Ahoj! Jmenuji se Angelika
or
Hi, my name is Angelika
with a “k” in the space
people believe a “c” belongs.
One foreign letter
and my family members
were slaughtered
by the tongue of America’s elders. “Angeleeka?”
“Can I just call you Angie?”
Being compliant to mispronunciation
is ingrained in my DNA.
Immigration officers
filled out my great
great
grandmother’s paperwork
for her,
writing down what they heard,
instead
of what she said.
“My name is Anna Hurnyi Tarras.”
“Please repeat.”
“Anna Hurnyi Tarras.”
The accent marks
were scraped from a 42 letter alphabet, making it only 26
and easier to chew up
and digest.
They write “Anna Hurni Tarris”
and in a single ink spill,
her parents become a figment
of the imagination,
her homeland exists
only in memories
and the lines of her hands.
She and her husband
sent west
to stop speaking in mother tongue
and be killed in a mining accident.
Her daughter becomes
an English teacher,
trying to erase the obvious
alien from her teeth.
Eduarta Theresa Tarras becomes
Irma Normington
and tries to teach her children
how to sound less foreign.
All I have left of my family is that “k”
in a c’s space.
That “k” is my grandmother’s babushka wrapped around braided hair
and the way she couldn’t remember
the word for “bellybutton”
even when her mom begged.
It is fresh cooked pierogie for dinner
and fried cherigi for dessert.
That “k” is every misspelled tombstone
in a now ghost-town cemetery
in Wyoming.
Dobre den! Jmenuji se, Angelika.
It was not a quirky addition
thought up by my bleeding mother.
It was the last puff of smoke
from the train across a new country,
the remnants of the old country
split in two.
It wasn’t a mistake.
For every time I responded
to the wrong name,
there was a day on Ellis Island to match.
For every shortened variation
of my too many letters,
there is one of my family member’s untraceable boarding pass.
For every syllable in
Angelika,
there is one of my grandparent’s obituaries with the names updated
to be more palatable.
Moje krásná dcera, Anastasia:
Or
My beautiful daughter, Anastasia:
It was not a mistake.
When they call you
Anastasia,
correct them.
When they laugh,
“I’ll never be able to say that right.”
Tell them,
“I’ll repeat it until you can.”
When they ask
“Why is it pronounced that way?”
say, “Because that is my name.
Moje matka”
or
“My mother gifted it to me
that way
on purpose.”
Say, “I honor
Anna Hurnyi Tarras
and Eduarta Theresa Tarras
and Maria Dlugos
and the bones of names
that never needed to be softer
and when they ask
if they can call you
“Anna”
instead,
say
“If I wanted you to change my name,
I would have asked.”
Angelika Brewer is an award-winning writer and poet laureate of Ogden, Utah
This story appears in the June issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.