What does it mean to change your name?

In my early 20s, I read Robertson Davies’ 1970 novel Fifth Business. I remember liking it a lot, but the only thing that stuck with me was that at least two main characters changed their names and took on new identities. It was as if each of them couldn’t become the people they were meant to be without choosing his own name. Many people change their name by choice; some people are given no option. Even in the early 1980s, the story resonated with me because of my mother’s experience when she came to the U.S.  

A few months ago one of the prompts in Barbara Krasner’s Writing Family History group was to write about name variations and changes and I recalled Davies’ book. Here is what I wrote in response to the prompt:

My mother was born Eva Marie Cohen (with a “C”). In 1939, her parents sent her and her brother from Vienna to their father’s relatives in Istanbul in order for them to get Turkish passports to allow them to leave Europe for the safety of their mother’s relatives in San Francisco. Although Eva and her brother Harry were born in Vienna, because their father was Turkish they were never considered Austrian citizens. In my mother’s Turkish passport, her last name is spelled Kohen with a “K”.

Upon arrival in the US, their relatives told Eva and Harry that they should adopt a different last name because Cohen sounded “too Jewish.” They chose a very English-sounding name, Lowell, probably because it was similar to their mother’s maiden name of Löwy. The American relatives all went by Levy. 

As soon as she set foot in San Francisco, my 18-year-old mother enrolled as a senior at Washington High School under the name Eva Lowell. Thanks to her new name, she no doubt stood out even more than she might otherwise have. Although her English was excellent, she never lost her Viennese accent. Eva does not look like the other girls in her yearbook photo: her dress looks dowdy and her hair unfashionable. In addition, her expression is serious, nothing like a carefree American teenager. She was separated from her parents, not knowing if and when she would see them again. She was living in a new country and speaking a new language. She had been separated from her brother who lived with different relatives and attended a different high school. As in Vienna, she was a foreigner, only here she couldn’t hide it.

At 23, my mother eagerly married a German Jewish man, more than 13 years her senior. He was quiet and serious, very different from the careless American boys she’d met. He too had an accent. In changing her name to Goldsmith when she married, there was less surprise when people met her and heard her accent. If my father had kept the original Goldschmidt, the accent probably would have been anticipated.

It is only in the past few years that I understood that my mother would have felt herself to be an outsider throughout her life. Not just Jewish in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s, but a foreign Jew – she didn’t belong in the larger Austrian community, nor in the Jewish one. On top of that, her father was a psychic and a palm reader, which did nothing to help her fit in. 

Then, as a teenager, she was separated from her parents. She lost her home, lost her name to try to fit into a new culture and language, was far away from all she knew and loved. Finally, with marriage, she got an identify that fit her accent, but not a perfect one either – Jews weren’t as welcome in the US as she had hoped and her accent sounded like that of the enemy.

No wonder she spent so much of her life trying not to be noticed!