I've seen the movie several time, and read the original play several time, and I still have a question. In the song "The Tailor Motel Kamzoil", Grandma Tzeitel says Motel was named after her "Dear Uncle Mordecai".
So is "Motel" a contraction of "Mordecai" or something? How does that work?
"I'm not reckless . . . I'm skillful!"
I'm not Jewish myself(as my signature clearly shows), but, from what I understand, in Judaism, when someone is named after another person, they name them from the same initial ONLY, not the entire name.
Eg: if they were naming a child after a relative named Sarah, they might name the new child, 'Susan,' etc.
If you love Mary and Jesus Christ and are 100% proud of it, copy this and make your signature!
So, if a newborn child has more than one member of a family whose name begins with the same letter, it must be clearly specified which person the child is being named for.
"I'm not reckless . . . I'm skillful!"
Jews can,and often do, use the actual name of a deceased relative, if they are Ashkenazi Jews. Sephardic Jews use the name of a living or deceased relative.
The name can be used as either the first or middle name.
The use of just the first letter is optional, and is often used when Americanizing or updating a Yiddish or "out-of -date" or too-Biblical Jewish name.
What I can't understand is why Motel was named after Grandma Tzeitel's Uncle Mordechai. The two families weren't connected until Motel's marriage to Tzeitel, many years later.
shareI have an old book of the original stories that Fiddler is based on, so I'll see if it's mentioned. Back then in those Jewish communities, cousins often married each other. A grandmother's uncle would be three generations removed from the young generation. Also, the uncle may not have been Grandma's Tzeiel's blood relative: maybe her aunt was. Just speculating until I look it up.
shareSo you're saying that Motel and Tzeitel could have been distant cousins. Interesting. Or maybe the two families could have been friendly with each other for ages. It's not very common to name a new baby after a friend of the family, but it's not impossible either.
shareone of my best friends gave her daughter my middle name as her middle name, and my other best friend gave her daughter my first name as her middle name. a large honour, to be sure! but yes, definitely not unheard of :)
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There were a lot of cousin marriages in these communities. Lots of people were related to their inlaws by blood.
shareThe business of naming after someone using only the first letter really isn't as simple as that. People *do* do that, but it's not always without controversy. I can think of two instances in my own family:
My sister named her son "Daniel", and at least once claimed to have named him after our great uncle Dave. However, some in my family (including myself, and, if I recall correctly, my mother), thought this was a crock, because why then didn't she name him "David"? The general feeling was that, since both "Daniel" and "David" are both perfectly good biblical Jewish names, that using just the first letter wasn't good enough. Now, if our uncle had been named "Durwood" or "Dewey" or something, we probably would have bought it.
Similarly, my cousin had a son not long after my grandfather died, whose name was "Benjamin". She named the son "Billy" and I believe claimed he was named after our grandfather. But my grandmother went to her grave bitter about this choice, saying "What was wrong with 'Benny'?"
A lot of it, though, has to do with the *Hebrew* name the child is given. Often the Hebrew name and the English name don't match, but usually (not always) the first letter will at least match. Thus, my first name is "Richard", but my Hebrew name is "Raphael". My father's name is "Robert", but his Hebrew name is "Rueben" ("Ruevain"). Interestingly, my naming is broken-yet-correct in that I'm supposed to be named after my great grandfather, but his name was also "Ruevain", and the Rabbi that my parents consulted said that you can't name a child "Reuvain ben Reuvain" ("Reuben son of Reuben"). So I ended up stuck with the Hebrew name "Raphael", which doesn't belong to *anyone* in my family. :-S
I think using the first initial only when naming kids after relatives is an American thing. In Russia a hundred years ago they used the whole name. And there weren't that many names in use - you only see about twenty or so given names for each sex, and in any family you see the same names repeated in every generation.
To answer the original question - there were lots of knicknames in Yiddish, and yes, Motl was a knickname for Mordechai.
I'm Jewish. Jews can and do name fully the same name. Many cases if they are naming after the opposite gender they will use just the initial, especially if there is direct masculine/feminine version of the name. Another thing that is done is using the Hebrew/Yiddish/English version of the name. Motel, is I believe the Yiddish version of the Hebrew Mordechai. And perhaps, grandma'a uncle was an important person in town. That is another tradition, to name after someone important, which is why you have a lot of Jewish kids with the same name, usually after a prominent Rabbi passes, you'll find lots of kids given the same name as the rabbi.
shareYes, it is a contraction of Mordecai. The ending -el is a consistent way in Yiddish of creating a diminutive, as in Hodel, Tzeitel. (It's used in Austrian German too.) So Motel is to Mordecai as Freddy is to Frederick.
shareI tell you what, IMDb is a great place to pick up a casual education on a wide variety of subjects. Thanks for this item.
"I'm not reckless . . . I'm skillful!"
You're welcome!
It's actually quite a pointer to how he is seen in the community. He's a master craftsman working in his own independent business, a householder, not in the tutelage of his father (if his father were living, he couldn't not have been deeply involved in his son's betrothal and marriage), a sober pious man from a respectable background. On all those grounds he should theoretically be getting enough respect to be known as 'Mordecai Kamzoil'; but everybody instinctively goes on calling him just 'Motel' as though he were still a boy.