Yes, I’m Yossle Nueman. From my name you might assume I am Jewish, was raised in Brooklyn and love cream bagels and lox with a little pickle on the side and you would be absolutely right. Why my parents should decide to give me the name Yossle is beyond me. They could have called me Joe, or Joseph or even an upbeat Zionist sounding Yossi if they wanted to be technically ethnic about it.
But no! I had to be Yossle; a name that smacks of an old shtetl in the Ukraine, Poland, Russia or some other G-d forsaken location in 18th Century Europe and even back then must have only been a silly nickname. And my parents – did they care about the fact that I would have to go through life carrying this load as a title? Feh!
They expected me to be proud of it! ‘Yossle, you are unique.’ I can hear my mom’s voice saying even now. You wouldn’t guess that I am eighty five years old. Except for my back and a bit of constipation every now and then, I still feel young and I don’t look a day over eighty. And my dad – well. He wasn’t big on the Yossle either. Thought of it as some kind of inside joke he never included me in on. For him it was more important that I keep the Nueman, but he never liked to contradict my mom and the name Yossle kept him amused.
So, why did I never change my name? Ah! That has to do with my old friend Quao M’Baye. He jumped ship back in the African colonial days and we used to work on the docks together. I was a young critter back then and just about to embark on life with the newfound freedom of adulthood. The day came that I had to register for papers and Quao came along with me, so I asked him, ‘Which do you like better Joseph or Joe?’
To cut a long story short, by the time I got through hearing how his father escaped the French in Senegal only to be chased out of the Gold Coast by the British and how he had been born on a Thursday, I decided to keep the Yossle. I began to perceive my own name with a whole new significance.
Then just last week, I received a letter. Not an email or a friend request on that shmasebook thing; a real letter! Oy, how I miss those! It was from the grandson of my father’s brother, who my parents thought had perished in the 40′s. The kid was a Yeshiva student right here in New York! We met and he had pictures, a diary, and a whole collection of old letters and knew the family history up till the second Great War. Things even I did not know. ‘How the devil did you find me?’ I asked him in awe scarcely able to comprehend such a welcome and unexpected surprise. The upstart said he Googled me, and that I was the only Yossle Nueman he could find.
