While living on Argentina, I lived two lives; I was Chejfec (T'chehfek) in the Public School and Chejfec (Chafetz) in the Jewish school. And both worlds were in my mind clearly separated; if somebody called me "Chafetz" I knew the connection was Jewish. The converse was not necessarily truth.

When I moved to this country I first attended the double Master program in Los Angeles at the Hebrew Union College and the University of Southern California. One of the first "cultural shocks" I had was being asked a simple question: "How do you pronounce your last name?". Here I had a golden opportunity, and I took it. I firmly answered "Chafetz", and at the quizzical look I explained the story behind the spelling. I have been called "Chafetz" ever since (most of the time) without changing the spelling of my name. Why is it so important?

When my brother got married in Los Angeles, my sister in law actually asked me why not changing the spelling to reflect the pronounciation in English so people can actually read it without an explanation? And I simply answered "Family History"...

When my grandfather Fajvel Chejfec left the shtetl of Radun behind to go to Argentina, the area was under Polish control so he left with a Polish passport, and if you want to spell "Chafetz" in Polish, you spell it "Chejfec". When my grandmother and my older uncle joined him a couple of years later, they had the same spelling. When my father, the first in the family to be born in Argentina, was registered in the Civil register, they made a spelling error; when my youngest Uncle was born a few years later, they made another spelling error. By the time the three brothers went to school, it became very confusing for the Argentinean bureaucrats that three sibling would have three different spelling of the same name, so they asked that everybody adopt the same spelling, and the choice fell with my grandfather's spelling. But the story goes on...

When I attended High School, I was still attending a Public High School during the day and a Jewish Day School in the evenings. Something hapenned however that blurred the division between "T'Chehfek" and "Chafetz". It was during Civics class. My professor, Mr Barcala, was of Spanish descent and the President of one of the most popular soccer clubs in Buenos Aires. In those days, one of the ways for Professors to grade students in Buenos Aires was "calling you to the front" to ask you questions. You can imagine how surprised I was when I heard '"Chafetz" to the front, please'. It didn't fit. This was the Public School. This guy was not even Jewish...

It turns out that Mr Barcala was orphaned very early in life and was adopted by a Christian Polish family, so he was familiar with the Polish language. He therefore saw "Chejfec" and correctly read it "Chafetz". More to come...

One of our relatives in the US is a Holocaust survivor who was during the war in the forest with the Bielsky Partizans of "Defiance" fame. These days, he goes by the spelling "Beryl Chafetz", but when a year or so ago I saw the Polish passport he was issued when leaving Europe after the war, I saw his name was "Boris Chejfec". He adopted the new spelling because when he emigrated to America there was already an uncle in Boston who spelled it like that.

I guess the point I'm trying to make it that while how you spell your last name is a personal choice, when making that choice we affect family history, and in fact the spelling itself is part of that history. For my grandfather, his last name was "Het-Fey-Tzadik" (the Hebrew/Yiddish spelling) and the Polish spelling was just a convenience. But layers of anecdotes involving different members of my family accumulated to give the Polish spelling its own meaning and value.

Learning why your name is spelled the way it does is a way to learn where you come from...and maybe where you're going. It is another link that connect us with the past and with the future. Otherwise, like the Jewish man in the story who wanted to change his name to sound more "American", we might all be "Sean Fergusson" (pronounced "Shoyn Fargessn", Yiddish for "I forgot")