menaced him: “What’s yer name?… Huh?… Don’t yuh know what yer name is?… Huh?… Ain’t yuh got a name?… Huh?” To all this the poor Jew had no answer but a stare of stupefaction and terror: at length a kind of frenzy seized him—a torrent of Polish, Jewish, Yiddish speech poured from his mouth, but never a word his snarling inquisitor could understand. The Jew begged, swore, wept, pleaded, prayed, entreated—a thousand tales of horror, brutal violence and tyranny swept through his terror-stricken mind, the whole vast obscene chronicle of immigration gleaned from the mouths of returned adventurers or from the letters of those who had triumphantly passed the gates of wrath: he showed his papers, he clasped his hands, he swore by all the oaths he knew that all was as it should be, that he had done all he had been told to do, that there was no trick or fraud or cheat in anything he did or said, and all the time, the foul, swollen, snarling face kept thrusting at him with the same maddening and indecipherable curse: “Yer name!… Yer name!… Fer Christ’s sake don’t yuh know yer own name?… All right!” he shouted suddenly, furiously, “If yuh ain’t got a name I’ll give yuh one!… If yuh ain’t got sense enough to tell me what yer own name is, I’ll find one for yuh!” The snarling face came closer: “Yer name’s Jones! See! J-o-n-e-s. Jones! That’s a good Amurrican name. See? I’m giving yuh a good honest Amurrican name that a lot of good decent Amurricans have got. Yuh’ve gotta try to live up to it and desoive it! See? Yer in Amurrica now, Jones…. See?… Yuh’ve gotta t’ink fer yerself, Jones. In Amurrica we know our own name. We’ve been trained to t’ink fer ourselves over here!… See? Yer not one of them foreign dummies any more!… Yer Jones—Jones—Jones!” he yelled. “See!”—and in such a way, on the impulsion of brutal authority and idiotic chance, Abe’s father had been given his new name. Eugene did not know what Abe’s real name was: Abe had told him once, and he remembered it as something pleasant, musical, and alien to our tongue, difficult for our mouths to shape and utter.
Already, when he had first met Abe Jones in the first class he taught, the process of mutation had carried so far that he was trying to rid himself of the accursed “Abraham,” reducing it to an ambiguous initial, and signing his papers with a simple unrevealing “A. Jones,” as whales are said to have lost through atrophy the use of legs with which they once walked across the land, but still to carry upon their bodies the rudimentary stump. Now, in the last year, he had dared to make a final transformation, shocking, comical, pitifully
