Nomina sunt omina. Lingua, identità e memoria in un racconto di Aharon Megged

This contribution examines Aharon Megged’s short story Yad va-šem (1955) through the lenses of language, memory, and identity. Set in Israel in the years immediately following independence, the story revolves around an apparently marginal family dispute: the name to be given to an unborn child. As the analysis shows, the onomastic disagreement gradually reveals a deeper fracture between generations and between competing cultural horizons. The grandfather, a survivor of Eastern European Jewry haunted by memories of a destroyed community, proposes to name the child Mendele in memory of a grandson murdered in the Holocaust. But the proposal encounters firm resistance from the young Israeli parents-to-be, his granddaughter and her husband, who have already chosen the biblical names Osnat and Ehud. This opposition is not presented as a simple clash of tastes or sensibilities, but as the expression of a broader process through which diasporic memory, linguistic forms, and emotional registers are filtered and often excluded from the emerging Israeli cultural framework. Names, in this context, function as condensed signs, carrying semantic and affective values that extend well beyond the individual sphere. Drawing on reflections on the social function of proper names (Barthes), the symbolic dimension of narrative form (Jameson), and the politics of language and gender in the Hebrew–Yiddish divide (Seidman), the article shows how phonology itself becomes an ideological threshold. The rejection of Mendele is articulated less through explicit argument than through aversion to sound and resonance. What is refused is not merely a memory, but the voice through which that memory would be transmitted. The absence of any explicit mention of Yiddish, despite its constant evocation, becomes itself a meaningful narrative strategy, pointing to a form of silencing that operates through omission rather than negation. The unassigned name thus emerges as a symbolic remainder: a trace of a past that cannot be fully integrated into the present of a post-traumatic society.