Forced to accept last names, there was a tendency to make up pretty or flattering ones, and usually in German, since in the Jewish Pale, Germans were among the landowning aristocrats, and the Jews themselves spoke a medieval German dialect—Yiddish. Thus there would be Goldstein (gold stone) or Goldberg (gold mountain) or Rosenbaum (rose tree) or Finkelstein (diamond) or Bernstein (amber) and so on.
Of course, human nature and human bigotry being what it is, these beautiful names in no way beautified a despised people. Rather the people denatured the names, which became "Jewish" and therefore objects of ridicule.
In other cases, last names were chosen from occupations. This has happened everywhere. In English, we have Smith and Miller as obvious examples. The early Judah came to be known as Azimy, from the grain he dealt in. This is clearly a derivative of the word zimy, which is Russian for "to winter." I suppose this family name would be roughly equivalent to "wintering" in English.
At some later time, someone in the family felt that Azimy was too un-Russian a name and therefore lacked appeal. The Russian patronymic ending "-ov" was therefore tacked on. ("Ivanov" is the Russian equivalent of "Johnson," "Petrov" of "Peterson," and so on.) Consequently, the name became "Azimov." The nearest English equivalent would be "Winterson."
The name, of course, was spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russia, and looked like this—A3HMOB. In Yiddish, which used the Hebrew alphabet, the name looked like this (reading from right to left) in the printed letters IJKD'nK an d like this in the cursive script [[IC/OIC
When my father came to the United States, however, he had a problem on his hands. For the immigration authorities, he had to spell his name in English, and though he was perfectly at home with the Cyrillic and Hebrew alphabets, the Latin alphabet, in which English is written, was strange to him.
He managed to make do with his memory of signs and inscriptions on imported objects, but made one mistake. A product that was familiar in many Russian households was a sewing machine, and the sewing machines were largely imported from the United States. They were, in fact, Singer Sewing Machines (named, as it happens, for Isaac Merrit Singer, one of the early manufacturers of the sewing machine).
The word "Singer," with the usual unvoiced s sound, meant nothing in Yiddish. The word zinger, however, is Yiddish for "singer" and that made sense. This was particularly so since the German s is pronounced like the English z, and if any lower- or middle-class Russian did have acquaintance with the Latin alphabet, it was almost always in connection with German.
Consequently, the Singer Sewing Machine was universally pronounced Zinger among the Russian Jews, and my father was quite certain that s was the Latin alphabet way of signifying the z sound. He therefore spelled the family name "Asimov" and it stayed so. The name is pronounced as though it were spelled with a z, but it is spelled with an s, and I am absurdly offended when the z is put in.
I tell myself that this is so because recognition value is important for me. People have to tell at a glance that a book is by me, and if my name is spelled in more than one way it will create confusion, hurt sales, and help impoverish me. But that's nonsense. I just want my name to be what I'm used to its being, that's all.
In Russian and in Yiddish, the name has always been pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, with the initial a like the a in
"father/' and the final v halfway to an f. It is pronounced "ah-ZEE-muf." In English, however, the accent shifted to the first syllable and it became "AZ-ih-mov."
I have always had trouble with the name. It is an indescribably simple one. Six letters; three vowels and consonants in alternation; all the vowels short; the s pronounced like a z. Nevertheless, when I was in the Army and we were subjected to a company roll call and some new sergeant was trying to bend his limited literacy to the task, I could only wait in silent martyrdom.
There would seem no name this valiant soldier would not tackle, no matter how long and how rich in consonants. If there were a soldier named Wrziewyloczszky, he would plunge headlong into it without hesitation and come out the other side with broken teeth but with some version of the name clutched between them.
Then he would come to a name that even he dared not tackle and there would be a simple silence. After I waited three seconds to make sure it was a silence, I called out "Here!" I was never wrong. It was always my name that defeated the unconquerable and smashed the invulnerable.
To this day, I get postcards asking me how to pronounce my name, with details concerning the Homeric wagers being made on various alternatives. Usually I say something like this:
'There are three very simple English words: "Has," "him" and "of." Put them together like this—'has-him-of—and say it in the ordinary fashion. Now leave out the two h's and say it again and you have Asimov."
Really! What the heck is the difficulty?
3
Petrovichi was what was called a shtetl, a little town in which a Jewish community was concentrated. It was ingrown and there were a number of Asimovs in it. I presume, in fact, that any Asimov in the United States probably had an ancestor who came from Petrovichi, and who is therefore some distant cousin of mine.
The Asimov could be spelled differently, it could be Azimov, As-imow, Azimow, Asimoff, Azimoff. The final w is simply the German way of transliterating the Russain v sound, since the German w is pronounced v. In the United States, nevertheless, the final ow gets to be pronounced as in the word "how," thus distorting the name considerably.
Not very many years ago, I found that not all Asimovs are of the Petrovichi line—or, indeed, are even Jewish.
One of the constituent republics of the U.S.S.R. is the Uzbek S.S.R., in central Asia, south and southeast of the Aral Sea. Its capital is Tashkent, a modern city of one and a third million, but its most famous city is Samarkand, which, six centuries ago, was the capital of the empire of the great conqueror Tamerlane. The Uzbeks, who make up two thirds of the population of the republic, are Moslem in religion.
As it happens, the family to which Muhammad belonged are the Hashimites, and I wouldn't be surprised if among some groups of Moslems, the variant name Asim was, for that reason, popular. Attach the Russian patronymic to it and it becomes Asimov. Apparently this is not an uncommon name in the Uzbek S.S.R.
Now that my name has become known in the U.S.S.R. through my writing, there seem to be Uzbeks who think that I am of Uzbek origin, and, in fact, I met one traveler who told me that he was solemnly assured by an Uzbek that the American writer, Isaac Asimov, was a brother of someone who lived in his town. Well, it's very flattering to be claimed in this fashion, but it isn't so. I'm a Petrovichi Asimov and not an Uzbek Asimov.
4
According to my father, the early Judah Asimov "was one of the great scholars."
There is no reason I shouldn't believe this, for there is nothing inherently impossible in his being a great scholar. I might even argue that since I myself can be considered a great scholar, 1 it seems only reasonable to suppose that I came by it honestly and inherited my brains from a line of scholars.
However, I have heard many Jewish people talk about their ancestors in eastern Europe, and one and all of them (no exceptions, regardless of their present apparent IQ ) were descended from a long and unbroken line of great scholars.
I'm sorry, but I can't believe it. I look around now and see among Jews I know a fair share of klutzes and shlemiels, and I can't believe that this is the first generation in which they have appeared.
The only conclusion I can come to is that it is all a pious fraud. The Jews of eastern Europe can't lay claim to dukes and earls in their ancestry and can only find impoverished and oppressed people, eking out a living under the forever-threatening fall of the ax. Since one needs some pride, the ancestors become scholars.
So the early Judah Asimov is reported to have been a scholar, and,
1 Whenever I say something like this, some people seem to be shocked and they call me "conceited." No one, however, not ev
en these people, calls me a liar.
who knows, it is possible he may have been. According to my father, the early Judah Asimov accumulated some money, left his family, and became the equivalent of an itinerant preacher, traveling to those various towns he could reach on foot in order "to tell the Jewish people that they should mend their ways, and become more pious."
That is all my father knew about my great-great-great-grandfather.
5
Judah Asimov had two sons. He may have had other children as well, but my father knew of only those two. The elder was Abraham Ber and the younger Moses Jacob. It was Abraham Ber who was my father's great-grandfather and therefore my great-great-grandfather.
Abraham Ber must have lived to a good old age, for he lived long enough to see the birth of his great-grandson, my father.
My father says, "He died when I was about three years old, and I remember that somebody brought me to his bed that he might bless me, and he gave me some kind of a red jelly, but I cannot visualize his face." (That means that Abraham Ber must have died about 1899).
My father goes on: "The stories I heard about him were that he was a natural-born smart man, and that he was a great scholar. That goes without saying." (Of course!) My father also says, "Like his predecessors, he was a dealer in rye and other products, and he was well known in town as a great and charitable man."
Charity is another great attribute, quite rivaling scholarship. This was a time when governments did not consider themselves responsible for the welfare of their subjects—and if the Tsarist government did, it would certainly draw the line at Jews. Therefore, impoverished Jews had no recourse but the charity of those other Jews who were better off.
Abraham Ber Asimov had twelve children by his first wife. The first eleven died in infancy, and only the twelfth survived. It was this twelfth, named Mendel, who was my father's grandfather, and my great-grandfather.
My father says, "Imagine how much my grandfather meant to him," meaning Abraham Ber.
I can imagine it. Abraham Ber must have spent perhaps fifteen years, mourning one child after another, giving up hope of ever having one as comfort in his old age, and then having little Mendel—and waiting for him to die, and with each year of the child's survival becoming more and more hopeful and yet afraid to hope, lest even now the boy be snatched away.
My father, however, does not speak of the boy's mother, who had
to go through twelve pregnancies and twelve childbirths in order to salvage one child. But then, women, until quite recently, were given no mind in this sort of thing. Thus my father, in reciting the names of his ancestors, speaks only of the male ancestors. He gives no female names, not even that of his own mother.
Then again, when I was young, my father, who loved to tell me stories and parables designed to improve my mind and spirit, would occasionally expound on a biblical verse. (He knew the Bible by heart— for he was a very great scholar, too, in the shtetl sense—but in Hebrew, of course.) He would recite the verse in Hebrew, then translate it into English—or Yiddish, if he couldn't think of an English word—which was all right, since I am bilingual and speak and understand both English and Yiddish with equal ease.
One time, I remember, he chose a verse which, in later life, I discovered to be Proverbs 10:1, which goes, in the King James Version: "A wise son maketh a glad father; but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother."
Having translated it, my father then said, with a Talmudic singsong to his voice, "Why, if the wise son makes his father glad, does a foolish son make his mother unhappy, and not his father? The answer is that if the son is wise, the father keeps him by himself, but if the son is foolish, he sends him to his mother and doesn't bother with him."
I thought about that, being about ten at the time, and then I said, "Isn't that unfair, Pappa? Why should the mother get him only if he's bad? Why shouldn't they both have him, either way?"
My father had no answer at all. In his whole life, he had never heard such a heretical notion as equality between the sexes, and I think he didn't understand my point any more than if I had delivered it in Swahili. 2
As for Abraham Ber's younger brother, Moses Jacob Asimov, he, too, lived into my father's lifetime. In fact, he outlived his older brother, and my father remembers him when "he was very old and half blind." He, too, was a scholar, of course, and for many years he was a cantor at the town synagogue.
"When I remember him," said my father, "he was already on a
2 The proper interpretation of the verse, with its father/mother antithesis, lies in the fact that the essence of Hebrew poetry lay in parallelism of statement, but I didn't know enough at ten to be able to explain this to my father and he would have laughed at me, anyway, if I had tried.
pension of ten rubles a year, but if they allowed him, he would still perform as a cantor. He couldn't believe that anyone could perform better than he could."
In fact, it must be that my father told me about this great-grand-uncle of his, for I distinctly remember him telling me, when I was young, of a very old blind man who had once been a cantor and who continued to insist on singing on appropriate occasions even though his voice had altogether decayed. He would sing in his quavering, cracked voice, and out of respect for his age, no one would stop him, even though the sound was horrible enough to scrape the wallpaper off the walls.
One time, though, Gentiles were present, and the embarrassment then became too keen. Someone approached the old man and said, "Moses Jacob, please stop. There are Gentiles present and it is not fitting/'
Whereupon Moses Jacob turned his old blind eyes this way and that and said, "Gentiles? Gentiles? I see no Gentiles," and kept on singing.
To me this is an important story for two reasons. First, it indicates that the ability to sing may be an inherited trait among the Asimovs. At least I remember that my father constantly sang in cantor style (lots of quavers and grace notes in an intensely minor mode) and did it pretty well.
And I can sing pretty well myself, either baritone or tenor, depending on how I feel. I like to sing tenor better, because I associate the tenor's melting notes with the juvenile lead in the movies and he's the one who always gets the girl. Baritone does sound more manly, I admit, and perhaps I do that better.
What really gives me pause about the story, however, is that I fully intend to continue writing as long as I live, and I wonder if I, like my great-great-granduncle, Moses Jacob, will continue to do so long after senility has deprived me of any writing ability, under the delusion that I can still do it. I have visions of my editors drawing straws to see who gets to tell me that I'm embarrassing the Gentiles.
Well, what the heck! Great-great-granduncle didn't listen, and I won't, either.
7
My father dismisses Moses Jacob's progeny very briefly. He says, "He had two daughters and so no Asimov was born of him." Having two daughters, apparently, is like having two horses. You don't count them.
Abraham Ber Asimov, who had twelve children and one survivor, by his first wife, was finally a widower. He married a second time and had a son named Judah, the second in the family of that name. My father says, in patent disapproval, "He was not only not a scholar, but he was a very average man."
This one, you see, my father saw with his own eyes. It is easier to be a scholar if there is an insulating period of decades between the man who is the subject of the description and the man who is doing the describing.
"In my time," said my father, "he married and had a daughter. While I was in the United States I heard that she became a physician, but I do not know anything more about her."
After the Revolution, you see, women could be educated and could even enter the professions. Still, she was only a woman and my father clearly wasn't interested.
In any case, it was Mendel Asimov, the only surviving son of Abraham Ber by his first wife, and my father's grandfather, who was the person on whom the Asimov stock was to depend.
My father says of Mendel, "H
e was not a scholar. He was not ignorant in the reading of Hebrew and in praying, but he did not study the Talmud." In other words, in American terms, he went to high school, but he never went to college. However, says my father, "What he missed in his studies, he made up in his cleverness."
Mendel's first-born was Aaron Menahem Asimov. He must have been born about 1865 or so. He was my father's father, and therefore my grandfather.
My Parents
Aaron's first-born was a girl, who died an infant. His second child, born after the death of the girl, was my father Judah, the third of that name 1 in the family.
My father was born on December 21, 1896. That sounds precise, but I wouldn't swear to the exact date. In the first place, the Russian Government didn't bother to keep birth records in those days, except perhaps in the important cities. If my family itself kept the record, they kept it according to the Jewish calendar, which is a lunar calendar, and the dates of which are not easy to match with the ordinary calendars of the Christian world.
Then, too, the Russians at the time of my father's birth (and of mine, for that matter) used the Julian calendar, which differed by thirteen days from the Gregorian calendar used by the West, and this introduces another complication.
In any case, when my father went to the United States, he had to produce documentary evidence of birth and it had to have a birthdate on it according to some European calendar. He got the birth certificate, and the day was according to the best of his memory under pressure. It seems to me it could have been off by a month or so in either direction, but what's the difference? The exact day would matter only to an astrologer and I wouldn't give an astrologer the time of day.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 2