Too Jewish …?

My parents were agnostic at best, and pretty anti-religious in general. We’d do the kind of obligatory holidays (usually at our more religious relatives) but other than that – it just wasn’t in our daily realm. One thing though really sticks out in my memory. My mom had a cousin, Zelda – Zelda Zeavin. Zelda and her family were very close to my mom and Dad. We’d often go to their modest home in Inglewood for Passover and visited with them at least a few times a month. Zelda had a brother, Jack. Jack Solomon. He was kind of a groovy guy who lived perched upon the bluffs above PCH in Malibu. I believe we maybe went to see him only two times, but I remember he wore amber-tinted sunglasses, wildly printed shirts that were buttoned down too low and had a “perm.” What I remember the most, however, was how much my dad abhorred him. Not for his egregious fashion sense, but for one singular reason: he had changed his name. “Jack” had changed his name to “Jay” and my dad was certain that he did so because “Jay” was somehow “less Jewish.” THIS, in my dad’s world, was the ultimate Shonda, a betrayal of the highest level. He would mock him at family events and would refuse to call him his new name. As we would drive home, he would rage to my mom “Who would do that? What kind of man would change his name to sound less Jewish?” His disgust never waned … the breech was simply too great to ever overcome. We stopped seeing Jay it was as if he were quietly erased, but my memory of my father’s absolute loathing of this man stayed with me.

My birth-father was a man named Alexander Eglowitz. His parents were Morris and Yetta Eglowitz. I know very little about him, he died in 2010. His niece told me the entirety of what I know of him via text. “He was a terrible man. A selfish, horrible, terrible man. He cheated on his wife all the time and left his two daughters terribly damaged. In his 20s he legally changed his name from Alexander Eglowitz to Allen Lowe because he felt his real name was ‘too Jewish.'” Maybe that’s enough?