Baby Name: Tom

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin had a total of four children: daughter Zamira and son Krov with his first wife, Nola Nicholas, and sons Gerard and Jeremy with his second wife, British ballerina Diana Gould.

His eldest son, Krov, was born in Melbourne in the summer of 1940. (Yehudi and his sister, pianist Hephzibah Menuhin, were on a concert tour of Australia at the time.)

Where did Krov’s unusual first name come from? Here’s Yehudi’s explanation:

We called our son Krov Nicholas — Nicholas after Nola’s family, of course, and Krov for reasons of my own. Like my mother, I avoided the Toms, Dicks and Harrys of generational conservatism in favour of something more exotically individual, and having wished ‘Zamira’ on Zamira, only later discovered from my father that the word meant ‘songbird’ in Hebrew. As Za mir also signified ‘for peace’ in Russian, our daughter’s name was doubly satisfactory. Our son’s name demanded no less ingenuity. I wanted it to be short and to have an r in it. I respected the letter r, or rather its sound, thinking it suggested bravery, courage, power, aggressiveness, strength — all of which words, it will be noted, are endowed with an r — and found our family’s names somewhat flabby in its absence. My mother, Marutha, had the only r-blessed name among the Menuhins until Zamira’s naming, and Nola’s family was equally underprivileged. No doubt my early struggle to master the English r, repeated some years later with the French and German ones, enhanced its value in my ears. Anyway, both my specifications were met in the made-up name Krov, which had a third attraction in its Russian provenance: with a hard ending it means ‘blood’ and with a soft one — approximately ‘Krovyeh’ — it means ‘roof’ or ‘shelter’. Saddled with this piece of fancy, the poor child must often have wished on his progress through youth that he had less to explain away, but in the extraordinary manner in which people and their names coalesce, Krov’s name, for all the forethought that went into it, has come to mean Krov.

According to one of Yehudi’s nephews, the name — which is similar to krav, the Hebrew word for “battle” — was also a nod to the Battle of Britain.

Additionally, it’s possible that Yehudi’s coinage of “Krov” was influenced by Kronrod — the name of Hephzibah’s first child, born earlier the same year.

Sources:

• Rolfe, Menuhin Lionel. The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey. San Francisco: Panjandrum/Aris, 1978.
• Menuhin, Yehudi. Unfinished Journey: Twenty Years Later. New York: Fromm International, 1999.
• Kozinn, Allan. “Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Violinist, Conductor and Supporter of Charities, Is Dead at 82.” New York Times 13 Mar. 1999.

Image: Clipping from the Montgomery Advertiser (18 Nov. 1927)