The following extract from Leonard Covello's autobiography, The Heart is the Teacher, describes how the author's Italian family reacted to the Americanizing of his name by one of his teachers.

One day I came home from the Soup School with a report card for my father to sign. . . . With a weary expression my father glanced over the marks on the report card and was about to sign it. However, he paused with the pen in his hand.

"What is this?" he said. "Leonard Covello! What happened to the i in Coviello?"

My mother paused in her mending. Vito and I just looked at each other.

"Well?" my father insisted. . . . "From Leonardo to Leonard I can follow," he said, "a perfectly natural process. In America anything can happen and does happen. But you don't change a family name. A...