Good Jewish Names

Walking Mr. Galimir from lunch to Curtis one day, we asked him what he had next.

“A coaching, of course.”

“Who do you coach?”

“I coach...you know, it’s a funny thing,” and here his pitch began to rise, “the names of the players now are so long, and I cannot remember a single one!”

“Well, who plays violin in the group? What does she look like?”

“It’s the girl...she is short, dark hair...she is Japanese.”

Of course that helped us not one bit, but eventually he described the cello player sufficiently that we ventured a guess. “Is that Kaori Yamagami?”

“Yummy gummi?”

As we laughed, he continued, “Ja! What happened to all the good Jewish names? Goldberg, Greenbaum...now the students come in with these names, and they have...five or six syllables, and it is impossible!”

We laughed again, knowing that his failure to remember the girls’ names was not because they were Asian. It was because he called any female younger than him “the girl”. And since he was in his upper 80’s, that meant just about every female. When asking about my lessons with Pam Frank (who was like a grand-daughter to him) it was, “what did the girl tell you here?” Or looking for his other student Tina Qu, “where is the girl?” Or sometimes, out of the blue, “How is she?”

“Who, Mr. Galimir?”

“The girl.”

“Which girl?”\

“You know, the girl...”