Ричард Костеланец

There is a rumor in my family that when I was born in 1940 my parents thought about sending out a card that would read, “Now we present our son Dick, one part kike, some other parts spic.” Politically correct before everyone else, so avant‑garde were they, my parents decided instead to print a more conventional announcement of my arrival.

One continuing source of identity confusion, at least for me, is that Latinos in New York hear my family name Kostelanetz as Spanish, even though my father was born in Russia; so that when I’m asked to spell it, say over the telephone, I hear back C‑O‑S. K‑O‑S, I repeat, with emphasis on the first letter. C‑O‑S, I hear again. K‑O‑S, I must repeat, often for a third time. “K, as in King.” There’s usually a pause on the other end of the line, because the letter K isn’t common in Spanish and I sense Latino listeners think I’m deceiving them. Actually, Latinos aren’t wrong in what they hear. What was Kah‑stel‑ja‑netz in Russia, with emphasis on the third syllable, probably came from Castellanos, likewise emphasizing the third syllable, which is to say someone from Castile, whose ancestors left Spain hundreds of years before. Perhaps this accounts for why my parents were married in Sheareth Isreal, the Spanish‑Portuguese synagogue on 69th Street in Manhattan, and why my grandfather Kostelanetz chose to be buried in its current cemetery in Cyprus Hills. I always speak of my friends Richard Castellana and Vince Castellano as “cousins, having the same name as mine—just spelled diffrently.”

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I’ve discovered informally that Sephardic Jews in America conducted kinds of enterprise unknown to Ashkenazim. In my mother’s family, some relatives imported olive oil while others brokered cashew nuts and comparably exotic foods. Their ideal appeared to be self-employment with all the freedoms and responsibilities involved. (Self‑employment has been my ideal as well.) The father of the painter Micaela Amato was a wholesaler of Latino herbs found in a Botanica, which is a kind of shop unknown to most Americans, if not most Ashkenazi Jews.

If Sephardic Jews are indeed culturally different, even in America, then Sephardic‑American art should be different as well—as different as Rosa Eskenazi’s songs are from Al Jolson’s, say—or in my case at least half‑different. That’s a question that Sephardic‑American artists, as they (we) recognize a common alternative Jewish heritage, will hopefully explore.