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Welcome to So What's in a Name Our Sages teach that one's name is the very essence of the person, the quintessence of a human being, that parents are endowed with a special power of prophesy when naming their newborn child. A name affects a person's entire life. A given name, we are told, is engraved into one's very soul. My family originates from central Europe, from the regions of greater Hungary. Hungarian culture dominated this region, which, in addition to Hungary itself, incorporates Czechoslovakia, parts of Romania, the western Ukraine and northern Yugoslavia. Unlike in most of Poland, Hungarian Jews give their children two sets of names, one for the street and one for the synagogue -- one for the goyim, the gentiles, and one for the Jews. This sometimes resulted in incongruous combinations. For example my maternal grandfather was known as Emmanuel, a nice Hebrew name, meaning God is with us. You can imagine him being called up to the Torah, "Arise Emmanuel the son of Shimon", but no, his "Jewish" name, his Hebrew name, like mine, was Menachem Baruch. My other grandfather, Baruch, was known as Béla (at least the first letter was common, perhaps not by coincidence, but since he was born in 1853 I have no-one with which to verify this). His wife was Fanny, but in Hebrew Feige (which is really Yiddish; it means "a bird" so in Hebrew she should have been called Tziporah). They called my father Emil, though at his barmitzva he was called to the Torah as Yisroel Moshe. I can give you lots and lots of examples: Agi who was Breindel (which means "brunette" in Yiddish), Eliezer who was Laci, Magda who was Devorah -- in fact everyone in my family and circle fit this mould.
So no-one was surprised when I was born that I was given two sets of names. [In fact the surprise came much later when I had children of my own and we were determined, to everyone's chagrin, to give them only Jewish, Hebrew (certainly not Yiddish names) -- but I'm getting ahead of myself.] Being the first child in my immediate family of Holocaust survivors, there was no surprise that I was named after perished relatives. (I'm lucky I wasn't the girl my mother was sure I was going to be -- no ultrasound yet -- because then I would have been named Beatrice or Beatrix, with probably the Hebrew name Rivka, after my maternal grandmother.) Giving me an English name which would hold me in good stead in the "new world" presented more difficulties. These survivors, in their anger with God over their losses and suffering, were not prepared to discard their Judaism. But they did want to hide it as much as possible -- leave it in the home and in the synagogue. And having a good English name was part of this, I'm going to call it, assimilation into the surrounding culture. The difficulty of course lay in the fact that my mother had been in the country for just over two years, and did not yet have a command of the language, let alone knowing too many "Australians" as they referred to their non Jewish neighbours. My father had two more years in the country than my mother, and had worked in the outside world, but I don't think he had too much more to offer in the local vencular of names. As my mother tells it, one morning, soon after I was born, while we were still in Paddington Hospital, she was reading the newspaper. Looking at the pictures and maybe trying to get a grasp of the language may be a more accurate description. Whatever the case, the headline that day concerned a doctor whose first name was Jeffrey. "My boy vill be doctor too" (famous last words) so I too became a Jeffrey. (For those of you who were there and are old enough to remember the story, this headline was not related to the famous Bogle and Chandler double murder story which gripped Sydney for months. I remember the episode clearly -- I was already ten years old -- and anyway Mr Chandler's first name was Geoffrey, the English spelling, and not Jeffrey, the American basterdisation. By the way, I recently found some interesting new background information on this old episode.) To Jeffrey they tagged a name that worked in both Hungarian and English to, so I became Jeffrey George Kuchar. I remember once complaining to my father that I had three names, when one forename and one surname were surely sufficient (unlike American assassins who all seem to have three names, e.g. Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wayne Gacy, John Wilkes Booth, Leon Frank Czolgosz and James Earl Ray -- if you've watched the movie Conspiracy Theory you'll know what I mean). My father told his nine year old son, "it's useful -- maybe you'll prefer to be called J. George Kuchar one day in the future".
As it turned out, my preference is to be known as Menachem Kuchar. No-one who knew me as Jeff Kuchar would have known who I was, had I left a phone message with their secretary from J. George Kuchar -- well the Kuchar may have been a giveaway, but you know what I mean -- Menachem Kuchar could be equally misleading. I would have been happy had my father done what he intended to do back in the sixties before he died, and changed our surname to Cook. Then I could have been Menachem Cook, learning at the famous Mercaz haRav Kook Yeshiva in Yerushalayim -- I could even have been mistaken as a scion of that famous family ;-) In theory in Australia, you can easily change your name to anything you want. I emphasise, in theory. For years I was called Menachem by just about everyone with whom I had contact, including my Bellevue Hill bank manager. I had already lived a number of years in Israel where a very few had any idea that I wasn't always Menachem. My old friends still call me Kuch, something that will never vary whether I am Jeff, Gyuri or Menachem. Ivor Francis Stowe gained fame by standing for the Australian Parliament eighteen times on a platform of spelling reform, using his legal name of Mr F. I too finally decided the time had finally arrived to formalise my name change. I was in Sydney in 1988 for a few weeks. As we needed new passports anyway, this was the ideal opportunity. Jill and I turn up to passport office (you could do it at the post office, but I wanted to make that I got what I wanted -- a new name). We arrive armed with everything one needs along with the applications: old passports, new photographs, birth certificates, wedding certificate. We wait for forty-five minutes in the busy office, and finally our number is called. We sit down opposite a pretty passport office bureaucrat. We hand over our forms. Everything is in order. There's one thing, I tell the bureaucrat, I would like to change my first name. I knew the law of the land. In England and Australia one can change one's surname (family name) by Deed Poll. A Deed Poll is a legal document which differs from a normal contract in that it only concerns one side to an agreement. It must be brought before a judge for verification and seal. The document states that you abandon use of your former name, you use your new name only at all times and that you require everyone to address you by your new name only. But I wasn't changing my surname, well not this time, only my (what the bureaucrat officially called my Christian name). For this change you must prove usage. No problem she says, you need to prove usage. I guess I should have brought my bank manager with me, but all I had was some business cards from Israel (even in Israel where everybody knew me as Menachem, officially I was still Jeffrey Kuchar, because the Israelis will only accept your foreign passport entry as your legal name). That's not sufficient I'm told. Driver's license, credit card, anything like that that proves usage of the alternate name. Whatever yarn I could spin was insufficient. "OK, then I'll go and do a deed poll", I suggest. She retorts, "You don't need a deed poll to change your Christian name". Well, then please change it. No, you have to prove usage. After fifteen minutes of beating around the mulberry bush -- deed poll, usage, deed poll, you don't need one -- we both knew we were getting nowhere. But our heels were dug into our entrenched positions. "Could I please speak to your supervisor." No problem, sir. Off she goes, returning a couple of minutes later with another bureaucrat, nicely dressed in the suit and tie that was then still a requirement of the Australian Public Service. "What appears to be the problem?" And around and around we go again. OK, then I'll go and do a deed poll I suggest. They retort in unison, "You don't need a deed poll to change your Christian name". Ditto, ditto, ditto. Another fifteen minutes elapse. Then he breaks the cycle. "What's wrong with Jeffrey anyway?" I'm sure why, but it was only then that I glanced at his name tag, "Jeffrey Green". Oh no, I think to myself, I'm stuck with my old identity forever. "There's nothing wrong with Jeffrey, Jeffrey. It's really a very fine name, but it's not what anyone calls me any more, not how I wish to be known." Another round around the mulberries, and he again diverts, "Where did you get this name, Menachem, from anyway?" I explain that all Jewish boys are given a Hebrew name as part of their circumcision ceremony, and the name after I was given, after my late grandfather, was Menachem (I didn't want to confuse him with Baruch -- one name was sufficient). Oh he said, in that case there's no problem. "Please fill out a statutory declaration (no judge needed for this -- this could be countersigned by a Justice of the Peace of which there was always at least one in the passport office) explaining what you have just told me and we can issue your new passport, Menachem. Yes, Jeffrey's new Christian name was now Menchem! As a postscript to this story . . . armed with my new passport, I go down to the New South Wales Motor Registry Office, to renew my local driver's license. They take my photograph (this was the first time -- new technology) and I go to the counter to pay. "Could I change my first name on the license, please", my hand in my pocket, ready to pull out my new, shiny, Menachem passport. "No problem love, what would you like us to change it to?"
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