10/8 - What's In A Name?

During some downtime in a Hebrew School lesson in the third grade, I remember my classmates and I discussing what our names meant. Max proudly announced that his name meant "the greatest". Ava stated that her name meant "life" and "bird". When I told them that I had no idea what my name meant, they quickly looked it up on the computer. The name Rachel came out to mean "ewe", more commonly known as a female sheep. My peers erupted into laughter. I was mortified. Not only was the meaning of my name not cool in any sense, but as a chubby kid, being equated to a rotund farm animal was not ideal. 

I struggled to accept my name yet again when I entered middle school, this time with my full name: Rachel Hannah Gittelman. I was going through a bit of an identity crisis; I wanted nothing more than to be fully white and not Jewish in order to be able to fit in. All three of my names are deeply rooted in Judaism and the Torah. Rachel was the favorite wife of Jacob, the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. Hannah was the barren and famously-patient wife of Elkanah. Gittelman goes back all the way to the various Jewish villages in Galicia (modern day Poland, Russia, and Ukraine). I disliked my name so much that I even went as far as researching how to change a minor's name in the state of North Carolina and printing out the necessary forms. My parents wouldn't sign them.

I no longer religiously practice Judaism, but I love taking part in the cultural and traditional aspects. Like I take pride in my Korean mom's immigration story, I see my dad's  family's stories (traveling from Russia and Spain) as another major point of my heritage. Learning about the mass immigration during the early 1900s often covers the stories of the Irish, but not usually of the Jewish. I can tell you a couple interesting ones right now. My great-grandfather didn't have the money nor the time to go to a regular university, so he got his engineering degree over sixteen years through night school. He would later go on to be one of the head civil engineers for the city of Philadelphia. Skip two generations forward and you'll see my Aunt Elena (my dad's first cousin) be appointed as a Supreme Court Justice by President Barack Obama. To me, my three names are significant because they represent an ancestry that I am incredibly proud of and that has given me countless values to live by.




I can absolutely relate to Anna Quindlen's remark, "there are two me's, the me who is the individual and the me who is a part of a family of four..." For most of my life I have been a very extroverted person outside of my house and an introverted person in it. I suppose this is rooted in me being having to be a shy and quiet kid because my older sister Grace was so generally rambunctious and outspoken. There just wasn't enough sanity in my parents' beings for us both to be loud. As a result of this, any place where I was alone without my sister, I was very sociable. To this day, my parents still can't believe it when a tennis coach, a teacher, or an orchestra conductor tells them how chatty and easy to talk to I am. 

The dilemma of being an individual while still being part of a whole is that as an individual I feel like I can be whoever I want (that being an extroverted person), while as a part of my family I feel like I need to fill the role of the quiet girl that I am expected to be and erase my identity as an individual.