So, Maggie Gyllenhaal got a fun surprise last year when she learned—at the age of 35!—that her real first name was not Maggie, but Margalit, which is Hebrew for ‘pearl.’ (Thanks, Kveller baby name finder.)

The Guardian first reported the news in July (they spelled it Margolit—which is some creative vowel usage, right? Or… a typo? A British thing? Gyllenhaal’s actual spelling? SO MANY QUESTIONS), but the actress elaborated on the story for the first time when she appeared on Live Kelly & Michael last week.

The inconsistency emerged when the Secretary star decided to adopt her husband’s surname last year, in addition to Gyllenhaal. To make the change official, she needed her birth certificate, and after much searching the document was unearthed—but her first name was listed as Margalit, not Maggie. Apparently everyone in the family just kind of, well… forgot what her official name was. Post-birth euphoria or something.

Gyllenhaal seemed bemused by the confusion, but adamant that she wouldn’t be adopting her ‘real’ first name anytime soon. “Maggie’s on everything: Maggie’s on my driver’s license, my passport… my mother still insists my name is not Margalit… I wish that were my name, but it isn’t.”

Maggie, Margalit—we don’t care. That which we call a Maggie by any other name would smell as sweet.

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(Image: Shutterstock / Debby Wong)

The post Maggie Gyllenhaal Just Learned Her Real First Name—And It’s Super-Jewish appeared first on Jewcy.

My parents struggled to choose a name after my birth in a shabby Moscow hospital. Nothing felt exactly right. After a month they settled on Yulia, a traditional Russian name that, they decided, was just unique enough. My mother loved the lyrical way it rolled off the tongue, Yoo-Lee-Yah. Most often, though, I was Yulya or Yulinka or Yulyasha.

When I was five-and-a-half, my family left Russia. I was still Yulinka in Vienna and Santa Marinella, Italy, where my family lived stateless for nearly nine months while I pleaded for chocolate ice cream and swam in the frigid Mediterranean Sea near our monastery-owned apartment.

A few months after our arrival in New York City, I became Sara.

My parents enrolled me in a Hasidic yeshiva for Russian-Jewish immigrants. We shed our secular names, and aspired to commit to memory everything our parents and grandparents never knew. Sara had been my grandmother’s birth name, before she felt compelled to change it to the more palatable and less Jewish “Alexandra,” or Sasha for short.

As Sara, I was the girl who learned to read both Hebrew and English at a sprinter’s pace, discarding all traces of an accent within months. Sara was bright, popular, and fiercely determined to rack up accolades. She moved from first grade to third grade the same school year, although at this particular townhouse yeshiva, that only meant a move to the adjoining room. All my new friends knew me as Sara. The name felt like my own. And Judaism was now at the forefront of my identity. At the yeshiva we devoted an entire period to reciting passages from the Chumash (a printed version of the Torah), starting with Bereshit. We’d sing the Hebrew verses followed by the English translation, over and over, until we knew them by heart. I learned the intricacies of nearly every biblical tale. The stories, the rituals, the history—all of it was mine.

After three years came unexpected news: we were moving to Virginia, where I’d be enrolling in a public school. Though I had once admonished my parents for not teaching my brother and me any Jewish rituals, I found it surprisingly easy to let go of the name Sara and the Orthodoxy it represented.

At the elementary school where I started fifth grade, they asked what I preferred to be called. “Julie,” I answered. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I remember feeling it was an appropriately “cool” name, and at nine, being thought of as cool was paramount. It felt more me than “Julia,” the transliteration of my given name. I embraced this new identity. I was ready to be wholly American.

Julie was shyer than Sara, less adept at making new friends, but she was also more curious and more adaptable. As Julie, I discovered American pop music, like Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, and the comforting malaise of a suburban life filled with birthday parties at the arcade and trips to the local shopping mall.

Sara hadn’t disappeared entirely, however. On my first day of Hebrew school at the local conservative synagogue, the teacher asked my name. “This is Hebrew school,” I thought. “In Hebrew school, you go by your Hebrew name.” So I answered, “Sara.” The teacher proceeded to introduce the rest of the class. “Kevin, Ashleigh, Lauren, Beth…” I immediately realized my mistake, but in my anxious nine-year-old mind, it was too late to correct it. My two identities were kept separate until a year later, when I moved to the better public school district attended by most of my Hebrew school classmates. There was a lot of confusion and embarrassment and awkward explaining. The comic ridiculousness of having three names wasn’t lost on me either, and I quickly learned to be self-deprecating. More than twenty years later, some members of the congregation still refer to me as “Julie-Sara.”

I felt that duality when I offered to do more for my Bat Mitzvah than was expected by leading certain prayers usually reserved for the rabbi—to the bewilderment of my classmates—because I genuinely loved them and was moved by the melodies. I’m still moved by prayer, by the crescendo of an entire congregation singing Avinu Malkeinu during high holiday services. There’s a purity to it, a lifeline to the past that feels indestructible.

I remained Julie all through middle school, high school, and college. Richmond, Virginia, my new hometown, was a cultural lifetime removed from the Russian-speaking neighborhoods of Brooklyn where we’d lived for three years. In Richmond, I had one Russian friend, who, like me, barely registered as Russian. We spoke about Russian food or cartoons every once in a while, but mostly we bonded over Tori Amos and musical theater. I was Julie, the girl who played soccer (less than decently), obsessed over Beat poetry, and hung out with friends over plates of French fries at a smoke-filled cafe downtown.

Most new friends were surprised to learn I was an immigrant. The more I told the story, though, the more I felt it burrow into me and become an ingrained part of who I was. My immigration made me something other than an average suburban teenager. The cloud hanging over my family and every other family who’d gone through a similar experience was always there versus here. Stagnation versus opportunity. Ignorance versus truth.

And though my family assimilated quickly and willfully (no Russian television, few Russian friends), intrinsic differences remained. My parents are warm and loving, but they’re also unexpectedly direct, which has caught many Americans off-guard. They’re patriotic in a way U.S.-born citizens can never truly understand. And yet, there’s still a lingering cynicism that no amount of American positivity can scrub clean.

There are also the cultural mainstays of Soviet life my parents can never entirely forget—nor do they want to. Vladimir Vysotsky is the music of their youth, and I’ve never seen them feel music so intensely as when they’re listening to one of his songs. I can’t help but love him, too. My mother and I sing patriotic Communist anthems on long car trips. We register the dangerous naiveté of the lyrics, but the act of singing the songs—my mother and I, together—transforms them into something comforting.

My parents never took to processed American food, and our table, even at Thanksgiving, is laden with celebratory Russian dishes like caviar, smoked meats, eggplant dips and beet salads. Russian culture, at least in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, was remarkably homogeneous under Communist rule. The food, the music, and the movies were all scarce, and so cultural “favorites” were everyone’s favorites, which is why, perhaps, it is so easy to bond with fellow Russian immigrants. True counterculture was reserved for the truly subversive.

During an internship interview my senior year of college, the coordinator uttered the name atop my resume.

“Thanks, Yulia,” she said. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Actually,” I responded, as I had many times before, “You can call me Julie.”

“But Yulia’s so much prettier.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure how to interpret the backhanded-compliment. “Yulia’s fine, too.”

For the past 10 years I’ve gone by Yulia in the workplace, though I continue to introduce myself as “Julie” to new friends. At first, I felt a bit like an impostor. It was strange to hear colleagues say my name. I barely felt Russian, way less Russian than many writers and authors whose Russianness was a central tenant of their writing, but whose bylines were Americanized names like Gary and Ellen and Julia.

Plus, “Yulia” is a formal name. It contains one more syllable than the casual Yulya. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Russian person call me aloud by my name, despite my mother’s fondness for it.

Was I fooling my colleagues into thinking I was something other than who I was? Slowly though, I grew into it. As I started getting published, seeing “Yulia” as a byline below a story I’d written felt right. It is my birth name, after all. It represents a unique life, a journey that’s taken me from a Communist childhood, to statelessness in Italy, to an Orthodox schooling, and finally, to American adolescence and adulthood.

I’ve decided I like the internship coordinator’s comment, about my name being pretty. It reminds me of my mother’s comments about why she chose it in the first place—her fond gushing over how beautiful she thought it sounded.

To minimize confusion when first introducing myself, I sometimes follow “Yulia” with the refrain “like Julia, but with a ‘Y.'” In a way, though, the name feels not at all odd or out of place for the city to which I’ve returned: New York City—the city of immigrants. It has a home here, a point of reference.

One night last summer I met friends in Coney Island for a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball game. There was beer and popcorn and fireworks—a collection of all-American trappings. After the game we walked to a Russian restaurant, where we drank vodka and feasted on blintzes and borscht. On the boardwalk, within yards of each other, couples writhed to reggaeton and Russian grandmothers sashayed to old Russian ditties. Yulia feels like the name best suited to this mishmash of a city, itself a fitting metaphor for my own patchwork of an identity. Feel free to call me Julie, though, if you’d like.

Yulia Khabinsky is a research editor and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Jewish Daily Forward, Narrative.ly and other publications. She blogs about New York at Notes From the Wonder City. Follow her on Twitter at @ykhabinsky.

Image: Shutterstock

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“Come on, that’s not your real name!”

“You must be Irish with a name like that!”

“When Irish eyes are smilin’….”

Bring it on, people, I’ve heard ‘em all.

My name is Tara Dublin, and yes, that is my real name. It’s on my birth certificate, driver’s license, and Social Security card. I didn’t have it changed from Lishka Rabinowitz or anything like that. It’s the name my parents gave me. When people hear my name, they immediately begin speaking to me in an Irish accent. That’s become something I’m so used to, I feel like I should be carrying my own little pot of gold by now. Tara is the throne of the ancient Irish kings, you see. And well, we all know that Dublin is the capital of Ireland (although telemarketers can’t seem to grasp this; they often call and ask for “Mr. or Mrs. Doo-blin.” And, come on, really?). I had fun going through customs at Shannon Airport with that name stamped in my passport; it got laughs from everyone in the country who saw it, plus offers of free drinks (alas, I was pregnant with my second son at the time).The thing is, I feel bad for the people when I have to tell them the truth about myself, because I know I’ll be disappointing them. And you don’t want to disappoint a pub full of drunken revelers in Killarney, let me tell you.

I’m not Irish at all, you see. Not in the least. My family tree has no branches—nor even a leaf—that touch the Emerald Isle. There might have been a great-great-grandmother who grew up in England, but her parents had brought her there straight from the shtetl, to escape the pogroms.

Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m not only not Irish, I’m Jewish. Yes, for reals.

It takes a while for people to grasp this fact. How can it be, with a name like mine?

Here’s my theory, because my father’s family never checked into their heritage: there’s a town in Poland called Lublin. We do know that some of his family came from Poland, so the thinking is that someone in the bloodline got Corleone’d at Ellis Island and got the surname of Lublin, but the L looked too much like a D, and the name became Dublin.

Or something.

My mother’s side of the family has been thoroughly traced by my Aunt Deena, and the Worgaftiks go back to Russia, some connected to royalty, all Jewish. So I am a legit Jewish American (Princess is debatable). I know there are Daublins somewhere in Florida, employing the use of the ‘a’ to sound less Irish and more Jewish (not that it was great to be either in early 1900’s New York).

So here I am, Tara Dublin, daughter of Michael and Bonnie, Bat Mitzvahed at Temple Shalom in Matawan, New Jersey, in 1982. Every new teacher would joke about my name. I could never find a personalized license plate or mug at Spencer’s in the mall. No one ever heard my name correctly over the phone: “Kara? Karen? Carol?” For years I wished I was like every other Stacey, Jennifer, and Kristin.

The name thing got a little more interesting when my family moved from New Jersey to suburban Atlanta in the late 80s. Not only did I sound like an extra from “My Cousin Vinny” to everyone’s ears, my first name is taken from the Southern Bible (also known as “Gone with the Wind”). I quickly learned to use my name to my advantage for the first time while waiting tables at a Ruby Tuesday in the Lenox Square Mall:

Me: “Hi, my name is Tara, and I’ll be your server today—“

Customer (usually an older lady in a sweater set. In Atlanta. In July. Who only ever orders salad): “Tara, like in ‘Gone with the Wind’?!”

Me (suddenly speaking in a Southern accent): “Whah, YAY-US! It’s my momma’s FAYVRITE movie? And do you know whut? My momma’s name is Bonnie, just like Scarlett’s little baby who DAHED, didn’t you just CRAH when that happened?”

My tip would go up at least two bucks after that.

The University of Georgia Drama Department was a den of sin when I transferred there in 1989, with students and faculty alike behaving somewhat like the cast of “Rome” well before its time. People smiled at each other in the hallways while stealing their partners at parties. Into this waltzes Loudmouth Jewish Girl from New Jersey, naïve to the ways of getting by in the South and how to navigate its odd traditions. In other words, I was neither genteel nor overtly slutty. My religion, however, was known to all soon after my arrival. A grad student kicked the Coke machine and announced loudly: “This machine just Jewed me out of a quarter!”

“Hey!” I yelled. “What the fuck did you just say?”

She turned to me, oblivious, and repeated it word for word.

“I can’t believe you actually said that,” I fumed. “I’M Jewish!”

“You are NOT!” she barked at me. “Your name is DUBLIN.”

“So?” I said. “I am Jewish. I had a Bat Mitzvah and everything.”

“You don’t even look Jewish,” she sneered.

“Yeah, I had my horns shaved off before I crossed the Mason-Dixon line,” I retorted.

By now, a small group of our fellow drama majors had quietly begun to form. The grad student had 3 years and 40 pounds on me. I wasn’t about to back down, however. I had to represent for my peeps.

Hands on my hips, I demanded an apology. “If I’m the first Jewish person you’ve ever met”—turns out, I was—“then I’ll be happy to educate you on all the shit you have wrong. Or you can be ignorant, your choice.”

We didn’t become besties or anything that would make this story adaptable for Lifetime TV, but she did apologize. I explained to her how I came to be called Tara Dublin, which made her laugh. She once lamented, during an acting class, that her Christmas Eve birthday led to a lot of “birthday slash Christmas gifts”. “My birthday is at the end of April,” I told her, “so I never have to worry about birthday slash Passover presents.”

“Tara,” she sighed in reply, “it must be so cool to be so…ethnic.”

Nu?

I love my name now, although it still causes people some confusion. On Twitter, where I’m “taradublinrocks”, I’m often followed by young men in Ireland who mistake me for being a club DJ. I lose at least 5 followers per day thanks to this, though they’re welcome to keep riding the crazy train that is my Twitter feed. Out here in Portland, where I’ve been living for nearly a decade, my East Coast pronunciation throws the locals a tad. “Is it Tare-a or Tah-ra?” they ask (“Actually, it’s Ta-RAH!” is what I want to reply). We do have Jews out here, despite what you may think, though I’m not joining a temple sisterhood anytime soon (that’s a topic for another blog). Trolling out the “My family got Corleone’d at Ellis Island” line brings more laughs in Portland than it ever did when I lived in Albany, Georgia.

My name might not give away my true heritage, while it does align me with one that I have no biological connection to. It’s almost like having dual citizenship! The Irish treat me like a Daughter of Erin, while my fellow M.O.T.’s are quick to recognize when they find out that I do, in fact, belong with them. On March 17^th, I proudly wear a “Not Irish—Kiss Me Anyway!” shirt, and light all the candles on Chanukah. Hopefully, it’s a name that will keep resonating with people, so that I land a book deal and get to charm the talk show hosts on the promo circuit.

I have this really funny anecdote about my name, you see…

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