Julio Kennedy Rosenblatt?

How did you get a name like that???

So glad you asked. My parents are both Chilean, and they are also both Jewish. Thus the Hispanic first name and Jewish last name. I was born in Santiago, Chile, and so were both of my parents, and my grandparents are from the Eastern Europe / Russia area.

My mom named me Julio after her father, who used Julio as the Hispanic version of his Jewish name (phonetically something like yee-hee-el). My dad hated the tradition of naming children after dead relatives, so he named me after his real live hero, John F. Kennedy - that was on September 3, 1963, just a couple of months before that grassy knoll in Dallas.

Rosenblatt is actually a German name, but as you know many Jews have such last names. This is because at some point the Russians forced the Jews to adopt German surnames instead of their Russian ones so that they could be easily differentiated from "real" Russians. Rosenblatt means rose petal in German.

So now you know where I got my funky name from. It's actually not that strange. And it had absolutely nothing to do with Julio Iglesias or a Paul Simon song!

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