Tag #123449 - Interview #78050 (rena michalowska)

My father constantly preached internationalism to me. I remember in 1952, personal ID's were being issued for the first time. Up until then we had no documents. My birth certificate or its copy arrived with an error, most likely caused by the clerk's haste or a simple mistake. My name on it was Rena Fischbein. 'Dad, I said, we have to correct his, one syllable is missing.' I'm telling this story to show how paranoid my father was after all. He glanced at me and said, 'You know what, let's leave it like that. Maybe Rena sounds better than Regina.' He didn't say out right that Regina Fischbein sounds rather unambiguous [i.e. explicitly Jewish]. So that's how I became Rena. From 1952, all my documents say that. But at the time, that didn't really matter, to a person who was busy studying, falling in love...