What's in a Name?

Donald Trump's grandfather, Frederick

"What’s in a name?” Juliet asks. “That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” Well let’s take Trump. Trump of course sounds like Trump card. To trump is to beat or trumpet which is to herald. Everything about Trump conjures the notion of overpowering. A three no trump bid in bridge, beats three spades, three diamonds or three clubs. You don’t monkey around with a name like Trump and Trumps don’t march to the beat of a different drummer. They’re majorettes. Donald’s grandfather Frederick immigrated from Germany and the name exudes an earthy almost Anglo-Saxon feel compared to Clinton which has English overtones, Cruz, which is Hispanic and Kasich which is Czech.  Sanders is another ball of wax. When you thinking of Sanders your mind goes to The Larry Sanders Show which starred the recently deceased standup comedian Gary Shandling. Bernie may have had to live down his initials BS but when you hear the Brooklyn accent and the urgency of which infects literally every sentence of his speech, you think of other standup of a similar vintage like Larry David. Will Sanders end up being the Larry David of politics, that is to say a big hit, but not as big as Seinfeld, the comedian with whom he was once associated? Lest Ted Cruz be given short shrift it can definitely be said that the name Ted Cruz does not conjure images of J. Crew, whose metrosexual style is a trifle too New York for someone who is unlikely to wear a rust colored belt. And what about those other names. When you  hear Kennedy you're most likely to think “dead,” like the punk rock group (Dead Kennedys), Johnson may bring up The Great Society, but not until you’ve thought of Johnson and Johnson. And then there are Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson, whose egg shaped head, is an example of the pathetic fallacy and Nixon who got nixed. Eisenhower rhymes with power and Washington was a person before being a city or state which is something that Omaha residents are reminded of on a daily basis when they cede to the fact that Lincoln is the capital of their state. Harry Truman earned points for the connotation of his name when in a stunning upset he beat the Republican, Thomas Dewey, for the presidency.

And the First Shall Be Last

Augustus John

Think about all auspicious personalities whose last names are typical first names. At the top of the list you have Anne Frank and Pope Francis. But there are also Dick Francis and  Philip K Dick, Rand Paul and Ru (ok Paul is really part of his first name, but why miss a beat), Phyllis George, John Irving and Deborah Harry. Anthony Lewis was a distinguished journalist and Susan B. Anthony a famed social reformer. And what more classic case of the carriage preceding the horse than David (Jacques-Louis), the pre-eminent l9th century painter. Jacob Joseph was a l9th century rabbi after whom an Orthodox Jewish school was named and don’t forget the comedian Larry David who created Curb Your Enthusiasm, a title that will resonate with anhedonics for eternity. Do you remember the sixties soul singer Joe Tex? He performed magic with microphones which he turned into pendulums and can we not say that Ben is Big Ben’s last name?  It’s rare that you have a person who has the same first and last name. It would be unlikely that Irving was one of the names on the list of possibilities that John Irving’s parents came up with before they finally settled on John and in spite of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert it is also unlikely that any parent would be gauche enough to name their male offspring Dick Dick. You don’t want to bring a child in the world who is going to live up to his name and behave like a Dick, no matter how much you might like the name. Augustus John was a famous Welsh painter, but there was no chance his parents would have named him John. Among other problems it wouldn’t have been august enough. Washington Irving could easily have been Washington George if his parents had changed their last name to another common first name, George. And the father of our country could easily have been Washington Irving if George Washington’s parents had liked idea of retaining their surname as a first name and decided to make the common first name Irving, their last.

Footnote

Joseph Cedar's Footnote could be a typical modern Jewish family drama, something in Jerry Seinfeld’s memory bank or literarily up against Larry David’s kitchen sink in Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is a scene in which we see three generations of a Jewish family piled into the car after watching Fiddler with the grandfather humming “Tradition.” And the father and son conflict is the substance of the kind of Yiddishkeit that would have been at home on Second Avenue a century ago. Two factors complicate matters: the son Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) and his father Eliezer (Shlomo bar Aba) are both Talmudic scholars and the movie takes place in Israel (whose own struggles with secularism and modernity are mirrored in the generational struggle that the film plays out). The plot hinges on many questions which the Talmud surely deals with. One is the question of righteousness. Should a man be righteous and honest when it causes another great pain? A simple and almost iconic struggle between father and son becomes a black hole in which centuries of ethics and morality are brought to bear on the answer to this question. Eliezer, whose publication is limited (the footnote of the title refers to a minor mention in his mentor's work) embodies a past in which great scholars devoted their lives to scholarship for its own sake. His son, who has published many books and works out his aggressions on the paddle ball court, is a creature of the modern world who plainly wouldn’t mind his Talmudic commentaries selling on Amazon. It’s interesting to ponder into which category the great Talmudic scholar Adin Steinsaltz, whose Talmud is on Amazon, would fall. Library carrels are as ubiquitous in Footnote as boudoirs were in the Hollywood movies of the 30’s and talking about books and libraries, there is an almost Borgesian obsession with language and citation which eventually builds to a surreal finale in a wonderful cross cutting scene as father and son attempt to diminish each other’s achievements.