My mother's grandparents and great-grandparents all emigrated from the Russian Empire in the first decades of the twentieth century to escape anti-Semitic repression and the pogroms sweeping across the Pale of Settlement. They settled in the tenements in New York City and Chicago and worked hard to reinvent themselves as "Americans." Part of their assimilation involved adopting new names. For instance, my great grandmother's kindergarten teacher disliked her name, so Sprintza became Jane.