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Story of my Name
The short version of the story of my name is as follows. My birth certificate gives my name as ”Ezra Wyatt Zuckerman.” This is also the name (well, with the middle initial) with which I began my career and under which I continue to publish. (Note though that at 8 days old, I was also given a Jewish name at my bris/circumcision ceremony-- עזרא מלך בן אברהם זלמן or “Ezra Melech son of Avraham Zalman” and that is still my name for Jewish ritual purposes. This common Jewish practice of having a “Jewish name” and a “secular name” has interesting implications for naming fashion).
In 1996, shortly before my wife Lisa gave birth to our first child, we added the name "Sivan" to our existing last names (hers was Wasserman) so that we would have a common family name (“Sivan” is the only last name held by the four children with whom we have been blessed—Jack, Nina, Jesse, and Libby). The Chicago judge who issued the name change wondered why we didn’t do this when we first got married; you would have thought that he would have just enjoyed the break from the dreary probate cases he was presiding over.
Over the years, we have run into a few other families that have adopted similar approaches to choosing a family name (not that we expected it would become fashionable). Insofar as it does not fit easily into conventional practice, it can lead to some difficulty, but none that cannot be managed pretty easily. It also has some advantages: it can be a nice opener for conversation in our (hopefully) multicultural, tolerant age, and it is a great way to gain insight into the foundations of identity—a topic that greatly interests me.
Of course, I am sometimes called by other names, which are unprintable here. Most of the time, this is not done to my face, and so I can remain blissfully unaware of it. (See here for some thoughts relating to this issue).
