Our names in the world

There are many Jewish family names that are matronymics. We know people with the family name Sorkin- Sarah's child, or Mirkin -Miriam's child or Dvorkin- D'vorah's child.

When I taught daycare the family circumstances of the kids I taught were often complicated. A child might be living with her parents or with her father and his girlfriend, or her mother and her new husband or have two moms or two dads. I solved my problem of how to refer to the parents by calling the adults in the child's life Mr. Child's Name or Mrs. Child's Name no matter what the exact relationship to the child was. Mr. Joey was Joey's male adult that I was speaking to no matter what his relationship was to the constellation of adults caring for that child. The same went for Mrs. Joey. my solution was at the same time exact and inexact.

I was surprised at how many of the children's names I remembered in this photo.

Once I had children I was faced with what my children's friends would call me. The kids I knew well called me by my first name, as I had requested them to. Once my kids started school their friends called me different things.

Children whose parents or grandparents came from the South tended to call me Miss Sarah. Frankly, that made me uncomfortable. To me it reeked of Southern Plantations . It took me several years to learn that being called Miss Sarah wasn't upholding a creepy racist past but was in fact the way well brought up children were taught to refer to adults who came into their lives. I learned to hear Miss. Sarah as a gift from the parents and grandparents of the child asking me for another cookie. It took me a really long time to learn that.

Others of my children's friends used to call me something that I just loved. They used to call me ______'s Mama, as if that were my proper name. It was a name that felt like it came out of ancient New York City streets and playgrounds. I loved the mix of the familiar and polite in that name.

Several years ago I was greeted really warmly on the street by a young man who I did not recognize. I guess my face showed that I had no clue who that young man was. He said " I'm Saul, Ellen's Saul!." I knew Saul from the time he was in diapers. I hadn't seen him since he was a little kid, and now he was a young man who shaved, and he was Ellen's Saul. I embraced him, we chatted, and both went on our way.

My youngest has been working at Trader Joe's. Again and again customers ask him if he is Sarah's ______. My son answers that indeed he is mine. I so love the sense of belonging implied by these relational names. I am of my children, and they are of me.

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Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

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A Passover loss

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sarah in nyc

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