Spelling names; Was Stress on final syllable of names

[Mike Salovesh]

My father used to keep a list of all the ways he heard our family name
mispronounced or saw it misspelled.  He claimed that the winner was when
a hotel "bellboy" paged Mister Arthur "Salkabainovitch".  (Dad's report
that the pager was a bellboy sort of dates the story, too, doesn't it?)

If anybody allows me time, I suggest that they think of the word "sash",
and slip in a definition that a sash is something like a window frame.
Then I tell them to open the window, by putting down SA, leaving a
space, and writing SH.  Then take the word "love" and insert it in the
space, and there it is: Salovesh. Love in a window frame.  Obviously, I
add, that's how the Russians advertise prostitution.

Actually, Salovesh was imposed on my grandfather by the immigration
authorities at Hampton Roads/Newport News in the early 1880s.  They
weren't used to Russian names, so they wrote whatever they could and
said "That's your name from now on."  My grandfather took that for a
legal opinion, and used Salovesh for the rest of his life.  The
original, standardized to English orthography, was Soloveitchik.  The
word is a diminutive for "nightingale".

My grandfather was born in Kiev, in what is now Ukrainia.  It's not too
far from the Crimean Peninsula. I used to fantasize that Florence
Nightingale must have been one of our cousins. That made sense out of
her Crimean War service.

All right, maybe Florence Nightingale wasn't a relative -- but at least
grant me that distance is relative. Despite my saying "not too far", I'd
hate to have to walk from Kiev to, say, Sebastopol. Still, it would be
lots shorter than trekking out to Siberia.

-- mike salovesh     <salovesh at niu.edu>    PEACE !!!