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We tend to think about foreign travel in terms of what we can gain: experience, photographs, souvenirs, new ideas, new friends and a broader perspective. But what if we shifted our focus to think about everything we could stand to lose as a result of travel? Some answers are obvious. Keys, money and passports stand among the most common. You can easily lose your way in an unfamiliar place. Meaning gets lost in translation — just think of reading the English on a menu in a foreign locale. You might lose your stomach if you are my mother on an airplane. (Sorry, Mom.)
But one of travel’s prime benefits is that it can strip us of some of our stereotypes, our prejudices and even our fears.
Now that I am returned from my year in Poland, I can thankfully say I have gained everything from that first category and lost little among the materials from the second group. However, I might end up losing something more personal, something that is literally who I am. Thanks to living abroad, I might lose my “witz.”
I don’t mean that a year
in Poland permanently damaged my hold on sanity, although certain moments during a dark winter brought me close to the brink. I am referring specifically to my last name. W-I-T-Z is not an ending common among the Polish nation; rather, it should end in W-I-C-Z (pronounced “vitch”).
In May, I took a solo trip up to Kashubia and to my ancestral villages in northern Poland. I gazed at the pages of an old church register over a century old. Sure enough, the children among my antecedents who were born, baptized, married and buried all bore the surname “Merchlewicz.” CZ at the end.
Wondering if the change took place as one of those countless Ellis Island-type mistakes of orthography, I reported my find to my grandfather, the oldest living family member of the line, who replied, “Oh, no, it got changed when I was about seven or eight years old.”
That fact indicates that I am only two generations away from the way my last name, my very inherent identity, had been known for who knows how many generations before that.
The question now is whether or not I should do away with the American “invention” that hangs at the end of my signature and go back to my roots or to leave it and embrace the inevitability that both time and people change. Preparing for such a long period of time away from the United States, I anticipated having one big, life-changing experience. I didn’t expect, however, that my stay would have an effect on how I might introduce myself to other people.
The way the world sees you is an important factor on how you view yourself. As anyone who works with kids will know, if children grow up hearing enough comments about how they are “bad,” “stupid” or “untalented,” then they will eventually begin to believe them regardless of their unlimited potential. We can think of ourselves as being a certain person, but, thinking exclusively of names, we are only what the world calls us.
In this quest for authenticity and who I have become after visiting the so-called motherland, I frequently think about the name of my forefathers as it relates to my identity.
There is one aspect to a name change back to the way it was that could bring an undesired association: the altercation in English pronunciation would render me as Sarah Merchle-“witch,” and that, I think, might actually drive me crazy.
A former Winona Winhawk, Sarah Merchlewitz is a recent graduate from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where she studied literature and writing. She recently returned from a year in Krakow studying at Jagiellonian University.
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