I disagree with Zack Polanski’s politics – but he’s right to reclaim his Jewish name

Polanski, who is Jewish, has said he changed his name to honour his heritage. His family, who came here from Latvia and Poland, anglicised their surname to Paulden, for the usual reasons familiar to JC readers. And he took Zack as his first name because he disliked the name David, which was also his stepfather’s name, and he liked the name Zack.

That story is especially familiar to me because it is so similar to my own – apart from the name change. My father, whose family were Belarusian, was born Bernard Polak, the son of a taxi driver in the East End. He became the first in his extended family to stay in education after the earliest leaving age, let alone to go to university. He won a scholarship to the LSE, graduating with a first and a series of prizes. (His essay on the theory of value from Adam Smith to Jevons won the Gladstone Memorial Prize in 1949. He followed this with postgraduate study under Friedrich Hayek at the LSE and then teaching.) He then joined the civil service where he rose to the top, advising a number of Chancellors and ending his civil service career as Director General of the Inland Revenue.

But there are no records anywhere of a Bernard Polak in the civil service. At college, he was advised that the name Polak would hinder his career, so he anglicised it to Pollard. And then, on his first day at work, his boss called him Barry. He thought it best not to correct him and so, professionally, he was Barry. Even if to his mum, his family and his old friends, he was always Bernie.

My father was at college in the immediate post-war period. Things were very different to when I was a student in the mid-1980s. By then – how naïve we were! – antisemitism seemed almost irrelevant. It certainly did not guide how we made our life choices. And I began to think that I should change my name back to Polak. None of the reasons that underlay my father’s decision seemed to apply, and – like Polanski – I wanted to reclaim my heritage.

In the end I didn’t. I decided that, even if my father had said he was happy for me to change it, to do so would nonetheless imply some sort of criticism of him for having changed his name – as if I was somehow braver or bolder. And nothing could have been further from the truth about a man I revered.

To this day, I still don’t know if I did (or rather didn’t do) the right thing. I feel that I am indeed Stephen Pollard, as I always have been and now always will be. But at the same time I sometimes think, especially since the fight against antisemitism became one of the defining features of my life, that I should instead be Stephen Polak. And that that should be my children’s surname.

So while I hope politically that Zack Polanski becomes yet another failed Green leader, I say this to him over his name change: I salute you, I admire you and, perhaps, I envy you.