The Counter Where Names Go to Die

The Counter Where Names Go to Die

On Ellis Island, 1912, arriving immigrants await their turns. White-coated men tell them to cough, peer into their eyes, take their urgent pulses.

At one counter stands a middle aged, thin-soled man whose job it is to give people their new American identities. He changes their foreign-sounding names to more American-sounding ones. He doesn't hear the music in “Delaprovatti,” nor the rhythmic susurration in “Sipsizimani.” 

Paderewski becomes Drew; Ystremskaya becomes Strong; Wjohowicz becomes Howard.

The immigrants -- so malleable -- will do anything to become Americans. They accept this indignity -- which is far less onerous than many they have suffered in the past -- for the sake of getting permission to begin new lives.

 This man does his job efficiently and rotely. It doesn't matter to him that people have a right to their names as part of a long blood line stretching back thousands of years. To him they are just sounds — problematic in most cases — strung together in chains that can be unlinked and made shorter.

It is of no concern to him, either, that these names have substantial meanings in other languages. They may be place names, signifying battlegrounds or vineyards or cairns wherein the bones of generations lie.  These names may mean “son of so-and so,” signifying lines of succession no less important than those of Tudors or Hapsburgs: Shlomo Ben Levi — Solomon son of Levi.  Ibrahim Bin Saud — Abraham from the house of Saud. Genetic history is seated in these names and yet, with a few pen scratches in a registry, he erases those connections forever.

One day a woman, one of several translators at Ellis Island, asks him why he has changed a passenger's name from Checzowicz to something else.

“The name was too long,” he says. “Ten letters.”

“But,” she says, “you didn't change O'Shaughnessy, and it has twelve.”

She waits for an answer but he stands stock still. Finally, “How does it hurt to shorten a name?” he asks. “You can dock a dog's tail, but he is still a Rottweiler.”

She turns away and doesn't speak to him again.

 Sometimes, when he is out in the great throngs of Manhattan, going about his usual errands at a Chinese shirt laundry, for example, or the fish market, he sees the hostile looks of immigrants around him. He has been bumped roughly in lines and glared at from vegetable stalls, and he is not sure why.

He doesn't recognize the faces, but they know him. He is the man at the counter where they lost their names. He is the man who stands on the spot where names go to die.