What's in a Weird Name
by Chris Wiewiora
After I graduated from college, I received a message from the e-mail handle “we.wore.a,” which belonged to a Brett Wiewiora. He said that he Googled his last name every once in awhile hoping that his brother Eric had been knocked out of “first place.” He also sometimes looked for other Wiewioras — his family had emigrated from somewhere in Poland to Pennsylvania at the turn of the twentieth century, and he wanted to compare notes about being a Wiewiora.
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My mother loves to explain to people that “‘Wiewiora’ is Polish for ‘squirrel,’” before mentioning, “My maiden name is Almond.” Then she adds, “Like the nut.”
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This year, at Grandma’s house, I found a set of photos from September, 1984. On the back of one, blue ink and Dad’s cursive print reads: Rich Wiewióra with his cousin, Witold Wiewióra, in the cousin’s home on ul. Swierczewskiego, house number 21, in Gorlice, Poland.
I e-mailed Brett what I knew about my Wiewiora family: Dad’s mother met Dad’s father in England after she survived the Nazi work camps and after he de-mobilized from the Allies’ branch of the Polish army. They got married and then Dad was born in England; they immigrated to Chicago. Grandma had been from Southeastern Poland in a village without a name anymore because it is now in Ukraine, but I didn’t know where Dad’s father was from. I included a side note about the difference we had in pronouncing our last name.
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Mom’s maiden name can be traced all the way to the Almond River in Scotland.
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When Dad was twenty years old his father died without having returned to Poland or contacting his family.
The first text link on Google for “Wiewiora” goes to the University of California — San Diego’s website for PhD alumnus Eric Wiewiora.
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When my parents married, Mom nicknamed Dad “Viv.”
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I called Dad to ask about the photos and he told me that in Warsaw he met this woman with the same last name as him — she said she was from Gorlice, where other Wiewioras lived. Dad knew his father was born close by, in Nowy Sącz. The woman got in touch with the other Wiewioras; they were his family. The son of the ghost of the long lost son was returning home.
Eric Wiewiora’s online CV lists his research interests such as Reinforcement Learning Theory with a sub-focus in Exploration vs. Exploitation as well as Unsupervised Learning and the sub-focus of Clustering.
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In public school other students called me, “Weewee.”
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Dad took a passenger train from Warsaw to Krakow — the new capitol to the old capitol — and then a wooden train from Nowy Sącz to Gorlice to meet his cousin Witold, who then took him back to a church off the town square in Nowy Sącz, where dad got an official copy of his father’s baptismal records in Latin. He found out that his father’s father had worked on the railroad at the turn of the century; the church had a stain glass window of a locomotive pulling its cargo out of a tunnel.
I Googled Brett Wiewiora. (He doesn’t even show up on the first page when you Google “Wiewiora.”) A video of him in a cap and gown appeared. During his commencement day, he stared into a camera and introduced himself the same way his e-mail was spelled. Instead of X-ing out of the clip, I continued to watch as he reached into a container on a chair to pull out a slip of paper.
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I tell people to pronounce Wiewiora with the Ws as Vs.
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Dad visited the grave of his father’s brother, Blazej. Dad told me the name translates into English as Blaze. For some reason he added, “Blaze is the Saint of Throats.”
Eric’s research is similar to essaying: reflection, speculation, self-interrogation, digression, and projection.
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In high school, I read an article in the Orlando Sentinel about another Wiewiora family who also lived in Central Florida who was getting their pool refurbished on the Home & Garden channel. On YouTube, I searched and found what I now think of as the “Unspoken Wiewiora” episode. The host never even attempted to say their last name.
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Dad said that it would have been dangerous for his father, a former freedom fighter in America, to reconnect with his family in Soviet-controlled Poland.
Toward the end of college, I got my first and last name as my Gmail account. Also, I bought my name as a domain using my Gmail as my account contact info.
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At my high school commencement an administrator said, “Christopher We-wore-a.” I shook my head as I took my diploma. Grandma, who had flown down from Chicago to Orlando, fumed the entire weekend as if our last name was common.
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“Why did your husband never get in touch with other Wiewioras?” I asked.
“They just would have wanted money,” Grandma said.
In his commencement day video, Brett reads from the slip of paper a question: What is one virtue you wish for all humankind to possess? Brett says that it’s not exactly a virtue, but it’s one of his favorite sayings: “Check yourself before you wreck yourself.” He holds back a chuckle and goes on to explain, “Your opinion may not jive with someone else’s opinion, but it’s based on your experiences, you know, you should be aware of that.”
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At one job in college, I was called, “Veev!” I didn’t mind that too much.
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Dad served as a missionary — undercover, first as Russian major student and then as a furniture businessman — in Soviet Poland.
I thought it was rude that Brett never e-mailed me again.
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I did not walk when I earned my bachelor’s or master’s degrees.
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Dad said he brought home a souvenir from his trip to his cousin’s, a wooden coat hanger made in Gorlice. He doesn’t know where it is now.
Photo by likeaduck