Name Game

I categorize every single name I hear as better or worse than mine; I’ve been doing this pretty much my entire life. I’d say ninety-nine percent fall into the better camp but once in while, I come across a name that I actually think is worse. (More on this later.) I have to say that I come by this name honorably enough: I was born in Chadera, Israel, where if the name Yona was not the most common of names, at least it was not freakish. But my parents moved back to the United States in 1958 and it did not occur to them to Anglicize my name; they had started life as, respectively, Hiram and Mildred, yet kept their Hebrew names—Chayym and Malcah—when they returned.

So what was it about this name that was so objectionable? It was always confused or mangled: Yola, Yoda, Ona and Zona were a few of its many ungainly permutations. And coupled with my unusual last name, Zeldis, made for an even more confused reaction. When I entered a new school in fourth grade, my teacher looked at the class list and said, “What is Yona Zeldis?” I had to raise my hand and say, “It’s me.” She thought it was a misprint and that it should perhaps have been Zelda Yonis; no such luck though. The McDonough part I married in 1985, and when I write, I use the damn whole thing.

I did have a brief moment in college in which I sought to use my middle name Miriam and filled out all my official school documents with that name; my diploma reads Miriam Zeldis. But I did not have the conviction, foresight or both to make the switch; I now ardently wish I had. So here, in my sixth decade, with six novels, twenty-six books for children, two essay collections and scads of published articles, essay and short fiction to my name—this unwieldy, two-headed calf of a name—I have made a grudging peace with it. The name may be awful, but it is mine.

Because of my heightened name sensitivity, I am almost obsessive about the naming of anyone else in my life: children, dogs and even (especially?) my fictional characters. When it came to my kids, I opted for James and Katherine: gender specific, Anglo, easy to say, to spell, to get. I inched out a tad on the middle names—Redden for my son, because that was my husband’s mother’s maiden name, and Constance for my daughter, because it was the name of my dear friend and her godmother. As for the characters that populate my novels, I love the process of bestowing their names and devote a lot of time to it. The names are not always ones I like; that would be too easy. No, the names have to fit the character—his or her gender, religion, nationality and class. (And names convey so much about a character; we perceive Katherine Anne Worthington as distinct from Sadie Mossbacher without another line of description about either.) Also the names have to speak to me in some ineffable way—each new name is like a poem to my ears and I have become highly attuned to its music. So what about the names that I consider to be worse than mine? Because there is that one percent. When I encounter such a name, I feel an enormous amount of pity and tenderness, not only for the name itself, but also for its hapless owner. I know all too well what it’s like to go through life with an odd and ungainly name and I feel their pain. A dear friend had an uncle named Oscar Kornblatt—horrors! The first syallable,“Korn,” suggested not the tasty yellow ears but the affliction of the toes, and second, “blatt,” had the misfortune to rhyme with splat. And the combination of the two induced shudders. But this name was paradoxically dear to me because of its very awfulness and I gave it to character I loved in my first novel, THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS.

I chose the names in my fifth novel, TWO OF A KIND, with the same kind of attention. The male protagonist, Andrew Stern, had the sort of Jewish boy name I was familiar with from my own childhood. Andy is a high-risk OB/GYN and he’s a smart, driven and essentially decent man, though at moments he can be overbearing and obnoxious. I felt I knew his type well and I found a name that put me in mind of it. For the woman he meets, the name had to be Christina. He’s Jewish and she’s not; this religious difference is one of the issues they must overcome to build a life together. Christina was about as clear and emphatic as I could get—can’t miss the reference to Christ in there, can you? Her last name, Connelly, is Irish because she comes from the kind of working class Irish family that used to make up the backbone of Park Slope, where she’s lived all her life. Her daughter Jordan and Andy’s son Oliver have names that are reflective of their generation; I knew of no one, other than characters in books or in movies, who had such names when I was growing up, whereas my teen-aged daughter and twenty-something son both have friends and acquaintances with these names. Andy’s mother, Ida, got her name from my great-aunt; I wanted a name that suggested her European Jewish roots and felt that was the one.

In my sixth novel, YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME, no one knows the name of baby found in the subway station; her mother did not provide her with one. But Miranda Berenzweig (how do you like that last name? It belonged to a boy I knew in college and I have waited decades for the chance to use it!), who hopes to adopt her, names her Celeste. Miranda chose the name to honor her grandmother. But it also has the association with celestial—heavenly—which seemed fitting for this child, who, though abandoned, managed to bestow an angelic grace on everyone in her orbit.

The naming of these characters and others has given me such satisfaction and delight. There is something so grand, and even Biblical in the process—think of Adam: Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.

I have an inkling of how Adam must have felt, and I can tell you, it must have been grand.

About Yona Zeldis McDonough

Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of six novels; her seventh, The House on Primrose Pond, will be out from New American Library in February, 2016. In addition, she is the editor of the essay collections The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty and All the Available Light: A Marilyn Monroe Reader. Her short fiction, articles and essays have been published in anthologies as well as in numerous national magazines and newspapers. She is also the award-winning author of twenty-six books for children, including the highly acclaimed chapter books, The Doll Shop Downstairs and The Cats in the Doll Shop. Yona lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, two children and two noisy Pomeranians.

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About THE HOUSE ON PRIMROSE POND

A compelling novel about one woman’s search for the truth from the author of YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME.

After suffering a sudden, traumatic loss, historical novelist Susannah Gilmore decides to uproot her life—and the lives of her two children—and leave their beloved Brooklyn for the little town of Eastwood, New Hampshire.

While the trio adjusts to their new surroundings, Susannah is captivated by an unexpected find in her late parents’ home: an unsigned love note addressed to her mother, in handwriting that is most definitely not her father’s.

Reeling from the thought that she never really knew her mother, Susannah finds mysteries everywhere she looks: in her daughter’s friendship with an older neighbor, in a charismatic local man to whom she’s powerfully drawn, and in an eighteenth century crime she’s researching for her next book. Compelled to dig into her mother’s past, Susannah discovers even more secrets, ones that surpass any fiction she could ever put to paper...