Page 25 - WhyAsInY

DoCtor’s HosPital
hit The Wall, as it were (no, not Pink Floyd’s; think geopolitically), and maybe three minutes had to be devoted to my spelling and re-spelling it. In my controlled panic, but not without my normal sense of the absurdity of the situation, I found myself saying, “B as in Berlin” and “M as in Munich.” That wasn’t so bad, because maturity had taken over and I did manage to suppress the giggles attendant to the way in which I was thinking that I really wanted to spell it: “Y, A, V as in V-2 rocket; E, R, B as in Blitzkrieg; A, U, M as in Mein Kampf.” Exercising some self-control was a good strategy, as Lothar ultimately diagnosed the camera problem.
Unfortunately, a large number of clerks, on hearing me spell my name as I usually do (“Y, A, V as in Victor . . .”), render it “Waverbaum.” “Why?” you say. That’s right. You’ve got it. Everyone knows that Why begins with W.
Obviously, the name is not common, and I always think it ridiculous when the person on the other end of the phone, having first established that I am Yaverbaum, proceeds to check my identity further by asking for my first name. It transpires, however, that one time, when I was reg- istering for a course at the New School by saying, “Yaverbaum,” I laughed when they insisted on having me give them the first (Christian?) name, only to discover that one of the already-registered students was Eric Yaverbaum, a second cousin of mine. (By the way, I have never dis- covered a Yaverbaum who wasn’t related to me by some degree of consanguinity.)
I should take the opportunity now to explain that neither I nor any- one else whom I know of—rabbis included—has a clue as to what my unusual family name means. Everyone knows that baum means tree. However, no one, it seems, has ever seen, been, or eaten a yaver. Natu- rally, those same rabbis reject the idea that yaver is a corruption of Yahweh. (Maybe a corruption of hah-vair, Hebrew for friend?)
Yaverbaum might be unusual, but it didn’t seem that way to Japanese officers of Sony Corporation of America when we went around the table making the customary introductions at a negotiating session in Harris- burg with the Pennsylvania Industrial Development Agency. After I told those in attendance that I was Sony’s attorney, Harvey Yaverbaum, I was
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