Generations

A couple of words about five generations of our family with some history and the selection of the name Aaron. Or from Aron to Aaron.

Selecting The Name

We had a name picked out for a girl for a long time now, but we never could pick something for a boy. So when on March 5th we found out that we’re having a boy we got together with my parents for a family meeting and ended up walking away with a decision to name our son Aaron.

Our criteria was very simple — the name should sound good in English, have a Russian form, because that’s what we’re going to use and having Jewish roots would be a nice bonus.

We went through a good number of names and even though we had Aaron in mind before when we were hypothetically thinking of names (way before we even wanted to get pregnant) we never really stopped on it or any other name.

The reasons for that probably were two fold. First of all since the name is rather uncommon in the part of the world where we come from I didn’t really know any other forms of it. My dad though said that a short form would be Ronya or Ronechka and we liked that there were variations beside Aron. But what probably really pushed us over was the fact that my dad’s grandfather and my great grandfather was named Aron.

And a while later we had two other forms of the name. First was Ari from Entourage — Ari Gold. Even though he is technically Ariel (another name that I liked, but it had no Russian form and The Little Mermaid has ruined it for boys), Ari works for Aaron too. And a day after Aaron was born — my dad remembered that his grandmother used to call his grandfather Arosha.

Arosha ended up being our favorite form of the name. We used to call him Ari most of the time during the pregnancy, but now it’s pretty much Arosha or variations of it.

Also I’m fairly sure that if we were still living in the old country there is a little chance that I’d risk naming my son Aaron or Aron. In U.S. it’s fairly common and back there it’s very Jewish — and in that country that would make things harder for him, which is sad, but true.

And a quote from the name dictionary:

The boy’s name Aaron \a(a)-ron\ is pronounced AIR-an, AHR-an. It is of Hebrew origin, and the meaning of Aaron is “mountain of strength”.

Family History

I mentioned above that we had the name in the family. My dad’s grandfather, my great grandfather and Aaron’s great great grandfather was named Aron. In Russian the name is spelled with one A.

The strange thing is that during all of this we never thought that August 8th would be the birthday. The date had no significance in my mind until the day when we already went to the hospital and my dad told me that he wanted Alena to give birth today (the 8th) because the date was significant.

Turns out that grandfather Aron has passed away on August 8th, 1943. And our Aaron being born and named after him on this date would be a symbol of continuation of life. It happened as a complete coincidence, but I’m still quite amazed by how it all came together.

I asked my dad to scan an old photograph from our family archive. It was taken in 1906, the year Aron and Hava Meira (my great grandmother) were married. He’s only 28 on it, but to me looks quite a bit older than I look, to myself at least, in my 29.

Middle Name

Thing were much simpler with the middle name selection. In line with Russian tradition we used my name for Aaron’s middle name — Daniel. In Russia he would be Daniilovich and here it’s just Daniel.

When we came to this country we all wanted our names to become more Americanized so we ended up dropping our middle names.

Some time ago I came to regret that decision. Instead of dropping it I should’ve just changed it to my dad’s name — Borisovich to Boris. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately on all my documents.

I think it’s a good tradition and I’m proud to have my dad’s name as my middle name.