According to my birth certificate, I was born on September 4, 1946 at 9:45 p.m. at Beth…, something or other, hospital in New York City.

Frankly, I don't remember the details as I was very young at the time. So, I checked my birth certificate, and as I have aged quite a bit, it too has aged and after looking at it, I seemed to have come out the better of the two — but probably not by much.

The single sheet is about 6-1/2" wide by 6" long and has been folded, not exactly in half, for all these many years. And when unfolded, my Certificate of Birth is very brown — anywhere from a soft brownish yellow to a deep almost unreadable ebony.

When it comes to the name of the hospital, there are ten splotches surrounding the information, making it just about anybody's guess. I scanned it into my computer and enlarged the name of the hospital to about 12 inches in width — but it still was unreadable. I even juggled with the brightness in PhotoShop, all to no avail. I guess, at least for the meanwhile, I won't know where I was born.

It looked like it read. "Place of " - "Brooklyn", and "Name of Hospital" — "Bethxxx" and there was about enough space for three or four letters afterwards. I thought that I remember hearing Beth Israel — but there wasn't enough room for a space and six letters. There was a Beth El Hospital in Brooklyn at the time. It opened as Brownsville and East New York Hospital in 1921, was renamed Beth-El Hospital in 1932, and in 1963 became Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center. So, I could have caught it as Beth El when I was born in 1946.

The next entry really surprised me. It read, "Usual residence of Mother." The certificate didn't even list the address of the father — hmmm.

Well, I'll have to give them one compliment, they spelled my Mother's maiden name correctly, Miriam Rosen — although that could be a bit of a story. Of course, she was Miriam Zagofsky at the time, but that wasn't one of the options. And besides, she had changed her name, shortened it from Rosensweig to Rosen.

My father, not so easy. He is listed as Jack Zagofsky — which is the name that he generally gave if you asked him. But his legal name was Jacob Arthur Zagofsky. No one called him Jacob, but most of his buddies called him Jake. And among his fellow union workers, he was know as Bloody Jake — not because of his boyhood hangouts with Brooklyn's notorious Purple Gang, that's another story, but because he was super-active in giving blood to the blood drives.

As for the Zagofsky part, he was the only one in his family with that surname. The rest of his family, his father, mother, and his brother and four sisters all had variations of that last name with spellings that went from his Zagofsky to Sukavsky — and nearly everything in between. The only commonality they shared was the "sky" which seemed to indicate a Jewish person from that town. So, the variations of Zagofsky suggested that my father's father, Theodore Todos Sakowski — among the dozen or more spellings on various records — had come from the town of Sakow in Eastern Europe, if there is such a place.

Where in Eastern Europe? I'm not sure. Sometimes it's listed as Poland. Sometimes, as the Russian Empire. It probably was like you could sit at the border and watch it shift between countries. Best as I could make out, it was probably it what we now call the Ukraine. But since the modern Ukraine didn't exist before 1991, as it was part of the Soviet Union, I grew up knowing nothing about it.

And as far as the various anagrams of Zagofsky go, the story I heard was that my father's father couldn't write in English and could hardly speak English, so my father's birth certificate, as well as those of his siblings, were filled out by the doctor as best as he could translate from the Cyrillic alphabet.

Anyhow, as I wrap up this treatise on my birth certificate, I notice that it was signed by an "Abraham Zelony" — or something like that. After all, doctors have never been prized for their penmanship. But isn't it neat that both the doctor and I would have the same initials.

Among other things, I would grow up to be a journalist. And often when I would interview someone, I would start by asking them when and where they were born, and then say, "So, what happened after that?" And what happened after that is my story.

~ Al Zagofsky