Of Names And Roots

March 23, 1986|BERNARD MIKOFSKY, The Morning Call

Someone wrote a book entitled "What's in a Name?" that included accounts of surname changes in ethnic groups, and the reasons, defensive or other, for such changes.

With his parents and siblings, my wife's father emigrated from old tsarist Russia. Their first port of call in the New World was a Canadian city, where a harried immigration official misheard their name Dobrodub as Dobrovitch. After all, a lot of "ovitches" had queued up at his desk over the years, hadn't they? (In Pennsylvania, quite a few names that once ended in "ovitch" now end in "avage").

The settlement and migration history of members of the Dobrodub family in the New World rings with wonderful Indian names like Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Michigan. But the Slavic sound of Dobrovitch and the subsequently shortened form Debrove yielded to a relentless process of Anglicization and abbreviation as several of my wife's uncles and their progeny became Dobbs or Davis. No one thought of becoming a Goodoak ("dobry" means "good," and "dub" means "oak").

With four generations living in various U.S. states and Canadian provinces, my wife set to work on a genealogy of the far-flung clan. The job took three years and prodigious letter-writing, some of it without response. On the triumphant conclusion of the project - 15 beautifully typed pages of marriages, begats and deaths - she posted 50 copies to her relatives. A few letters acknowledging receipt or noting thanks trickled back in the next two years.

Perhaps some people aren't that thrilled about roots. Maybe being like everyone else is more important to them. Or, some may not care to respond to unsolicited mail, even my wife's genealogical efforts.

Name changes can be defensive. During World War I some German-origin families in England and the U.S. anglicized their surnames. An illustrious example was the change of Battenberg to Mountbatten in 1917, when the English descendants of Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg opted to transform the Germanic-sounding "berg" into "mountain."

At times, such changes have been aimed at opening career possibilities. Forty years ago a Krzyzanowski might become Cross (krzyz means cross) to make it easier to gain admission to med schools that didn't want too many "foreigners."

Names are also changed to provide mellifluous or impressive forms for the theater marquees. Robert Taylor was a catchier monicker than the original Spangler Arlington Brugh. John Forsythe is probably more romantic-sounding than John Freund.

Occasionally, the changing of a name would seem almost like forgetting the suffering of one's forebears. Dith Pran, a Cambodian who lived through the genocide described in "The Killing Fields," recently became an American citizen. May Dith Pran's descendants never be tempted to change their surname, for this name will always be a symbol of courage and the will to be free.

But there are occasions when the moral rightness of a name change is beyond question. After nine years of prison and persecution for his religious beliefs Anatoly Shcharansky changed his first name to Nathan meaning "(God) hath given": Life. Liberation from prison. Freedom of conscience. Freedom to emigrate. Freedom.

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