Oren:
Marla Avigail,
You are named for Allison’s Savta (grandmother), Marion Goodstein, and her father, Phillip Martin Redisch. While your first name echoes Savta’s name more, your mom and I both like that it shares the first three letters of Phil’s middle name as well. Savta’s yiddish name was Chava Meryl, which is why your Hebrew (or Yiddish) name is Meryl too.
Allison:
Savta was in some ways the quintessential Jewish grandmother, but in the ways she was stereotypical, it was only the good stereotypes. When I was in 6th grade, I had an assignment to pick my hero and write about him or her, and I chose Savta. Many of the reasons I wrote about in 1996 are the same reasons I’m so thrilled to name my daughter in honor of her Savta Rabba, her great-grandmother. I wrote: “the thing that makes her heroic to me is that she sets aside most of her money and resources to help and visit her family. She is devoted to her Judaism. She even helps other people observe Judaism by making and selling kosher meals and challah in Knoxville. She is a hero to me because her priority is her family.”
Savta taught me not only to prioritize family, but to be welcoming, hospitable, generous, inclusive, and egalitarian. Folks looking for a Shabbat meal in east Tennessee rarely passed through Knoxville without being a guest at my grandparents’ table. She was progressive too: even in the 1990s it didn’t matter if you were HIV+, part of a same sex couple, or any other part of your story or background – you were always welcome. She wore a tallit even when other women did not, and she served not only as the first female president of her synagogue, but also as president of their sisterhood, chair of many other committees, and the authority that folks throughout the community went to for any kosher food related questions.
In fact, my own friends and communities have seen the fingerprints of her legacy in many ways. When someone remarked last week that she wishes she knew how to braid challah with four strands, I was able to send her a video of me doing exactly that, because Savta taught me how. When our friends go on roadtrips, even if Lisa or I are not with them in the car, they will countdown to a state line, because Savta did that to entertain her own children on their family roadtrips starting in the 1960s.
Oren:
Our daughter’s middle name, Avigail, is in honor of my father-in-law, because one translation of this name is “my father is happy,” and as anyone who knew him knows, there was almost no better descriptor of Phillip Redisch.
Allison:
To know my father was to know laughter, even if things weren’t *really* all that funny. He loved to make jokes, both inappropriate and well, slightly more appropriate, and apparently even carried around a notebook so that he could write his jokes down and reshare them. Often, he wouldn’t be able to even finish whatever joke he was telling because he would just be too overcome with laughter.
There are two other possible translations of our daughter’s name that I’d like to mention as well:
The first is that one could also translate Avigail as “my father’s joy.” One of the most painful parts of the fact that he’s no longer with us is that his daughters were truly his joy, and I can only imagine the true joy he would’ve had from getting to know his grandchildren. He would’ve been silly with them, told them an endless stream of jokes, and of course laughed and played with them in a way not quite like anyone else I know.
When I was 10, we did a family tour of CNN studios in Atlanta, and as part of the tour I was recorded pretending to be a news anchor. It was a 2 or 3 minute video, on VHS of course, that he insisted on showing to absolutely everyone. And this was way before you could just show a video to someone on your phone! Had he been able to really live in the age of smartphones, I’m confident that not a single person he encountered would’ve been able to get through more than one or two sentences of conversation with him without being shown pictures of his grandchildren. He probably would’ve been the person who spent the last few days going around Home Depot or some such thing and making sure to show the cashier at checkout that his new granddaughter has 10 fingers and 10 toes!
And there is one interpretation of Marla Avigail’s name that tells a story. One could interpret her name (with a bit of gender and reflexive flexibility) as “Even when things were bitter, my father was happy.” Giving our daughter a name that tells this story is important to me for two reasons. First, I think it is an important reflection of my father’s story. As many of you know, he was the most social person in any room, and the last one to leave even Southern Jewish events. That his disability robbed him of the ability to be social for the last decade and a half of his life shouldn’t go unacknowledged when I honor him and his life. The other reason this interpretation is meaningful to me is that unlike our path to Johan, getting to Marla was a fertility journey that required three rounds of IVF, and so our daughter’s name also reflects the rejoicing that comes after the bitterness.
Another note about both my grandmother and my father: they were both proud Southern Jews, living in communities where the surrounding Christian culture was strong. Their Jewish identities were tied to being a small, proud minority. While I’ve spent a lot of time focused over the past couple years on my family and on my household, the goings-on in our country and in our world are not lost on me. Oren and I were keenly aware that right as the state of Alabama was banning IVF, our IVF baby was coming into existence, and would be named for two people born in Alabama. Also, while their relationship was technically son-in-law – mother-in-law, I think that Savta was like a mother to dad in many ways, and that they would have both enjoyed knowing that they were named for together.
Oren:
My sister-in-law Lisa wondered the other day if our second child would also have a German name, and while we didn’t think that Marla is especially German, we discovered a few days ago that Marla can also be translated from German as “wished-for-child,” which you most certainly are.
Allison:
One final note about the name Marla: after Savta passed away, my Aunt Shari was going through some of Savta’s things, and found a Hebrew school notebook that Savta had written in in 1938, at age 9. While her given Hebrew and Yiddish name was Chava Meryl, in that notebook, nine year old Marion wrote her name with a kamatz, one of the Hebrew vowels, under the lamed, which one could read as Marala. While it may have been the simple mistake of a child eager to learn, I’m thrilled to know that somewhere along the way, Savta wrote her name quite similarly to the name we are giving to you.
Oren:
Johan, we know that in our journey to get to Marla, and even now that she’s here, there have, at points, been less focus on you. When we first told you about your sibling’s existence, you decided we should nickname her Shady Grove, and clarified that despite our shared interest in the Metro, this nickname was because “that’s what your doctor’s office was called.” When you decided to nickname her after the fertility clinic, we realized that you’d been internalizing all along where our other focus was.
Allison:
We of course can make no promises about how close you will be and cannot know what your and your sister’s relationship will look like, but I can tell you that without a doubt, a sibling was by far the best gift my parents ever gave me. And I can also tell you that when I sat with Lisa in a nursing home in Alabama in my early 20’s, and realized that I had a true partner in caring for our parents and navigating the challenges of our family and the broader world, that I made a commitment that if I had one child, I would do everything in my power to ensure that you had a sibling. I certainly didn’t know back in 2007 what that would look like, but as we navigated a year and a half of fertility treatments, I reminded myself of this commitment I’d made to you long before you came into existence. I know you will argue, I know you might compete, I know you won’t always be able to even stand one another, but the fact that we were finally able to give you a sibling is truly one of my greatest joys.
Oren:
When we named your brother Johan, one of the first things we told him is that he had to live up to the legacy of being named after three first born children. You might have an even bigger challenge. Not only are you named after two first borns, in our family of four, you are the only one who isn’t a first born. If you’re hoping that we (Allison and Oren) will be able to provide guidance in how to navigate among us oldest children, we will try our best because we are your parents, but we can’t really draw from our own experiences in this regard. Fortunately, you have also been born into a large, caring community, as evidenced by the number of people who have joined us today. Among all those people, and especially your Grandfather “Danpa”, Aunt Lisa, Uncle Jonathan, and Aunt Leni, we are sure you will find the support you need to deal with us, Johan, Grandma Grussky, and Savta Fran.
Allison:
Finally, while we are of course grateful that family and friends from around the world are watching on livestream, we particularly want to acknowledge our deep gratitude for those of you who are here in person. For nearly five years, we have been hoping to someday have the opportunity to name our child in the presence of community, as it is meant to be. It feels like we have been waiting a long time to do things differently than we had to in 2020, and we are so very grateful on so many levels that that day has finally arrived for our family. We would like to thank the staff of Tifereth Israel, especially Sheri Blonder, for making this space available to us today.
Oren:
This particular physical space also has significance for our family: Oren (Allison) and I met in this building, in the chapel upstairs. However, a few months before that, we were both in this exact room for another baby naming. That baby’s mother is Rabbi Elizabeth Richman, who not only officiated our ceremony today, but also helped us to adapt the ceremony to reflect our own values and wishes. Her children Yonatan and Avital, and our children Johan and Marla, are the sixth generation of our respective families to be linked in various ways.
Allison:
A whole team of doctors and nurses at various institutions, including Shady Grove Fertility and Sibley Hospital, guided us on our IVF journey and helped us get to where we are today.
Oren:
To Marla’s grandparents, Savta Fran, Danpa, and Grandma Grussky: Isn’t it wonderful to meet and hold your new granddaughter within days of her birth? Thank you for supporting us as we prepared to transition to being a family of four, and especially over the past week since Marla arrived. We appreciate how special it is for our children to have their grandparents present in their lives.
Allison thanks Oren
Oren thanks Allison
Likes: Looking out the window, looking at light fixtures, looking at the fan
Likes: Being held, sleeping on us
Johan’s bris was not what we had imagined in most respects. Some things were as we expected, such as having a large gathering, adapting the ceremony script from that of friends and family, and giving our child a name. The fact we would be doing it via Zoom with just us and the mohel in our home was not something we had ever imagined prior to the onset of the pandemic.
Likes: The see-saw at the playground, eating non-acidic food, spending time with visiting family from out of town
Likes: Eating solids, playing with Daddy’s office chair, pulling up at the front window, watching Mommy and Daddy brush their teeth
Likes: When mommy jumps with him, being tickled on his tummy, being worn facing outward
Likes: Jolly Jumper, being able to crawl, playing with solid food on his high chair tray