“It’s Ruth, what else?”

by Nicholas Laughlin on June 18, 2010

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid. Photograph courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Jamaica Kincaid is surprised that many people still wonder at the fact that she converted to Judaism. It seems natural to her to be Jewish — and even to have served as president of her synagogue in Vermont. “Yes and I’m black and I’m a woman. Oh boy, it keeps piling on,” she laughs. “I don’t even think about it anymore. I haven’t talked about it in a long time, no one has asked me about it. I forget that it might be interesting to anybody.”

— From an interview profile by Maya Sela published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which Jamaica Kincaid discusses her relationship with her mother, Israeli politics, the “improbable” story of her start as a writer, and her relationship with Judaism.

Many Antilles readers probably know that Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson, and changed her name as part of her re-imagining of herself as a writer:

“I was very young when I did it. I was interested in style, I had cut off all my hair, bleached it blonde, and I had no eyebrows. I wore very odd clothes. And so I picked a name that was a combination of an island name and a very English name. Havana was one choice and Dominico was another, but I liked the combination of Jamaica Kincaid.”

But she also has another name, chosen to signal a different kind of re-imagining:

“You mean my Hebrew name?”

You have a Hebrew name?

“Of course! Doesn’t everybody? It’s Ruth, what else?”

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