Jewish authors hide clues in the characters' names. Here's how to find them

A Spoon and the Sea reader FAQ from Toronto, Canada

“Are these the real names?”

A lot of people know that The Spoon and the Sea is based on a combination of a real story from my family, and my Grandma. The answer to this question is: no. All of the character names are changed and not just for privacy reasons.

I had a lot of fun choosing them and I think Jewish character names are an opportunity loaded with meaning and clues for the reader. The process felt second only to naming my four children.

Here’s why.

My favourite book of all time, Exodus by Leon Uris, gave us Ari Ben Canaan. Literally, lion, son of Canaan. You know exactly who this man is before he opens his mouth i.e. proudly, openly Jewish, strong, loves his country. It’s also extremely on the nose (which reminds us how much has changed since 1958 especially post October 7).

Dara Horn writes about the cost of this disappearing act in People Love Dead Jews, the idea that Jewish identity has always been more palatable for everyone when it’s a little less visible. Jewish names in real life and in books are part of the package.

What contemporary Jewish fiction writers are doing now is something more subtle. But if you know what you’re looking for, it can be fun to peel back the layers of meaning to find the storyline clues.

Character arcs / conflict - Every story needs a conflict and the protagonist’s name is the perfect vehicle to allude to what it may be. In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Danny Saunders is a Hasidic boy with a Harvard-bound mind, trapped between his father’s world and the secular one pulling at him. The name Danny as a warm, American, and unthreatening diminutive of the biblical name Daniel wraps up this internal battle. The name does the work of showing you his dilemma before Potok has to explain it.

In The Spoon and the Sea, the protagonist is half-Jewish and half-Arab without truly fitting into either world. Ashi is the ambiguous, pronounceable nickname for Ashar in its Arabic form and Asher in Hebrew. Zooming in even more, the name means happiness. The book follows a son trying to excavate his mother’s story and piece together his own history before it gets swallowed up by dementia. Reaching into those last painful memories is the last-ditch chance at wholeness and, ultimately, happiness.

Surnames - Jewish surnames are a world of their own with clues to a life. Schneider means tailor. Shapiro points to the area of Germany where the family is from. Haddad, like the protagonist in Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted, means blacksmith.

In The Spoon and the Sea, Rose is from a traditional Ashkenazi family living in Golders Green in the 1940s. Her surname is Weiss to help introduce the heritage she is loaded with when she comes into the story. Quintessentially Ashkenazi and meaning ‘white’, the surname Weiss nods to the weight of her surprising romance with a black man from Zanzibar and the layers of tension in an interracial relationship in that time and place.

Israeli fiction and nature-themed names - Names drawn from the natural world are rarely just names. In Israeli fiction this runs especially deep, because Hebrew names drawn from flowers, trees, animals, and seasons are not unusual or poetic choices. They are completely ordinary Israeli names. Think of recent Eurovision superstars like Netta (a sapling), Yuval (a stream) and Eden, like the Garden. What this means for the reader is that an Israeli character’s name is often a piece of the landscape they belong to.

In The Spoon and the Sea, Calanit is named for the wild red anemone that blooms every winter across the Israeli south. It also alludes to the Hebrew word for bride (kallah) and sets up a visual cue for one of the most painful scenes in the book. She is the woman the protagonist wants to marry. She breaks his heart and every time he sees those flowers covering the hillsides, he cannot escape the thought of her.

So next time you pick up a Jewish novel, spend a moment with the names as they pop into the story. Look up what the name means in Hebrew, Arabic, or Yiddish. Notice whether a surname is Ashkenazi or Mizrahi. Jewish names, in fiction and in life, have always carried maps of where a family came from and clues about their life.

What Jewish authors do with character names is what Jewish naming does for people, it folds a whole story into a single word.