HOW MANY DEGREES OF SEPARATION?

Ever since I started my proofreading business, I've been in touch with Bill Sabin, the editor of the Gregg Reference Manual, which is close to sacred in agencies' considerations. I rely on it for hyphen placement, what to capitalize, and boring (not to me) stuff like that. We had fun arguing over points of grammar, and sometimes I’d even win. We began calling and e-mailing back and forth; I'd ask his advice, he'd give me a ruling, and my clients' agency accepts it if I represent that it's from him. One particular note to him led to something amazing. I'd asked him a question; his answer was long and involved and funny. At the end of his answer, he wrote: "Enough already,” as my mother used to say. It’s time for both of us to get back to work.

Two words!! That's all it took to tell me that he's my co-religionist. So I e-mailed him:

Bill, the remark made by your mother ("enough already") leads me to believe she was the daughter of a Jewish immigrant from one or another of the downtrodden Balkan countries. You know me as Mollie Newman. My last name isn’t a particularly Jewish-sounding surname, but my husband is Jewish, and my maiden name is Saferstein, so I'M Jewish too.

Five minutes later I got an e-mail back:

Mollie, you and I may be distantly related. Both my parents came as teenagers to this country from Bialystok in 1920. My father’s family name at the time was Saperstein. He had a younger brother named Albert, who managed to get the education my father craved but could not have because he had to support his family. Albert embarked on a career in medical research at a time when it was difficult to be Jewish and also have any type of career in medicine. He felt he could move upward more easily if he chose a different name, so he picked Sabin. He then asked everyone else in his family to do the same so that anyone checking on his family background might not discover any disparities. He went on, of course, to do research in polio and he was the creator of the Sabin polio vaccine. I’ve often suspected that William Safire was also a Saperstein or a Saferstein way back when. In any event, the name means sapphire or sapphire stone, which means that we are all sparkling gems. = Bill