. That feeling, perhaps, as much as his name, made my returning to it worthwhile.”
Does the return to the name lift the veil that screens the family history? Does it thus reveal the repressed that hampers any possibility of remembering?
The name, with its more or less precise contoured forms standing out against a mnemic background, reveals a history hitherto partial or kept secret, mute, but letting signs of recognition emerge.
This testimony shows that each subject also composes with his or her own psychic resources. The re-name is presented as a save-yourself-if-you-can. Although changed, the name carries with it a thickness of signs and affects of which it is sometimes difficult to be relieved. For some, tatters; for others, protection — the name carries with it elements of family history spanning several generations.
Bearing a Jewish name today
“Shall I tell you that what attracts me in you are kindred, Jewish traits? We understand each other. (…) Be assured that if I were called Oberhuber, my innovations would have, in spite of everything, met with far less resistance.”18 Freud, Letter to Karl Abraham
The change of name testifies, for these families, to their determination to live without fear of being designated as Jews. The return to the name is, conversely, an act that expresses the families’ choice to inscribe their name within the lineage of their forebears, without any feeling of shame relative to the “consonance” of names. To return to a name that History attempted to erase is truly a matter of an act of resistance. Of resisting the forgetting of names, notwithstanding the fears of certain members of the same family more inclined to concealment. These names lift up faces and life stories from generation to generation, and it is indeed this thread that those who carry out an act of return to the name grasp.
We have been able to hear, through this testimony, how much the memory of these families refers back to this mnemic background that constitutes what Roland Gori calls “the traumatic mycelium of memory”19 which carries traces, imprints, reminiscences, diverse impressions. These impressions left by ancient traumas attempt to represent themselves, to be inscribed “in the hard,” as the historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus says in the postface to my book, with regard to the wall of names. Forgetting does not cease to be inscribed and to be transcribed in the work of thought and representation. Forgetting is not the contrary of memory; it is consubstantial with it, but for these families, it is a true fear of forgetting that pushes them obstinately to recount the story, for lack of having been able to inscribe the memory in a text — and to inscribe history, these families pass through the name. The name as memorial of a history whose persistent aim was scrupulously to efface all trace of Jewish presence.
So how is the return to the name effected psychically, in this workshop of family memory?
We posit the hypothesis that it is through narrative that the history of the name and of its languages, of its places, is rehabilitated in a mnemic cartography that gives back contours to a history often punctured by the dramas of great History. The recovered name is to be thought of as a name hollowed out by historical temporality, there where the changed name was without relief for these families. For the latter, the name, as a fiction constructed on the basis of the geo-linguistic dimension, belongs indeed to the history of the Jewish people. In other words, the re-name is the process that restores an effaced writing, through its letters reintroduced into the discourse of the subject, which then operates as a moment of historical truth.
The changed name, by the inflection of its accents, screened a certain truth of family history intricated with great History. By lifting the letters, the subject returns to his own psychic text. There are of course other means than the re-name for returning to this text, but for these families, it was a possible recourse. It is a form of “orthonomastics” that aims to restore the order of the name within the disorder of generations caused notably by the trauma of the Shoah. And this history is indeed a French history.
Testimony from a person who had reached out to me in 2009 after the screening of my first film, Et leur nom, ils l’ont changé, prod. Studio Vidéo Paris Diderot, 2009.↩︎
Habiter son nom, une histoire française, 2021, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme.↩︎
Two thousand francizations of patronyms were granted between 1945 and 1950, following an initial ordinance (about four hundred per year). Cf. Loisel, 1950, cited by N. Lapierre, “L’emprise du national sur le nominal,” in Brunet G., Darlu P., Zei G., 2001, Le patronyme, histoire, anthropologie, société, CNRS éditions, Paris, p. 122. “Most were requested by Jews originating from Eastern Europe. (…) It was only after the third law of 1965 that the number of francizations (of names and/or first names) increased significantly. It has remained, since then, approximately constant: each year, 20% of naturalizations are accompanied by francizations, but only 7 to 8% of the latter concern patronymic names, that is, about five hundred per year. (…) Changing name at the same time as nationality appears as a redoubled rupture.”↩︎
According to Yitskhok Niborski, this is a variant of lebn vi di got in Ades: “to live like God in Odessa,” which was adapted to France by emigrants from Eastern Europe (many thanks to Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot for having transmitted to us the spelling of this expression). In the nineteenth century, this phrase testified to the state of mind of the Jews of Central Europe who idealized republican and secular France, the first country to have granted them emancipation (the process of liberation that allowed them to obtain citizenship and the full equality of their rights through the vote of the Constituent Assembly in 1791).↩︎
C. Masson, N. Felzenszwalbe, Rendez-nous nos noms. Quand des Juifs revendiquent leur identité perdue, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, November 2012. With a preface by Annette Wieviorka and a postface by Daniel Sibony.↩︎
N. Lapierre, “L’emprise du national sur le nominal,” in Brunet G., Darlu P., Zei G., 2001, Le patronyme, histoire, anthropologie, société, CNRS éditions, Paris, p. 124.↩︎
One will read more precisely what pertains to these juridical and political questions in C. Masson, N. Felzenszwalbe, op. cit., or again in our collective book La force du nom, Desclée de Brouwer, 2010.↩︎
Pépy, 1966-67, p. 34, cited by N. Lapierre, art. cit., p. 124.↩︎
Idem.↩︎
P. Legendre, “La Brèche. Remarques sur la dimension institutionnelle de la Shoah,” Sur la question dogmatique en Occident : aspects théoriques, Paris, Fayard, 1999, p. 340.↩︎
Ibid., p. 347.↩︎
Ibid., p. 349.↩︎
Published in C. Masson, Habiter son nom – une histoire française, Hermann, Paris, 2020.↩︎
This certificate attests that no opposition has been filed against the civil court decision rendered.↩︎
Owing to his functions as a lawyer, it is possible that the period of instruction was only six months, whereas the procedure can be much longer for others.↩︎
This is the Jewish holiday of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur).↩︎
Sent in January 2019, two years after our interview.↩︎
S. Freud, Letter of 23 July 1908, published in Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Correspondance : 1907-1926 (Briefe 1907-1926, S. Fischer-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1965), trans. from the German by Fernand Cambon and Jean-Pierre Grossein, Gallimard, coll. Connaissance de l’Inconscient, Paris, 1969, p. 53.↩︎
R. Gori, “La mémoire freudienne : se rappeler sans se souvenir,” Cliniques méditerranéennes, 2003/1, no. 67, pp. 100-108. URL: https://www.cairn.info/revue-cliniques-mediterraneennes-2003-1-page-100.htm↩︎