In the summer of 1979, after 9 years of being Gennady Aronavich Ortenberg, thanks to the democratic wisdom of a street football huddle in the Brooklyn Streets, I was baptized and renamed. My new American name was John. I had no idea at the time that John was the Westernized version of Ivan. Had I known, I may have protested. The Ivans of the world had never been kind to my people. Ivans were first in line at the pogroms my grandmother told me about. Ivans most likely shot my grandfather as he was returning from the front where he helped them fight Fritz. Ivans called my father a zhyd and Mrs Ivan proclaimed me a traitor in second grade for the crime of not wanting to be called a son of a zhyd. But I accepted the monicker because I wanted play football with the neighborhood kids. A small price to pay.

John with an H. The real John. Not Jon, short for Jonathan. The kids in the street of Bensonhurst never knew anyone without the H. Jonathans lived in Boro Park or Midwood or maybe on the Upper east side. In Bensonhurst there were Paulies, Carmines and Vitos a plenty, but no Jons. Considering that my name was randomly assigned to me by a group of Italian-American kids with no real ear the subtleties of the Ukrainian pronunciation of Gennady, I think I got lucky with John. I could have just as easily become Geovani, Gugliemo or Giuseppe. Frankly, any one of those is closer to Gennady than John. John made no sense phonetically, culturally or in any other conceivable sense. I’m willing to wager that the neighborhood kids to whom the universe assigned the task of naming me had no clue of the etymology of John ( most likely from the Hebrew Yohanan, meaning God was gracious.) I would also wager that the conversation in the huddle was akin to this:

“ Carmine, what the fuck that kid say was his name?”

“I dunno Vito, I just wanna play”

“So what do we call this Russian prick?”

“Just call him John or Bob who gives a fuck.. But he’s on my team.. he’s tall”

“Fuck you he’s on your team. You already have an extra guy.”

“No… fuck you, Pete sucks its like having a girl on the team”

“Fuck you Vito”

“Shut up Pete”

“So he’s John”

“Yeah.. lets play”

And so I was now the tall Ivan the terrible of Bensonhurst. I had no idea of the rules of football. I lined up on the line… they told me to run. Someone threw me the ball and I caught it. I stood there. Two hands touched my shoulder. Everyone stopped. “ John… when you catch you gotta run, ok”…. “OK”. It took three more plays running the wrong way to learn which way to run.

For a few weeks, whenever the kids played outside, I would come down from our 2nd floor apartment and join them. I picked up the rules of the game faster than the rules of Italian-American kid culture. We were kids and I was a tolerated outsider. I sounded like a prepubescent Russian spy. I was one of the new weird people moving into a neighborhood studded with pork stores, Italian bakeries, pizzerias, old Italian grandmas in black dresses and headscarves, Cadillacs and a population of people for whom the only two vowels of any import were A and O. As in “Ay Oh, fuggetaboutit.”

These kids talked about the yankees, the jets and how much they hated the commies and the niggers. I was pretty sure they suspected me of being the former, and more than fairly certain my dad felt the same about the latter.

This was the general pool of kids which produced the murderer of Yusef Hawkins in 1989. That same year I was called a traitor for the second time in my life. This time by the neighborhood teens because I marched down 20th Avenue with Roy Innes to protest the Yusefs racist murder while the neighborhood people on the sidelines held watermelons over their heads. Or Perhaps my traitorous crime was telling Channel 7 News’ NJ Burkett the obvious. “ Well, NJ, there’s definitely racists in the neighborhood, look at the watermelons” on live tv. This was the same pool of kids who took a baseball ball to me because they confused my colorfully crochet yarmulke with a target sign. But all that was a decade away. In 1979 we were just kids. That summer from the moment I left my apartment to play ball to the moment I came home sweaty and exhausted I was just John. But only till September.

My first school in America was Yeshiva Be’er Hagolah Institute. The name translates to “ wellspring of the diaspora.” It was started in the late 70’s by the Orthodox Jewish community to address the spiritual needs of the Jewish refugees flooding in from USSR. The school was meant as a spring of Torah and Mitzvot from which an entire generation of Soviet jews could satiate their long deprived spirit. Those same Russian Jews who have been stripped of the identity in the pursuit of the communist ideal, the Jews who were denied their birthright of the Shtetl life now can send their children to learn all about their Jewish heritage. But a very specific Jewish heritage. The orthodox heritage. Because after all, if you were saved from political persecution and economic deprivation but you ate pork and drove a car on Shabbat, were you truly saved?

In retrospect, and perhaps I am being unkind, it felt like a cultish land grab for new followers. While organizations like HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society ) and NAYANA (New York Association for New Americans) were focused on helping the refugees through the emigration process and provided essential social services, Be’er Hagolah was teaching a generation of young Russian children who were struggling to learn English to read Hebrew and observe Shabbat. It’s difficult for me, all these years later after having renounced my orthodox beliefs becoming deeply secular and atheist, to be objective on this matter. My personal distaste for orthodoxy of any kind certainly colors my world view and my memory. The the kindest interpretation I can muster of the founders of Be’er Hagolah is that they truly believed that the soul of the Soviet Jew was on life support and they were willing to do virtually anything to save it. Even build a school with substandard education. An education which by their standards was focused on the important things. Mainly, weaving a new thread of Jews into the very old cloth of Orthodox Judaism. It was as much an attempt to prevent the assimilation of the Russian Jew into the goyish America as it was a Gymnasium.

My schooling at Be’er Hagolah began in the basement of an existing Yeshiva ( Ohel Moshe) on 80th Street and Bay Parkway. This was an era when a 9 year old child could walk 10 blocks to school by themselves without CPS being called on their parents. ( This may sound shocking to the 27 year old living at home who has yet to adult, but we survived. ) Be’er Hagolah did not have its own building and would not have one for a decade. At the time it occupied several classrooms in the Ohel Moshe building. Over the next several years my school would move further and further away so that by the time I was in high school my commute went from a 10 minute walk to an hour long 3 bus change tour of Brooklyn nightmare.

To attend this new Yeshiva there were three main requirements 1. You had to be Jewish. That is your mother had to be Jewish. Your father could be Ghengis Khan or Farrakhan just so long as you mother was not Shaka Kahn. 2) If you were male you had to be circumcised. 3) You needed a Jewish name.

With hurdles 1 and 2 cleared we were now up to the Jewish name. This is an area where my father was very much ahead of me. His name was Aron. Not Aaron, pronounced eh-ron but Aron pronounced Ah-ron. The Russian pronunciation is virtually identical to the Hebrew. Had he been the one going to Yeshiva, his name would have not changed. But mine was Gennady, which had no English corollary and even less of a Jewish one. This required the Rabbis at the school to get creative.

There are roughly three dozen biblical names which start with G. Most of them are archaic or simply sound like a middle easterner is clearing their throat. These include Gudgodah, Giliad and Gur-baal…These names are not used in the mainstream of orthodoxy. In fact there is only a hand full of names which are used in the American Jewish Orthodox community today. (There are more in Israel, but they are Sephardic names and to the average Yeshiva boy those names might as well be Christopher. ) With the limited number of choices I had to choose from Gavriel and Gershon.

Names matter. They are how people know you. In many cultures names are either description of your personality or a parent’s hope for your life’s outcome. Names memorialize the past and are beacons to which the future steers. In some Native American traditions a person’s name changes over time. They are given a descriptive name at birth which changes to reflect their accompaniments or defining characteristics over time. They may have interim names as teenagers and once they reach adulthood and accomplish more they would adopt a more fitting moniker. If I applied that to myself I would have been Big Ears as a child, Egotistical Asshole as a teen, Without Direction as a young adult, Suicidal Depressive as upstanding member of society and Today I would be Healed Heart by Love of a Woman.

I believe that in some way a person has to reconcile their name with the way they live their life. If you know after whom you are named you either become as they were or rebel completely against it. If grandpa Saul was a saint, then you either strive to for sainthood or embrace sin with gusto. Alternatively, if your name has a real meaning you either fulfill it or its opposite. For example, to be named Chaim requires you to live life fully, because if you don’t you wasted a name. If your name is Deirdre you either fulfill her sadness or strive like mad oppose it.

The meaning of Gavriel is was an angel. His name means “strength of god” it did not sound anything like Gennady. And so they picked Gershon.

Gershon is a derivation or perhaps a Ashkanazation of the Biblical Gershom. Gershom was not an Angel. He was a footnote in the Bible. His only claim to fame is his patronymic. His full name would have been Gershom Ben Moshe. The son of the only man to have been close to the face of God, Moses. Moses chose this name for his son because it commemorated his sojourn in the Tent of Jethro. Gershom means “ a sojourner there.” The next forty years of my life were spent fulfilling the meaning of my name. Being a stranger everywhere I lived and to everyone I’ve loved. The name gave me a superpower; the ability to look like I was home without ever feeling it. I was now Gershon Ben Aron… or to translate to English, A Stranger, the son of a Narcissist.