In the eighteenth century, laws were passed requiring Eastern European Jews to adopt non-Jewish names; but no record exists of the sale of these names or of price lists set according to their pleasingness.
–Janet Malcolm, Six Glimpses of the Past
I know my name by sound–
–Tracy K. Smith, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It
I. Introit
Asked if I come from a musical family—does that mean
singing? Instruments? Broadway, or the bimah?
—I say, they love music. Work in other fields. The fields
are a synecdoche, but Dad did try his hand at farming.
My brother, a community garden. There’s only so far back
we can go. Limned by departure and arrival. Asked what I
would have done if not for music—does that mean what job,
or how I’d survive? Music is a parlance. Any life
has understudies, alternates. Small assistants, darkly dressed,
waiting in the wings. See what happens if I animate those.
My interlocutors are curious, but their questions aren’t innocent.
I would quit while I’m behind, stick to what I don’t know.
I’m from a thinking family. Skeptical, apt to touch our wounds.
II. Subject
Biber Gallery, I was born upstairs. Nine Mile and Woodward.
I’m so much older now than they were then, those dark-haired
accentless American kids, fresh from U of M. Dad showed
his sculptures, Mom strolled me, managed everything. This lasted
until, evidently, no money in art. Later the building became
a beauty school. Today it waits its turn to be gentrified.
The world begins when we’re conscious of it. My earliest
visual flash: lifted from a crib by a huge hand. I was raised
in suburbia, surrounded by other Jewish kids and kind
Unitarians, some Catholics, and those who never mentioned
what they believed in. We had a yard, but it was not the country.
I find a roll of stick-on labels in the basement, Biber Honey,
as I clean. It brings a phantom taste instantly, and fear of sting.
III. Countersubject
A half-known story: my parents’ experimental idyll,
green rind of their early marriage. Some mid-Michigan
land, a vegetable plot, the casual nudity of art students,
like-minded friends. Dad needed to skip the city, left behind
the baby grand he learned the blues on, found another
inherited wealth, Gan Eden with a one-room cabin he built
himself. Stacks of boxes, fields to sow and every star at night.
Humming that exits the mind and threads around, sun-
drowsy, flower-scented flight. The rounded apiarist’s helmet
and thick gloves. Plans to put his name on a going concern.
Do you know how many hives? How many swarms,
how many tries it takes to make one jar of gold? Neither do I.
Neither did they. And rain put paid to the kasha Dad tried to raise.
IV. Modulation
Another unknown: how we got our Biber, long I, by way
of Biber, German for beaver or bearded man, via Russia,
Belarus, Ukraine. Was it a descriptor? A tsarist purchase?
Were we taxable then? According to what I’ve read, medieval
Jews could have sobriquets from where they lived, stature,
occupation, like anyone else, or we could be singled out
for names unusual and fanciful: silver leaf, pink stream.
Or mocking: fat stump, white head. By Shakespeare’s time,
laws had changed again. Tolerance varied by region.
How not to be a Shylock? By Mozart’s time, what could we
afford? On what thin broth keep alive our Levite patronymics?
Did parents centuries ago have to decide whether to skimp on bread
in order to get a better class of name passed on to their kids?
V. Inversion
There is a town called Biberach an der Riss, woody, towered.
We either can’t trace ourselves there or haven’t tried. What plants
populate its hill? Covering graves or ballfields? What do residents
now know, and what is habitual don’t? Were their Jews free
or walled? A medieval center of weaving. Are the women high-voiced
and narrow, do the men write and draw? Absent record books,
I’ll invent whole cloth. I want to say we thrived, that our houses
stayed up hundreds of years, lined in bright colors and candles.
I want my name to have come from a place where we owned things
such as our fate. How unlikely that is. Could we even lose our old
inflections before the hasty exit? I don’t have a good accent
in my first language. Bitten tongues tend to trip. I love ballads,
I sing rhymes, I’m a good mimic. Interpret heritage to mean difference.
VI. Parallel
I could have worked with Spanish, I knew my cases
and tenses and pronouns easily. Boot verbs, false cognates,
local variants on vulgarity. But knowledge isn’t language,
and a rolled R never rolled my way. Thus in Spain
I could not say my own first name. Traveled on student exchange.
My hosts had never met a Jew, American or otherwise.
I looked like them, coarse dark hair, that nose. I looked Spanish
or Italian, Greek at the outermost. In Madrid, kind matrons
helped me wayfind, wished good appetite over hard-edged bread.
In Toledo the alte shul had become a mosque, the mosque a church,
the church a store, the entire city a reliquary. I gave my
mitzvah money to a thin Romani girl with deepwater eyes.
We rested in the shade. Beber, to drink. Our word imbibe.
VII. Retrograde
Hebrew: my child-self thought to be a cantor, life’s direction
no longer set by surname and gender. Mom taught me reading
right to left in that rough-boarded cabin between field and pond.
Aba babayit, Ima babayit.[1] They were both there. I learned about
maiden names and married ones, how to parse shin from sin
and decode characters. Lacked muscle support, voice timid
as white-tailed deer. Chanting the parsha’s ancient pitches
for my thirteenth birthday, passing every test by miles, I kept
to the city for safety. Never grasped the glottal R. Couldn’t
chat with a sabra, not in their tongue. Not to make a friend,
not to ask a question, not to believe in the afterlife.
My ceremonial name is double: one of each great grandmother.
We call kids after the deceased or make up something new. No juniors.
VIII. Progression
That one music history prof called me Ms. Beeber all term,
deference to German in the classical world. All scholars know
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, the Baroque composer, no relation
–we think. A Catholic, unless a layer of conversion underneath.
Listen to his Mystery Sonatas in alternate tuning, a cipher good as patois
or World War II code. There are physical rules in it you’d have to work
to translate, to break. Or let the sound cover you and feast you, a chordal
banquet, food after a fasting day. Fiddlers, forgive the sacrilege:
scordatura prickles like olive brine. What would Biber have done
without music? How praise St. Mary? Why hide his mother love in boxes
of paper and wood? Mezuzot are our thing, giving our front doors away.
It’s fine: I’ll be mistaken for his namesake. My plain-spoken, half-grown music
yields a wage, so I remember who taught me counting, saving, telling time.
IX. Voice Leading
Mom’s people spoke Polish, Yiddish, and a few other things
perforce, American last. Eldest daughter of an eldest daughter,
a baby immigrant, she signed her citizenship in eight-year-old’s
perfect script with a brand-new first name she hadn’t asked for
and didn’t want. Later majored in English. Mastered spelling
like Webster, usage like Merriam for beauty and certitude.
Funk and Wagnalls, Strunk and White have nothing on refugee women.
I don’t know what school was like for her. I could tell you a synonym.
Yeshiva teachers hit the kids as though pain was the lesson.
Middle class came a day at a time. There was a lot to rent or buy.
Mr. Spargel taught her piano. Was it green where he got the name?
Rules about what to enjoy. She passed all her classical bones down
to me, and still knows every lyric of operatic German, Italian, and French.
X. Tonality
Did my ancestors give up our surname’s spelling or its sound?
Why would they, arriving with so little else? Or was change
made for them? Or assimilation, that suave compromise. Could have
agreed to Bieber, one extra vowel, never read aloud as bib,
reputation for industriousness. Or Beiler, long I, one who wields an ax,
the human way of hewing trees. Or veer to Bleibner, one who remains,
or Bider, one who endures. Holding fast to this new, fast place. Instead,
generations of correcting goyish hubris, white phonics, Midwestern
sneer. Biber? Honey, we’re smart entrepreneurial one-offs all distinct
but for the name: a lawyer, a car dealer, a genealogist, a translator of
books into Braille, a textbook rep, a nonprofit director, a cosmetologist
who sings onstage. It’s been years since the sculptor-architect tried to farm
and kept those bees. Me? I teach, perform and forget parts of speech.
XI. Closing
Given enough time, could we attune to anything?
The circumflex is shaped like a shell, but we are not of the sea.
The umlaut needs pursed lips, as if to kiss or whistle. Call us
Bucher, for all the reading, or Buechner, for the lofty beech.
Call us Beiner, for the fleeing. There’s a letter elision from end
to beginning, a glide-caress unnotated but well known.
Call me Geiger, for the playing, or Spielman, if a label
is required, easy to say. Schreiber, for recording the poetic past.
Does it matter what family name we live with, as long as we
write it down? Or which handcraft we do for work, if it pays?
Or for how long? Or where we land at last, provided we evade
pursuit, or in which tongue we adore which god in verse?
Our crop didn’t flourish, so we gorged on learning.
XII. Cadence
Which self am I? Without recognizing the buzz I could live
quite close to the honeycomb, the tautened string, the carbon
form. I could put the Braille stylus to its board. Eye to clef.
I could fill out a male alter ego, free to roam yet bound
to the hearth. I could be a marrana, forced to the cross,
diligent, finding my way back through the forest
to the words. Give me a call and I’ll send a response:
my name, which I’ve been mispronouncing, is my home.
If I’m musical, that’s just echoing what I hear. If my tribe
surrounds me, it’s in these lines. What else can I enumerate?
Plan, occupation, idiom, pseudonym, birthplace, fingerprint,
bassline, sustenance, byline. They’re all there. Escape, return,
entanglement. Forebears nearly fill the room. They’re all here.
[1] Father is at home, mother is at home.
_________