By SAM ROBERTS
For many 19th- and 20th-century immigrants or their children, it was a rite of passage: in America, they adopted a new identity. Charles Steinweg, the Germanborn piano maker, changed his name to Steinway . Anne Bancroft, the actress who was born in the Bronx, was Anna Maria Louisa Italiano.
The rationale was straightforward: adopting names that sounded more American might help immigrants avoid discrimination . Today, most experts agree, that traditional immigrant gambit has all but disappeared. Sociologists say the United States is simply a more multicultural country today , and they add that blending in by changing a name is not as effective for Asians and Latin Americans who may be more easily identified by physical characteristics than some Europeans were in the 19th century and early 20th century.
At least in certain circumstances, affirmative action and similar equality programs have transformed ethnic identity into a possible asset. Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, suggested that newcomers from overseas no longer felt pressure to change their surnames beginning in “the 1970s and 1980s, as immigration became more a part of American life and the civil rights movement legitimated in-group pride as something to be cultivated.
” A century ago, some names were simplified by shipping agents as immigrants boarded ships in Europe. Others were transliterated, but rarely changed, by immigration officials at Ellis Island in New York. Many newcomers changed their names legally, from Sapusnick to Phillips (“difficulty in pronouncing name, interferes with their business,” according to a legal notice), Laskowsky to Lake (“former name not American”) and from Katchka to Kalin (Katchka means duck in Yiddish and a particular Mr. Katchka was “subjected to ridicule and annoyance ”).
Most requests appear to have been granted routinely, although as recently as 1967, a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn refused to change Samuel Weinberg’s family name to Lansing “for future business reasons, such that my sons shall not bear any possible stigma.” The judge’s name was Jacob Weinberg. Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said: “Jews and Italians changed their surnames in the past so that people wouldn’t identify them as Jews or Italians, the famous cases of course being movie stars.
But if you look, phenotypically, nonwhite ? East Asian, for example, or black ? changing your last name is not going to make a difference. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall, and most people didn’t know she was Jewish; whatever name she used, Lena Horne was black.” Lisa Chang, whose parents came from Korea in 1976, had assumed she would marry a Korean man, but decided to retain her maiden name when she wed a Caucasian instead.
“I felt like I would lose a part of myself and my Korean heritage ,” said Ms. Chang, 28 . “No one actually told me I had to change my last name, but I did feel some pressure from my future in-laws.” Even these days, finding the right adoptive name can be a problem. Not long ago, David M. Glauberman, a Manhattan public relations executive, grew tired of having to spell his name every time he left a telephone message.
Instead, he legally changed his name to Grant. The first time he left a message, a secretary asked: “Is that Grand with a ‘d’ or Grant with a ‘t’?”
