by Isaac Asimov
I knew nothing about that as a youngster. I just liked the name. I was Isaac Asimov, and I would never dream of being anything else. That was so even when I was quite young and perhaps it had something to do with my feeling that I was remarkable. Since my name was part of me, it had to be remarkable also.
The trouble was that not everyone was enamored of my name. When my mother was in her first years of immigrancy, the neighbors felt it incumbent upon themselves to warn her that she was loading me down with undesirable baggage. The name Isaac was advertising my Jewishness, and establishing a stigma, and it made no sense to worsen the disadvantages I would inevitably be laboring under. Why rub it in other people’s noses. —So went the arguments.
My mother was nonplussed. “What do I call him, then?” she asked.
The answer was simple. You keep the initial letter so that my mother’s father, for whom I was named, would still be honored, but you adopt some old and honorable Anglo-Saxon family name. In this case, it should be Irving, pronounced, in Brooklyn, as “Oiving.”
(Actually, such changes of name do littie good. If enough Isaacs and Israels become Isidores and Irvings, the old aristocratic names come to wear a Jewish effluvium and you’re right back where you started.)
However, it never came to that. I must have been five years old at the time, and I listened to the exchange, and when I heard the suggestion that I be called Irving, such a wail went up from me as my mother had never heard before.* I made it quite plain that under no circumstances would I consent to be called Irving, that I would not answer to the name Irving, that I would yell and scream anytime I heard the name Irving. My name was Isaac and that it would stay.
And it did, and to this day, I’ve never been sorry. Stigma or not, Isaac Asimov is I, and I am Isaac Asimov.
Of course, I had to endure being called, in taunting manner, Izzy and Ikey and I bore it stolidly because I had no choice. When I reached the point where I could better control my environment, I insisted on my name in full. I am Isaac, no nicknames allowed (except for old friends who are so used to calling me Ike that I don’t think they can change).
I remember meeting someone once who commended me on keeping the name Isaac, telling me it was a rare act of courage. He then referred to me as “Zack” and I had to correct him with considerable irritation.
But then, in my late teens, when I was beginning to try to write, the problem of my name arose again. I couldn’t help but notice that the writers of popular fiction all seemed to have simple names of Northwestern European extraction—especially Anglo-Saxon. Possibly those were the writers’ real names, and possibly they were pseudonyms.
Pseudonyms were common among writers of popular fiction. Some wrote in a variety of different genres and used a different name for each. Some were not particularly interested in having it known that they wrote popular fiction. And some felt that a simple American name might lead to greater reader acceptance.
Who knows? In any case, the names were largely Anglo-Saxon.
This is not to say that there weren’t Jewish writers. Some even used their own names. Two of the best science fiction writers of the 1930s were Stanley G. Weinbaum and Nat Schachner, both Jewish. (Weinbaum published for only a year and a half, during which he immediately established himself as the most popular science fiction writer in America, before dying tragically of cancer while still in his thirties.)
Note, though, that the last names were German, and that was semi-acceptable. Despite World War I, Germany was still Northwestern
· I told this story in my earlier autobiography. You must forgive me, but it is sometimes essential that I repeat stories in order to have a proper retrospective. Remember, too, that a number of readers of this book will not have read the earlier one.
European. The first names were certainly acceptable. Stanley was another one of those old English family names. (My brother was named Stanley at my mother’s insistence, over the votes of me and my father, who wanted Solomon.) As for Nathan, if it is shortened to Nat, it sounds all right.
What I had, though, was a blatantly Jewish first name and a (good heavens!) Slavic last name. I was warned that editors would probably want to call me John Jones. At this suggestion, I rebelled. I would not allow any story of mine to appear except under the name of Isaac Asimov.
It might seem eccentric of me to be willing to sacrifice a career as a writer rather than not use my odd and peculiar name, but so it would have been. I identified myself so strongly with my name that to have the story appear without my real name would have been no satisfaction to me. Rather the reverse.
It never came to that, however. My name was, in the end, used, and without objection. Over a period of more than half a century, it has appeared on books, in magazines, in newspapers, wherever any of my prolific output was to be found. And as time went on, Isaac Asimov appeared in bigger and bigger letters too.
I don’t want to claim more than is mine by right, but I think I helped break down the convention of imposing salt-free, low-fat names on writers. In particular, I made it a little more possible for writers to be openly Jewish in the world of popular fiction.
And yet—and yet—
Somehow that doesn’t seem to be enough. A friend in Atlanta sent me an article that appeared in the Atlanta Jewish Times on November 10, 1989. It quotes the thoughts of someone named Charles Jaret, who is described as “a Georgia State University sociologist, [who] has made a study of Jews and Jewish themes in science fiction.”
Here is another quote from the article: “Probably the best known Jew in science fiction is writer Isaac Asimov. But Asimov’s connection with Judaism is tenuous at best. ‘You’ll find more themes in his work that derive from Christianity than Judaism,’ Jaret says.”
This is unfair. I have explained that I have not been brought up in the Jewish tradition. I know very little about the minutiae of Judaism. Surely this is not something to be held against me. I am a free American and it is not required that because my grandparents were Orthodox I must write on Jewish themes.
The fact that I am, by the usual definition, Jewish does not bind me hand and foot. Isaac Bashevis Singer writes on Jewish themes because he wants to. I don’t write on them because I don’t want to. I have the same rights he does.
I am tired of being told, periodically, by Jews, that I am not Jewish enough,
Let me give you an example. I once agreed to give a talk on a day that happened to be the Jewish New Year. I didn’t know it was the Jewish New Year, but if I had it would have made no difference. I don’t celebrate holidays, not the Jewish New Year, not Christmas, not Independence Day. Every day is a workday to me, and holidays are particularly useful because there is no mail and no telephone calls to distract me.
But I received a call from a Jewish gentleman soon afterward. He had noted in the paper that I had spoken on the holy day and he berated me for it rather harshly. I kept my temper and explained that I didn’t observe holidays, that if I hadn’t given the talk I certainly would not have attended synagogue services.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “You should serve as a role model to Jewish youth. Instead, you are simply trying to hide the fact that you are Jewish.”
This was too much for me. I said, “Pardon me, sir, you have an advantage over me. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
I was taking a chance, of course, but I won. I won’t use his real name, but it was completely equivalent to the following. “My name,” he said, “is Jefferson Scanlon.”
“I see,” I said. “Well, if I were trying to conceal the fact that I was Jewish, the first thing I would do, the very first thing, would be to change my name from Isaac Asimov to Jefferson Scanlon.” He hung up the phone with a bang and I never heard from him again.
Another time I was given the back of the hand for not being Jewish enough by someone whose first names were Leslie Aaron but who used only the Leslie portion.
Why do all these people hound me? They sit around with
their simon-pure first names of Charles and Jefferson and Leslie and they scold me for hiding my Jewishness when I have plastered the name Isaac all over my writings, and have discussed my Jewishness in print, freely and openly, whenever it was appropriate to do so.
Anti-Semitism
This leads me to a more general discussion of anti-Semitism.
My father told me rather proudly that there was never any pogrom in his little town, that Jews and Gentiles got along. In fact, he told me that he was good friends with a Gentile boy, whom he helped with his schoolwork. After the Revolution, that boy turned up as a local functionary of the Communist Party and helped my father with the paperwork required for emigration to the United States.
This is important. I have frequently had hotheaded romantics assume that our family fled Russia to escape persecution. They seem to think that the only way we got out was by jumping from ice floe to ice floe across the Dnieper River, with bloodhounds and the entire Red Army in hot pursuit.
No such thing. We were not persecuted and we left in a quite legal manner with no more trouble than one would expect from any bureaucracy, including our own. If that’s disappointing, so be it.
Nor do I have horror tales to tell about my life here in the United States. I was never made to suffer for my Jewishness in the crass sense of being beaten up or physically harmed. I was taunted often enough, sometimes openly by young yahoos and more often subtly by the more educated. It was something I accepted as an inevitable part of the Universe that I could not change.
I also knew that vast areas of American society were closed to me because I was Jewish, but that was true in every Christian society in the world for two thousand years, and I accepted that too as a fact of life.
What was really difficult to endure was the feeling of insecurity, and even terror, because of what was happening in the world. I am talking
about the 1930s now, when Hitler was becoming more and more dominant and his anti-Semitic madness was becoming ever more vicious and murderous.
No American Jew could fail to be aware that the Jews, first in Germany, then in Austria, were being endlessly humiliated, mistreated, imprisoned, tortured, and lulled, merely for being Jewish. We could not fail to realize that Nazi-like parties were arising in other parts of Europe, which also made anti-Semitism their central watchword. Even France and Great Britain were not immune; both had their Fascist-type parties and both had long histories of anti-Semitism.
We were not safe even in the United States. The undercurrent of genteel anti-Semitism was always there. The occasional violence of the more ignorant street gangs always existed. But there was also the pull of Nazism. We can discount the German-Arverican Bund, which was an open arm of the Nazis. However, people such as the Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin and the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh openly expressed anti-Semitic views. There were also homegrown Fascist movements that rallied round the anti-Semitic banner.
How could American Jews live under this strain? Why did they not break down? I suppose that most simply practiced “denial.” They tried hard not to think of it and went about their normal way of life as best they could. To a large extent, I did this too. One simply had to. (The Jews in Germany did the same thing till the storm broke.)
I also had a more positive attitude. I had enough faith in the United States of America to believe that it would never follow the German example.
And, as a matter of fact, Hitler’s excesses, not only in his racism but in his nationalistic saber rattling, his increasingly obvious paranoia, were rousing disgust and anger among important sections of the American population. Even if the United States was, on the whole, rather cool to the plight of Europe’s Jews, it was becoming increasingly anti-Hitler. Or so I felt, and I found comfort in that.
I also tried to avoid becoming uncomfortably hooked on anti-Semitism as the main problem in the world. Many Jews I knew divided the world into Jews and anti-Semites, nothing else. Many Jews I knew recognized no problem anywhere, at any time, but that of anti-Semitism.
It struck me, however, that prejudice was universal and that all groups who were not dominant, who were not actually at the top of the status chain, were potential victims. In Europe, in the 1930s, it was the Jews who were being spectacularly victimized, but in the United States it was not the Jews who were worst treated. Here, as anyone could see who did not deliberately keep his eyes shut, it was the African-Americans.
For two centuries they had actually been enslaved. Since that slavery had come to a formal end, the African-Americans remained in a position of near-slavery in most segments of American society. They were deprived of ordinary rights, treated with contempt, and kept out of any chance of participation in what is called the American dream.
I, though Jewish, and poor besides, eventually received a first-class American education at a top American university, and I wondered how many African-Americans would have the chance. It constantly bothered me to have to denounce anti-Semitism unless I denounced the cruelty of man to man in general.
Such is the blindness of people that I have known Jews who, having deplored anti-Semitism in unmeasured tones, would, with scarcely a breath in between, get on the subject of African-Americans and promptly begin to sound like a group of petty Hitlers. And when I pointed this out and objected to it strenuously, they turned on me in anger. They simply could not see what they were doing.
I once listened to a woman grow eloquent over the terrible way in which Gentiles did nothing to save the Jews of Europe. “You can’t trust Gentiles,” she said. I let some time elapse and then asked suddenly, “What are you doing to help the blacks in their fight for civil rights?” “Listen,” she said, “I have my own troubles.” And I said, “So did the Gentiles.” But she only stared at me blankly. She didn’t get the point at all.
What can be done about it? The whole world seems to live under the banner: “Freedom is wonderful—but only for me.”
I broke out, under difficult conditions, once in May of 1977. On that occasion I shared a platform with others, among them Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust (the slaying of six million European Jews) and now will talk of nothing else. Wiesel irritated me when he said that he did not trust scientists and engineers because scientists and engineers had been involved in conducting the Holocaust.
What a generalization! It was precisely the sort of thing an anti-Semite says. “I don’t trust Jews because once certain Jews crucified my Saviour.”
I brooded about that on the platform and finally, unable to keep quiet, I said, “Mr. Wiesel, it is a mistake to think that because a group has suffered extreme persecution that is a sign that they are virtuous and innocent. They might be, of course, but the persecution process is no proof of that. The persecution merely shows that the persecuted group is weak. Had they been strong, then, for all we know, they might have been the persecutors.”
Whereupon Wiesel, very excited, said, “Give me one example of the Jews ever persecuting anyone.”
Of course, I was ready for him. I said, “Under the Maccabean kingdom in the second century B.C., John Hyrcanus of Judea conquered Edom and gave the Edomites a choice—conversion to Judaism or the sword. The Edomites, being sensible, converted, but, thereafter, they were in any case treated as an inferior group, for though they were Jews, they were also Edomites.”
And Wiesel, even more excited, said, “That was the only time.” I said, “That was the only time the Jews had the power. One out of one isn’t bad.” That ended the discussion, but I might add that the audience was heart and soul with Wiesel.
I might have gone further. I might have referred to tbe treatment of the Canaanites by the Israelites under David and Solomon. And if I could have foreseen the future, I would have mentioned what is going on in Israel today. American Jews might appreciate the situation more clearly if they imagined a reversal of roles, of Palestinians ruling the land and of Jews despairingly throwing rocks.
I once had a similar argument with Avram Davids
on, a brilliant science fiction writer, who is (of course) Jewish and was, for a time at least, ostentatiously Orthodox. I had written an essay on the Book of Ruth, treating it as a plea for tolerance as against the cruelty of the scribe Ezra, who forced the Jews to “put away” their foreign wives. Ruth was a Moabite, a people hated by the Jews, yet she was pictured as a model woman, and she was the ancestress of David.
Avram Davidson took umbrage at my implication that the Jews were intolerant and he wrote me a letter in which he waxed sarcastic indeed. He too asked when the Jews had ever persecuted anyone.
In my answer, I said, “Avram, you and I are Jews who live in a country that is ninety-five percent non-Jewish and we are doing very well. I wonder how we would make out, Avram, if we were Gentiles and lived in a country that was ninety-five percent Orthodox Jewish.”
He never answered. Right now there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.
The Jews are not remarkable for this. It’s just that because I’m a Jew I am sensitive to this particular situation—but it is a general phenomenon. When pagan Rome persecuted the early Christians, the Christians pleaded for tolerance. When Christianity took over, was there tolerance? Not on your life. The persecution began at once in the other direction.
The Bulgarians demanded freedom for themselves from an oppressive regime and made use of that freedom by attacking the ethnic Turks in their midst. The Azerbaijani demanded freedom from the centralized control of the Soviet Union, but they seemed to want to make use of that freedom to kill all the Armenians in their midst.
The Bible says that those who have experienced persecution should not in their turn persecute: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). Yet who follows that text? When I try to preach it, I merely make myself seem odd and become unpopular.
