#perhaps worth mentioning that naming your kid any version of Dad II would have been unthinkably goyische in the ghetto

[power-chords]

After ten years in the army, [Lansky's second son] moved to California and became a computer programmer. When he had a son of his own, he named him Meyer Lansky II, which upset the gangster. The idea was to fade into America, not brandish your name. Lansky's other son, Buddy, who was handicapped, remembered the old gangster's reaction. "Dad got mad," he told Robert Lacey in the book Little Man. "He thought it was not fair on the kid that he should have to live with that." For later generations, the life of the ghetto, the crime and violence, were just stories, something you forget before you hear. Why should they remember? In the story of the Jewish underworld nothing compares with the Italian dynasties, the Gottis, the Gallos. No one runs out to avenge a family name. That's the last thing the patriarch would want. Even the most violent of the gangsters saw themselves as good Jews, people of the Book. They went to temple on High Holy Days, thought of God when things went bad, had their sons circumcised and bar mitzvahed. [...] How did they square their criminal life with the life of the Bible? Well, like most people, they made a distinction: this is the life of the soul, this is the life of the body. Next year in Jerusalem. But this is how I live in the Diaspora. A lawyer asked [Abe] Reles how he dealt with the contradictions. "Do you have any regrets?" asked the lawyer. "This is the way I live," said Reles. "Do you believe there is a God?" asked the lawyer. "Yes, sir." "When did you start to believe in God?" "Always knew there was a God," said Reles. "You knew there was a God while you were doing these different killings?" "That is the way my life was mapped out," said Reles. "That was my profession." "Did you believe in God while you were killing Jake the Painter?" "I knew there was a God."

Vincent, without patronym, Collateral (2004), directed by Michael Mann; Excerpt from Rich Cohen's Tough Jews, first published 1998.