O pinion
was a witness, not a victim.

One month later I was
asked to help organize Stern
students to sit shmira at
the New York City Medical
Examiner’s temporary morgue
outside Bellevue every Shabbos
— keeping the Jewish custom
of watching over the dead.

Every Friday night I took the
midnight shift and arrived at
the very spot where the two
lines had formed. Fate brought
me there. A mitzvah brought
me there again and again.

Every single time it felt like I
was walking onto holy ground.

We were a constant flow
of young Jews; the same few
volumes of Psalms passed from
hand to hand for months on end.

What started off as a
catastrophe that I happened
to witness became something
different. During my once-a-
week midnight Shabbos shift,
my job was to offer comfort to
the souls that lingered there in
that makeshift outdoor morgue.

I lived inside that space for nearly
nine months, and when it ended,
it was my turn to recover.

Twenty years later, I can
honestly say that I haven’t. It is
raw. I still think about that Penn
student who joked about the
missing, and perhaps it has made
me stronger in teaching my
own children about empathy
and the right words to say.

Instead I seek closure.

I visit the memorial and see
the waterfalls flowing into the
memorial pools.

In the depths, in their
company, inverted into the
ground below
memorial waterfalls, I go back to one
of the Psalms. To the one I’d
memorized and could recite over
and over when I was too tired at
4 in the morning to read from
the book. Tehillim 130, which
begins: “A song of ascents. Out
of the depths I call You, O Lord.”
Every year around this time
I am brought into the depths.

Out of the depths I continue
to call. l
Jessica Russak-Hoffman is a
Seattle-based author.

JEWISHEXPONENT.COM No One Lost Their Jewish Last Name at Ellis Island
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
SHORTLY BEFORE he died,
my dad gave me a trove of family
documents, some dating to the
19th century. For the first time
I had confirmation of what our
family name was before a great-
uncle changed it to Carroll when
he and his brothers immigrated
to America.

My father’s parents moved
from Russia to Paris before
coming to the United States.

Among the papers is a yellowed
French immigration document
signed by my grandfather on
March 13, 1913; there he spells his
last name Karoltchouk. On my
grandmother’s “Permis de sejour
a un etranger,” issued in Paris in
1914, it’s spelled Karolchouk. A
cursory web search locates Jews
with variations like Korolczuk
and Karolchuk, which I am told
is a common Polish surname.

My father was always ambiv-
alent about his last name. His
uncle was probably right that a
deracinated name like Carroll
made it easier for a family of
Polish Jewish immigrants trying
to gain a foothold in America.

The dilemmas of Jewish
name-changing form a powerful
chapter in novelist Dara Horn’s
new collection of essays. “People
Love Dead Jews” is an examina-
tion — deeply reported, at times
brilliant and often bitter — on
the persistent hatred aimed at
Jews, even in their absence. A
recurring theme of the book is
the way antisemites, philosem-
ites and Jews themselves rewrite
and distort the past, and how
Jewish identity is “defined and
determined by the opinions and
projections of others.”
Our last names are a case
in point. Horn explodes the
old myth that Jews’ names
were changed at Ellis Island by
clerks too lazy or malevolent
to spell them right. In public
lectures and a 2014 essay, Horn
would explain that “nobody at
Ellis Island ever wrote down
immigrants’ names.”
Instead, she’d cite works
like Kirsten Fermaglich’s “A
Rosenberg by Any Other Name,”
a deep dive into the data showing
the “heartbreaking reality” of
Jewish immigrants changing
their own names “because they
cannot find a job, or because
their children are being humil-
iated or discriminated against at
school, or because with their real
names, no one will hire them for
any white-collar position.”
What Horn didn’t count on
was the anger of her audiences,
who insisted that their grand-
parents and great-grandparents
were passive victims of a clerk’s
pen. Horn explains this denial
as a “deep pattern in Jewish
history,” which is “all about
living in places where you are
utterly vulnerable and cannot
admit it.”
Instead of fessing up to that
vulnerability and their culpa-
bility in bowing to it, many
Jews prefer to invent more
benign “origin stories,” either
to exonerate their non-Jewish
neighbors or spare themselves
and their children the “humil-
iation” that the new country is
no more friendly to Jews than
the one they left. If Jews were
to tell the truth about why
Karolchouk became Carroll, or
(in my mother’s case) Greenberg
became Green, they’d be
“confirming two enormous fears:
first, that this country doesn’t
really accept you, and second,
that the best way to survive and
thrive is to dump any outward
sign of your Jewish identity, and
symbolically cut that cord that
goes back to Mount Sinai.”
Horn ends up saluting the
“enormous emotional resources”
JEWISH EXPONENT
displayed by the Jews who cling
to the Ellis Island myth, but I felt
hers is an overly harsh assess-
ment of the survival strategies
employed out of necessity by a
previous generation of Jews. I
can’t prove that my great-uncle
and his brothers weren’t humil-
iated by the name change, but I
am guessing that it went down
easier than Horn imagines. A
new country, a new language,
a new alphabet. So much was
lost in translation. Given the
choice between the misery they
left behind in the Old Country
and the opportunities available
to them even in an intolerant
America, their generation felt
losing the last name was a palat-
able trade-off.

History bears out their choice.

Within a generation or two, the
name-changers’ children were
able to assert their Jewishness in
countless ways. The prosperity
that came with “passing” allowed
them to build public Jewish lives,
worship as they chose and climb
the ladder of success unthwarted
by the twisted imaginations of
antisemites. Having achieved
success, these Jews would build
forward-facing Jewish institu-
tions, proudly attach their names
to dormitories and concert halls,
and send their children to Jewish
day schools without fear that
they would be denied admission
to the top universities.

Horn’s book, by contrast, is
haunted by the killings of Jews
in Pittsburgh, Poway and Jersey
City, but those attacks remain
the exceptions. Despite the
beefed-up security at American
synagogues in the wake of
9/11, and the renewed feelings
of vulnerability they instilled,
those attacks don’t reflect the
lived reality of most American
Jews 100 years removed from
Ellis Island.

Jewish survival and adapta-
tion have often depended on
shape shifting, from first-cen-
tury Yavneh to 20th-century
Tel Aviv, when Jews like David
Grün and Goldie Myerson
traded one kind of Jewish name
for another. Besides, what we
consider “Jewish” last names are
often themselves “un-Jewish”
place names and occupations,
adopted after state legislation in
Yiddish-speaking lands required
hereditary names instead of the
patronymics the Jews had been
using. They certainly didn’t go
back to Sinai.

Name changing wasn’t a
humiliation but a strategy,
and one that, in the American
context, has paid off handsomely.

Like my dad, I sometimes
wish our last name sounded
more Jewish. But to even think
of reclaiming a “Jewish” name is
a privilege that would have been
unimaginable to so many Jews
living in truly hostile lands. And
the notion of what is and isn’t
a “Jewish” name is itself being
complicated — and enriched
— by conversion, interfaith
marriage and all the other factors
that have diversified the Jewish
community in recent years.

Still, as Horn wrote in her
original article about the Ellis
Island myth, the internet has
become a “toxic sea” of antise-
mitic misinformation, and “that
makes it all the more important
to get Jewish history right.” We
should all recognize the Ellis
Island story for the myth that it
is, and embrace the real stories
of courage and adaptation that
brought us to this place and
time. l
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor-
in-chief of The New York Jewish
Week and senior editor of the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

STATEMENT FROM THE PUBLISHER
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SEPTEMBER 16, 2021
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