A DOUGLAS BY ANY OTHER NAME
On June 30, 2015... I did the last-name-change thing... to Douglas Alden from Douglas Warshaw.
As I wrote that evening—and post annually (if only to remind myself)—here’s the story behind it.
* * *
When I was about four years old, my dad said to me, "You know you have a middle name, right?"
And I said something like, "WTF is a middle name?"
After my dad explained what a middle name was, he informed me that mine was: "Alden."
And I said something like, "WTF does Alden mean?"
My dad's response—which would make Philip Roth proud—was: "It means that when you grow up, you'll change your name to Douglas Alden.
“Your mother and I agree on this."
100% true story.
* * *
I was only four but I distinctly recall thinking: "Wow. They both agree on this?" (Let's just say, it wasn't a great marriage.)
And then, I remember thinking:
"Wow. That's some serious second-generation-American Jew-desires-to-assimilate-with-a-touch-of-self-loathing logic."
(I may have only been four, but I was a Jew in Manhattan; and when it comes to self-loathing, four Manhattan-Jew years are like 16 non-Manhattan/non-Jew years. Don't get me started on what happens at 50.)
And then I thought, "Self-loathing or no self-loathing, I really, really like the name, Alden."
* * *
At age six I was told that back in the old country—back where the Russians and the Poles used to flip a coin to see whose turn it was to hold the pogrom—our original family name had actually been Bloch.
Apparently our name was changed to Warshavsky at Ellis Island by some turn of the century, anti-semitic, Tammany Hall civil servant clown, who at the end of each day went home and had a conversation with his wife that went something like this:
Wife: “How was work today, honey?”
Ellis Island Clown: “The usual. I changed a bunch of impoverished people’s names to the towns they fled from before they washed up on our shores. What’s for dinner? And where are our eight kids?”
A few years later my family "Americanized" our Ellis Island gift from Warshavsky to Warshaw.
What can I say, they weren’t an overly creative bunch.
* * *
At around age nine, I found myself thinking, "Cassius and Malcolm changed their names—and Alden sounds a lot better than ‘X’—Why should I stick with a name that was slapped on my grandparents by some clown on Ellis Island?"
At various points in my life since then, I've come close to giving myself a last name briss, but for a number of reasons I never shortened it… until today... June 30, 2015… at 11 a.m... in a New York City courtroom at 111 Center Street.
It was a short ceremony, with no food. Exactly what you'd expect from a guy with the last name Alden.
* * *
Melissa's last name stays Lazarov. And Amelia and Lily are keeping the last name Warshaw.
So now we're the Alden-Lazarov-Warshaw family. In whatever order you want to put it.
— Douglas
