E La Bambina Si Chiama...

On Sunday morning, in a rather beautiful ceremony, we learned the name of Mila and Eli's baby girl: Yelena Meira Lifshen. Her Hebrew name is Yael.

The Jewish tradition is to name a child in honor of a deceased relative — never a living one — and the names are explained during the ceremony.

Yelena is after Mila grandmother Helen, Yelena being a Slavic version of Helen, and I expect it's what grandmother Helen would have been called in Serbian. Mila gave a wonderful speech about her grandmother, honoring not just those things that many of us remember about grandmothers, like warmth, generosity, and roasted chickens, but also those things that made her very unique in her time — her getting divorced and raising five children alone.

Meira is Hebrew for "light", and was chosen in honor of Eli's brother Moshe, who died last year. (It is enough that "Moshe" and "Meira" both begin with M, and that "Meira" was specifically chosen in honor of Moshe.) Eli's speech about his brother was extremely beautiful and moving; there was much crying, and it was all I could do not to break down myself. I wanted to draw a picture of this. At one point I looked up and saw Eli reading his speech and his father standing next to him, red-faced and crying. I sat down yesterday to sketch this, and couldn't. I hadn't seen enough. I'd looked away to regain composure. I know that Mila was on Eli's other side with Yelena, and I know Eli's mother was on his father's other side, but I looked away too soon to remember the scene well enough. But I was very touched, and I wanted to convey that with more than words.

There were other elements to the ceremony as well: Yelena's first taste of wine, the grandparents wrapping her in Eli's tallit. The we had a brunch of muffins, bread, poached salmon, quiche, and a lovely blackberry-plum cake.

Labels: personal

posted by Tony at 10:49 PM