Trouble on Account of a Name

By chance I was born not any ordinary day...but on the day immediately following the Day of Atonement. Since not many have the distinction of being born on such a day, my mother took it as a sign that I should grow up to be a great scholar, a mighty Man of Israel...

And indeed, she must have been right...how else to explain that she, a thin, frail Jewess, could have fasted a whole day on Yom-Kippur, standing on her feet, then come home late at night and gone into labor....and before the break of the next dawn who but Yours Truly should come into the world kicking and screaming? I was probably hungry from my mother’s long fast...in any case, she saw in these events a good omen, a "finger of God"...that with the help of the Almighty, her newborn son was destined to grow up to be a scholar, a modern-day saint, that "God and Man" would rejoice in.

And my mother would never for one minute let me forget that I was chosen to become a great Student of Wisdom. It could not be otherwise...especially because from her two elder sons, who had been driven far away, over the sea, to that non-Kosher Land of America, and who worked there day and night for a piece of bread....from those two she couldn’t hope for anything to be proud of. Not to mention the third son, who was already showing no great inclination toward the Talmud...so I represented the last chance for her to realize her motherly ambitions. Such were her hopes and dreams....

As things turned out, my mother’s prophecy was not fulfilled; but as a result of it I was left with one thing that I could never forget: that I was born not on any ordinary day, but rather on the day after Yom Kippur. And so from all my mother’s children, I am the only one who even now knows the actual date of his birth...because in those days, amongst our people, nobody knew from such things....

In the meantime, to ensure that I, her new-born son, should grow up to be a "Hero of Israel", she chose for me a name from one of her deceased cousins, who had been a distinguished scholar, but to my great misfortune he went by the peculiar name of Falik, or Falk....and during my childhood years, on account of that noble moniker I derived precious little pride and satisfaction...on the contrary, I had to put up with name-calling and ridicule. I still feel a shudder when I think back now on all the pain and trouble that name caused me. It went so far as to make me resent not only all of my mother’s cousins, living and deceased, scholars and wise men....but aslo even the Holy Torah itself, (may God forgive me for the thought!).

The first ones who made fun of my ungainly name were none other than my father’s pupils. Unable to get even with my father, their "Rabbi", for his tongue-lashings, for his whackings, for having to put up with his Pentateuch with all its commentaries, with the difficult Talmudic passages...instead they took their revenge on me. It didn’t help that I was much younger than they, and that even though my father spent less much less time with me than he did with them, that I still knew the lessons better. They made up a little song about my name, which went like so:

Falk, Falik, Flekl,

A fleckl arayn, a fleckl aroys

Di gantze maysseh iz oys...

This innocent-sounding song, which was soon over the whole village, caused me no end of agonies. It darkened my days and years! Wherever I went, I heard that mocking piece of doggerel, so it seemed that not only the village children were making fun of me, but also every stick, every spot of paint on every fencepost in the village were sticking out its long, red tongue at me and screaming: "A fleckl arayn, a fleckl aroys..."

My father, whenever he would hear that song, would become livid. He used to severly punish the "singers"...but nothing helped. On the contrary, the more he beat them, all the more fervently did they sing their little song. I started to feel as though I were a small, helpless little animal, being chased by a pack of angry dogs. More than once, I turned my eyes heavenwards, to plead with God, he should intercede on my behalf, he should take revenge on my enemies, who surrounded me from all sides...but the blue sky kept silent, and pretended not to notice that a child’s heart was bleeding, and that his pale cheeks were burning with shame and sorrow!....

There were times when I lost control...threw myself tooth and nail upon my tormentors. More often I would come running to my mother in tears, complaining bitterly to her:

"How could you give me such an ugly name!?...never mind that such a name is not to be found in the village...even if you went up and down the whole country you couldn’t find such an ugly name?!"

My mother would assure my that one day, God willing, I would grow up to be a learned man; and on that day, "the whole world would rejoice in my name". But I didn’t care: I screamed, stamped my feet, raged at the top of my voice:

"I don’t want the whole world to "rejoice in my name"! I want to have a name like all the other kids, like Avrum-Aharon the beadle’s son has, or like Khayim-Shloymeh the blacksmith’s son, not a name like "Falik" or "Falk"...!"

Little by little I came to understand that all my tears and complaints wouldn’t help. Because my sentence had already been imposed, at the time of my circumcision. So I made my peace with my fate. My father, however, seeing how I bore my wounds in silence, couldn’t make peace with my fate. He still perceived the song as an affront to him on the part of his wealthy pupils. It may have hurt him even more than me; and one time, after class, when it had really "gotten to him", he shouted bitterly:

"Enough! There has to be an end to this! I can’t carry on this war forever! A poor man’s son should study with this equals, among poor children, and not with those spoiled brats!..."

And when the first snows began to fall, father took me to the Kamenetz Hebrew School, put me in the highest class, which met in the big brick House of Study, and which was conducted under the supervision) of the town’s rabbinical adjudicator, Reb Shlomoh-Hayim Garfinkl, a friend of my father.