No Margarets: an essay by Carla Sarett

(Another memoir piece)

When we moved from our tan split-level in Long Island to our more refined house in New Jersey, with its dollhouse in the backyard, my mother thought it a scandal that its owner, a Jewish doctor named Katzen or Katz, had named his only daughter, Mary.  I never learned the doctor’s name or his wife’s name, but I knew her name, Mary.

“Very peculiar for a Jew to name a daughter Mary,” my mother said.

Even at ten, I knew Mary was no name for Jewish girls.  Marilyn or Marian, fine, but Mary, never. 

My mother went on, her eyes shining, “They must have been very  rich to name her Mary.”

The idea that our family who was by no means rich were moving into a rich man’s house was a big deal.  My mother had grown up in the Bronx with, as she put it, “nothing.”  And from our exchange, I gathered that rich Jews (whoever they were) got to name daughters forbidden names, even Mary.  Although I never met Mary, I pictured her tall, dark-haired, pale, with soft brown eyes, everything I felt a true Mary should be.

Back then,  there were a lot of rules that Jews followed about names.  Girls couldn’t be Katherine, Angelica, Margaret, Christine, or Maria.  Now Margaret is a strange case— yes, there is a Saint Margaret, but other saint’s names slipped through.  There are two Saint Dorotheas, but Dorothy was a common Jewish name. There is Saint Lucy (Lucia of Syracuse, if you’re wondering), and Lucy was my mother’s name.  

Lucia of Syracuse

There’s a Saint Irene, and I know too many Jewish Irenes to count.  So, sainthood doesn’t fully explain the lack of Jewish Margarets. Still, even now, if I meet a Margaret, I figure she’s not Jewish.  (Boys had different naming rules — the two staples of the Christian faith, Peter and Paul, were and are popular names for Jewish boys.)

A few years ago, I contacted a psychic (a telephone psychic.) I was considering a novel involving a psychic cult and some research was in order.  At first, the psychic seemed pretty, well, psychic.  She knew my father’s name, got close with my grandmother’s.  But after she’d hit the low hanging fruit (“there were secrets in your family”), she announced that a spirit was trying to contact me.  (Apparently, when you get on the phone to the other side, the spirits all line up, they’re eager to chat.)

“There’s a Margaret who wants you,” she said.  

“I don’t know any Margarets,” I said.

There was an uneasy silence.

“No one in your family?” 

I’d mentioned to this psychic that most of my mother’s family had died in the death camps, so I’d given her a clue (not even a psychic one) that I was Jewish.  But not being Jewish,  she didn’t know the rule about Margaret.  

“No Margarets,” I told her.  “Tell her to find another family.”

Naming Me, an essay by Carla Sarett

I've been thinking a lot about names.

The most famous of pen names is George Eliot. As a girl, I despised maudlin Silas Marner (is there anyone who likes it?) and pictured Mr. Eliot as a priggish male. By the time Middlemarch startled me, I knew its author to be a certain Mary-Ellen Evans who lived rather unpriggishly and died almost as soon as she married.

Well, Mary-Ellen is certainly a name to dump.  Any name with a dash is one I’d cast off, although Mary-Ellen reclaimed her name when she made her ill-fated marriage to young Mr. Cross.  

Actually, I had a lucky break in the naming department.  My mother, in a fit of romantic whimsy, was dead-set on naming me Wendy.  I suspect that she, like others in her generation, had read J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan or seen it as a play, and fancied that her daughter would be a little Wendy, dancing around a room with the lost boys.  There were many Jewish Wendys in my classes at school.

It exhausts me to think of my life as Wendy.  I’d have been trapped forever within the childish confines of my mother’s fairy-tale imagination.  (In fairness, I have known at least one brilliant Wendy, and that’s not counting Wendy Wasserstein, and neither seems to have minded her name in the least.)

My grandmother and mother

Fortunately, my cool-headed father had other plans for me, although not for the reasons one might expect.  According to family lore, my father hated my Russian-born grandmother’s habit of turning all names into diminutives. My grandmother spoke Polish, Russian and Yiddish, and interspersed a bit of each language into her English.  My mother, a Lucy (the name on her passport was different) was always a “Luciluh” or little Lucy. My father told me later, he couldn’t stand the idea of his daughter becoming “Wendiluh.”  

So, he came up with a name that would defeat my grandmother.  He chose the feminine form of the obstetrician’s name, a certain Dr. Carl Polifka, and I became Carla.  The masculine turned feminine, which is, I think now, how my father saw me since, as fate would have it, I looked very much like my father and nothing like my delicate-featured mother.

My grandmother sidestepped the issue of my name altogether. She always called me Shana, which means beautiful in Yiddish.  In the strange ways of families, my niece is named Shana, although my sister claims she had no idea of my grandmother’s pet name for me.

But like all (or at least much) family lore, the version of “how I got my name” is shaky at best. Yes, there was an actual obstetrician named Carl Polifka, that part is real enough. And yes, my parents did love him. And yes, my mother did long to call me Wendy. But I later found a picture of my dad from his army days. He is standing with a young man with dark curly hair, and the two of them look happy in the way only young men look.   

“That’s my friend Carl Glassman,” my father told me. “He was the closest friend I ever had.”

I knew why I’d been named Carla. It had nothing to do with Dr. Polifka.

Funnily enough, my dad created his own diminutive for me, and until the day he died, never called me anything but Carly.   No one else gets to call me that, in case you're wondering.