by Nina Zolotow (Berkeley, CA)
“You also have a Jewish first name,” my mother told me. “It’s Tzipa.”
“Tzipa?” I asked, trying to reproduce the completely unfamiliar sound I was hearing.
“Yes, Tzipa. She was grandma’s sister who died.”
“Oh,” I said “Okay.”
There we were, sitting together on the couch in the light-filled living room of our brand-new house, up on a hillside in a canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles, California, and I was young enough to simply accept the mystifying information that, in addition to my English first name, Nina, I had a “Jewish” first name, Tzipa, without asking any questions. But I always remembered what my mother told me. Even as the years passed and I never heard anyone call me Tzipa (my relatives called me Ninala or Ninatchka), I always remembered that name.
I also believed that no one else I knew had two first names. I didn’t realize then that it is very common for Jewish people to have a Hebrew name in addition to their name in the language of the country where they were living, and that their Hebrew names were not just second names in another language, but they were spiritual names in “God’s holy language.” I missed out on learning that, I think, because my parents, as well as my grandparents, were not religious, so I never went to synagogue or Hebrew school.
So that made me think that it was only me who had a secret name. It was like a magpie surprised me with a gift, dropping a small shiny object at my feet, and having no idea what to do with it but not wanting to get rid of it, I put it in a box with other precious objects. And I took that box along with me with every move I ever made, from city to city and even from one country to another.
I might have learned more about Hebrew names had I married a Jewish man. But, instead, I married a man who, despite being raised by parents from a small Protestant religious sect, the Church of the Brethren, always believed that everything he learned in Sunday school was just so many stories, stories that had no relationship to the world as he knew it. And he and I together raised two children who we brought up just as I had been raised without any religion.
“Do you remember me telling you about my Hebrew name, Tzipa?” I asked my husband recently.
“Tizpa?” Brad said. “No, not really.”
“I guess that name doesn’t mean anything to you,” I said. “But I definitely told you. I think you might remember when I tell you that it means little bird.”
“Ah, little bird,” he said, smiling fondly. “Yes, I do remember something about that.”
When I became an adult, my appreciation for my secret name grew because even though I didn’t like the sound of it, I learned that it means “little bird.” Tzipa, you see, is a diminutive of the biblical name Tzipporah, which is derived from the Hebrew word for bird, “tzippor.” And because birds can soar across the vastness of the skies above us, free from the restrictions that keep humans tied to the earth, in Jewish symbolism birds represent freedom. They also represent the awakening of the spirit and the connection between the earth and heaven, the material world and the spiritual one.
“Did you know that I have a Hebrew name?” I asked my brother, Danny “It’s Tzipa.”
“No, but I like the sound of that,” he said. “How did you find out about it?”
“Mom just told me that when I was a kid.”
“So, you mean that Mom and Dad gave you a Hebrew name?”
“Yes. They named me after Grandma Goldie’s sister who died in the Holocaust. But maybe you didn’t know that because no one ever called me by that name.”
“Okay…. Well, that’s a good person to be named after. It’s a nice way of keeping someone’s memory alive, whether the name gets used or not.”
Then, less than a year ago, my first cousin, Susan, sent me the result of the research she had done on our maternal grandmother’s family, the Levinstein family from Kudirkos-Naumienstis (also known as Naishtot) in Lithuania. And there at the end of the document was quite a lot of information about Tzipa, who she was and how she died.
I learned that Tzipa, who was one of the older sisters of my maternal grandmother Goldie Levinstein, had been born in Kudirkos-Lithuania in the 1890s. And that unlike her three sisters, she did not emigrate to the U.S. but instead stayed in the town where her parents and two brothers still lived. She married a rabbi named Itzhak, and together they had six children, five sons, Haim, Eliyahu, Israel, Dov, and one other whose name and fate we don’t know, and one daughter, Leah.
Then, on June 22, 1941, the Germans invaded the town and set the Jews to work under the supervision of local Lithuanians until a day in early July when a group of Lithuanian “activists,” under the command of Germans, attacked the city. This group ordered all Jewish males above the age of fourteen out to the streets and then took the Jewish men in groups of fifties to the Jewish cemetery. There the Germans and Lithuanian activists together shot one hundred ninety-two prisoners at the edge of pits they had already dug. The women and children were later forced into a ghetto within the town. On September 16, the 650 remaining women and children, and a few remaining men, were transported to the Parazniai forest by armed Lithuanians, who forced them to take off all their clothes and then lined them up and shot them all.
But Tzipa, her husband, and three of her children, Leah, Israel, and Dov, escaped the mass murders. After frantically packing up some kosher food, they ran for their lives. Once across the river, they fled into a more rural area. The first few days there they spent in an open field eating grass and finishing up the last of the kosher food. Then they found an abandoned shack and moved into it.
During those first long summer days, I imagine they must have seen birds of all kinds flying from tree branch to tree branch or high up in the distant blue sky above them and longed to be free like that, to fly far, far away from that place. Because things soon got worse.
Israel and Dov both left, joining the Lithuanian army that was attempting to fight off the Nazis. So Tzipa went away for few days, returning with flour for making bread, which she had purchased with money she received from selling her gold fillings. But her husband Itzhak, the rabbi, refused to eat non-kosher food. So he gradually starved to death. And then Tzipa herself came down with dysentery.
What must it have been like for her to be dying and know that she was leaving her young daughter—only 14—completely alone?
Dov was killed fighting the Germans in the open fields. Haim was murdered by the Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators, as was Eliyahu, along with his wife and their two month-old baby. But two of Tzipa’s children survived. Her son, Israel, was badly wounded and became disabled—his hand was seriously damaged, and he lost the toes on one foot—but after the war, he emigrated to Brazil. And her daughter, Leah, also survived. After her mother died, she found a job at a factory where they paid her with small amounts of food. And after the war, she found her way to Israel, which is how our family knows this story.
“Did I ever tell you that I have a Hebrew name.” I said to Quinn, our child who is a scientist now living in Scotland and who strongly identifies with being Jewish.
“Yeah, I remember you telling me,” Quinn replied. “I actually wrote the name out for you in the Hebrew alphabet when I was studying Yiddish.”
“I’m very glad you do remember. What are your thoughts about me having the name of a woman who died during the Holocaust while trying to save her family?”
“Yes, well, I do think it’s nice to keep her memory alive by giving her name to someone in the family, but it’s also some heavy shit because it represents how you grew up with the Holocaust all around you—after all, you spent a lot of time as a child around adults who must have had a traumatic response to that genocidal event.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Even though I didn’t understand much about it at the time, I always had some awareness of it.”
To be honest, I’m still grappling with what it means to me to carry the name of that extraordinary woman. But, at last, I finally know what to do with the gift of the Hebrew name that was given to me all those years ago. I am taking it out of my box of precious things where it has been hidden all these years, placing it in the palm of my left hand, and reaching my hand out toward you, saying, “Here. Look at this.”
Nina Zolotow just loves to write, and she has been doing it for her entire adult life. Currently she is writing creative non-fiction and experimental fiction/poetry, which you can find on her blog Delusiastic!, where there is both brand new and older works, and you can also subscribe to her on Substack, where she is releasing one story a week. Nina has also written or co-written four books on yoga (seeyogafortimesofchange.com) as well as being the Editor in Chief and writer for the Yoga for Healthy Aging blog for 12 years. Before that there was 20 years of writing instructional manuals for the software industry, including many books for programmers. And somewhere in there was an MFA from San Francisco State in Creative Writing. All of that taught her how to write simply and clearly when needed but also to go crazy with words when that seems right.
This story originally appeared on Nina’s blog, Delusiastic! and is reprinted here with permission of the author.
The Jewish Writing Project 