The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven

Author:Gail Hareven
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781612190303
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2010-12-28T22:00:00+00:00

NAMES

Since I was legally married, she was registered at the Ministry of Interior as Hagar Ginsberg, daughter of Alexander and Noa Ginsberg.

It was only when I went to register her, when she was already almost a year old, that I discovered that the Ministry of Interior was kept up to date by the Rabbinate, and that without my knowledge they had changed my name from Weber to Ginsberg, which meant that as far as the state was concerned I had been Ginsberg now for over a year and a half without anyone taking the trouble to inform me. When the situation became clear to me, I didn’t even try to find out whether I could change it. On my first ID card, which I had received just before I got married, my name was given as Weber, and I simply continued to sign my name and introduce myself as Noa Weber. The struggle for the right of married women to keep their maiden names was unheard of then, I had no ideological reasons against taking my husband’s name, but because it was “only a fictitious marriage” it had never occurred to me to use his name.

Whenever the subject of the name came up, for example before the elections in December ’73, when my mother noticed that the voter’s notification they sent me was addressed to “Noa Ginsberg,” it led automatically to talk of divorce—“Really, Noaleh, isn’t it about time you resolved the matter and asked him for a divorce?”—I would say, “I haven’t got the strength to take care of it now,” and “I’m in no shape to make contact with him now,” and it was only at the end of the seventies, when I was already working for the human rights fund, that I adopted the avant-garde position: I don’t care what my name is at the Ministry of Interior, and I’m not interested in their opinion regarding my marital status. As long as there’s no separation between state and religion in Israel, we should take no notice of their registrations, and the more anarchy we create the better. My name is Noa Weber, I’m as single as I ever was, and I have no intention of entering into negotiations with some official in order for him to confirm my true identity.

In 1984 things became a little more complicated, after my bag was stolen with my ID card inside it. The new ID they issued me was in the name of Noa Ginsberg, and the same went for the passport I obtained at the end of the eighties. As a result, to this day I have to explain myself when I sign checks—the name printed in my checkbook is Noa Weber—but all my plane tickets are in the name of Ginsberg, and Ginsberg is my name at airline check-ins.

The fact is that at the end of the eighties I could have registered myself again as Weber, without requiring a divorce or waging a legal battle—other women had already won the battle—and the other fact is that I failed to do so.

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