Marsha Lederman is pouring milk into her coffee – and by Marsha Lederman, I mean the illustrator and sculptor based in Arlington, Va., not the Marsha Lederman typing these words (I prefer cream). We have met in Seattle – she’s in town for an engineering conference that her husband is attending; I’ve travelled there to meet her – but also for a weekend rendezvous with my best friend, who now lives in Atlanta (and, just to complicate matters, is also named Marsha). Marsha Lederman and I happen to be staying at the same hotel, having breakfast daily in the same penthouse lounge, and we have separately become fond of the Greek yogurt dish on offer. Despite all the time we have each spent hovering over that particular platter, we have never bumped into each other.
But finally, at the appointed hour, we meet.
“Marsha Lederman, I presume,” says her husband, Art Schwartz, (to me). There are big, generous hugs. I feel instantly as though I have acquired two new family members.
The Internet – Facebook in particular – has made finding your appellation doppelganger a common and easy pursuit. My colleague David Ebner is Facebook friends with 18 Dave and David Ebners (and one Gregor David Ebner) – in places including Budapest, Santiago and Menomonee Falls, Wis. There is a Jim Smith Society. Director Alan Berliner made a film about the practice, inviting a bunch of other Alan Berliners to dinner in The Sweetest Sound. What was once a convention of people named Phil Campbell in the town of Phil Campbell, Ala. (first held in 1995, organized through snail-mailed form letters) was resurrected in 2011, when a disparate group of Phil Campbells descended upon the tornado-ravaged town to help in relief efforts.
But Marsha Lederman is no Phil Campbell or Jim Smith. According to howmanyofme.com, there are 125,124 people named Marsha in the United States and 3,179 people with the last name Lederman.
And there is one Marsha Lederman.
I found her after receiving an office going-away card from a job I was leaving. A colleague had scribbled a complimentary note in which he remarked upon a surprising achievement – that in addition to being a journalist, I was also a children’s book illustrator.
After a bizarre moment of confusion – had I illustrated a children’s book? (of course not) – I went looking for the Marsha Lederman who had, and found her at marshalederman.com.
It’s not the only misunderstanding that has resulted from our shared names (and, I suspect, creative professions). A decade after the going-away card mix-up, that same website – hers – was listed under my bio at a book festival in which I was participating.
A few years after the greeting-card incident, I friended Marsha Lederman on Facebook. And so began the weird experience of seeing my own name pop up on my timeline with status updates about experiences I was not having. Marsha Lederman is installing the granite countertop for her kitchen renovation. Marsha Lederman is in South Africa, photographing penguins. Marsha Lederman is biking in New Mexico. I have still not become accustomed to this. I feel a jolt of weirdness every time.
When we meet, I go into reporter mode, collecting details. She is 13 years older than I am and compact – 5-foot-4, super-fit (yoga) and angular. I am shorter and nobody has ever described me as angular (or super-fit). We’re both white, but have different colouring. Even accounting for the accents, we sound nothing alike. (But we pronounce our last names the same way, with a long “e” – lead-er-man. Then again, most of my family pronounces it with a short “e” – but that’s a whole other story.)
I am hunting for physical similarities because, of course, the big question has been whether we can determine a family connection. With most of my father’s family wiped out during the Holocaust, I am like a hawk when I hear the name Lederman, always on the lookout for potential relatives.
Another way to gauge this, since Jews are generally named after a deceased relative, is to determine the origin of our first names. I am named after two grandfathers named Moshe; she is named after her great aunt Marasna. All three were killed in the Holocaust. Her middle name is Anne (“Ann” at birth; she added the “e”). Mine, I’m afraid to report, is Estelle.
When she tells me her grandfather’s name – Jacob Lederman – I get a charge. This was my father’s name, and it’s my son’s. (Then again, Jews of Eastern European descent named Jacob were a zloty a dozen.)
Her father’s family was from a tiny village in the eastern part of the Russian-Polish Pale of Settlement, while my father came from the big city of Lodz in the western part of the Pale. Her grandfather left at the turn of the 20th century (after, according to family lore, tossing all of their gold into a little pond during a pogrom); my father after the war. It is possible that my father’s Ledermans moved west within the Pale between the turn of the century and when he was born in 1919, but I don’t know anyone any more who can provide that information. (MAL’s father was born a year earlier than mine.)
Both of our families operated grocery stores – hers in Rochester, N.Y.; mine in Lodz, Poland – but that’s about it for any shared family experience (beyond running from persecution).
During our hours-long coffee date, I seek out familiar personality traits, as if our shared names might somehow have bestowed upon us common characteristics. (Which seems ridiculous, I acknowledge. A rose by any other name and all that jazz.)
She is curious, outgoing, social – a self-described “people collector.” She has been drawing from the time she could hold a pencil, and has a thing for anthropomorphizing animals in her illustrations – cats and pigs especially (for a book catalogue’s drawing of the Lincoln Memorial, she turned Honest Abe into a feline). Among her biggest projects: illustrating the children’s book Virginia: An Alphabetical Journey Through History.
She has been focusing on sculpture lately, and jewellery-making. She carries around a little Moleskin sketchbook and whips up detailed pencil portraits of people she encounters – on buses, subways, in waiting rooms, often with a little note. “Exhausted,” reads one. On another page, “Amazing blond curls.” (This notebook, like her Facebook posts, gives me a start when I see her name listed on the front page. “What is she doing with my book?” I think for a flash.)
I can’t draw (or sculpt) for beans and as a consumer of art, I’m generally not big on animals. She, on the other hand, doesn’t consider herself much of a writer. (When we meet, we resurrect a fantasy previously discussed on Facebook: to collaborate on a children’s book – I’ll write; she’ll draw.)
While I do, like Marsha Ann(e) Lederman, consider myself a people person, this is hardly an unusual trait.
We did both keep our names when we got married – not uncommon, but a key element in our story; it’s how we have found each other.
And we establish with some gusto one unsurprising mutual experience: I ask her if she ever gets a Brady Bunch-inspired “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha” (or “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” – that's how Marcia Brady spelled it) chanted at her when she introduces herself to someone new.
“Oh God,” she says. “All the time.”
Marsha A. Lederman has a grown son (31) and daughter (23). Her parents are 96; she is about to move them from Florida to assisted living in Virginia. She has a lot of family scattered throughout the United States and beyond. My parents died years ago and I have a tiny extended family.
In her early 60s, Marsha A. is travelling, exploring different media in her artistic practice, volunteering to help run a local ampitheatre and growing taller (really!) through her yoga practice. I, meanwhile, am enmeshed in the constant work-life balance battle brought on by a demanding full-time job and a young(ish) family.
We are at different life stages in different geographical places. Marsha A. certainly doesn’t need another (fake) family member. I certainly don’t need another commitment – even if that commitment is a new friendship.
And, yet, the meeting of the Marsha Ledermans (or, as my husband calls us, Marshas Lederman) solidified this tenuous name-based connection. I knew instantly that we would make room for each other in our lives. Friends, almost family. Potential creative collaborators. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but with another Marsha Lederman around, I feel a little less alone in the world. With this lovely story, we have somehow formed a family, and a new chant of “Marsha, Marsha” sounds just right.