It no longer has any relevance
“I don’t want to discuss that. It no longer has any relevance. It’s excess baggage. I’m getting rid of it. Go to sleep now, Gary, and try not to snore.”
“Do you plan eventually to change your name?”
“There’s no need for that. I’ve already reached the point where my name connotes nothing more to me than the designation EKseventeen might connote. I don’t feel I have to live up to my name, to defend it, to like it, to spell it. I used to think of Anatole Bloomberg as the essence of European Jewry. I used to think I had to live up to my name. I thought I had to become Anatole Bloomberg, an importerexporter from Rotterdam with a hook nose and flat feet, or an Antwerp diamond merchant wearing a skullcap, or a hunchbacked Talmudic scholar in a woolly black coat and shoes without shoelaces. Those are just three of the autobiographical projections I had to contend with. It was my name that caused the trouble, the Europeness of my name. Its Europicity. And there was another thing. Some names possess a smell. I didn’t like the way my name smelled. It was like a hallway in a tenement where a lot of Bulgarians live. But that’s all over now. Now I’m free. I’m EKseventeen.”
“It’s a fabulous name,” I said. “I mean the original one. I’m glad you’re keeping it.”
“It’s a means of identification. It has no significance beyond that.”
“Good night, Anatole.”
“When I arrived here last year,” he said, “I was still in a state of confusion and inner panic. But the remoteness helped me. The desert was an ideal place in which to begin the process of unjewing. I spoke aloud to myself in the desert, straightening out my grammar, getting rid of the old slang and the old speech rhythms. I walked in straight lines. I tried to line myself up parallel to the horizon and then walk in a perfectly straight line.
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