O Canada!

What's in a Name?

We were going to be the ones smart enough to read the writing long before it actually hit the wall. We weren’t naive, delusional, complacent, hidebound. The opposite! We were clear-eyed, adventurous, confident! We’d pack our bags and go in plenty of time.

Turns out I was wrong. Turns out I am just as inert and complacent as any Jewish resident of Berlin’s Charlottenburg circa 1935.

Or I was, until a couple of months ago when it came to my attention that I am a Canadian citizen by descent under section 3(1)(g) of the Citizenship Act, because my father is Canadian, born in Montreal. More importantly, my US-born children are Canadian citizens under Bill C-3.

Time to get the bolt hole ready, kiddos.

Should be easy, right? Straightforward? My dad, Leonard Waldman, born in Montreal in 1925. Me, Ayelet Waldman, born in Jerusalem in 1964. I have a copy of his birth certificate, and a copy of mine. I should be able to fill this form out in half an hour.

Except I can’t, because my father, a socialist Zionist committed to the cause of colonizing (his word) Palestine, did what so many immigrants to the new Jewish state did. He translated Waldman into Hebrew and started calling himself Yaari. Or Ya’ari, depending on his mood. Waldman is an Ashkenazi Jewish surname with straightforward Germanic roots: Wald = forest. Literally “forest man” or “man of the forest.” Yaari (יַעֲרִי) comes from the Hebrew root, יַעַר (ya’ar) meaning forest. The suffix י- (-i) is a possessive ending meaning “of” or “belonging to.” So Yaari means “of the forest” or “forest person,” the Hebrew equivalent, almost exactly, of Waldman.

All those early Zionists did it. David Grün started calling himself David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meyersohn became Golda Meir. Little Szymon Perski from the shtetl no more! Shimon Peres took his place.

I’m not criticizing them. (Well, I mean, yes I am, but not for the name thing). After all, this is no different than what Jewish immigrants did when they arrived at the Goldene Medina. All those Polish and Russian Wallechinskys who became Wallaces, the Kaminskys shpatsiring around as Kayes’. And no, their names weren’t changed by irritable and bigoted immigration officers at Ellis Island. They did it themselves. I refer you to genealogist Jennifer Mendelsohn and her posts pointing out the destitute immigrants in the direct ancestral lines of bigots like that gollum in hair gel currently purging the traumas of his childhood by murdering people in the streets and imprisoning babies in rancid wire cages.

What is driving me and the Canadian lawyer I hired crazy is that no one seems to have done any of this name changing legally. My father just started calling himself Yaari, and then once the Zionist dream went sour, reverted back to Waldman. My siblings and I have different surnames. The lucky ones are either Waldman or Yaari. I was stuck with both, sometimes one or the other, sometimes hyphenated, sometimes not, depending apparently on my parents’ whims when they were filling out paperwork. Then, to make matters worse, I dropped the Yaari and took my husband’s surname as my middle name, which back then you could do in the State of California in a similarly ad hoc way, just showing a marriage license.

I am legally Ayelet Chabon Waldman, with a drivers license and a passport to prove it. Except I’m also Ayelet Yaari on the Israeli passport that I am cursed to schlep around. And Ayelet Yaari on my US Birth certificate, and Ayelet Waldman-Yaari on my record of US citizen born abroad. Etc. Etc.

My desire to resolve this lunacy and get my Canadian citizenship in order has become increasingly heightened not by my second rewatch of Heated Rivalry (Come on, I’m not an idiot) but by the official Canadian response to Heated Rivalry, which is so fucking cute I can’t even stand it. I mean, look at this:

O Canada I stand on guard for thee!