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Q: No. Sorry … I was just kidding.

A: OK. OK. I kind of thought we were doing an interview where you were challenging whether I knew how to pronounce my own name.

Q: No, forgive me. So that’s how you pronounce it. But this isn’t the first time this has come up?

A: Well, actually the earliest I know about it is in my mother and father’s autobiography where my dad wrote a section about when he was in elementary school. His elementary school teacher said that his name was spelled incorrectly and that she was changing it to “Berenstein,” and that she wouldn’t recognize the spelling of his name in her class because there was no such name. So it goes back pretty far, the issue. And when I was a kid growing up, nobody pronounced it correctly. I never even tried to get people to pronounce it correctly. They always said “Berensteen” or “Bernstein” or something. I never thought much about it at the time. I just figured that, you know, people pronounce things incorrectly, and that’s just the way it is. It’s not a new issue, it’s just a common phenomenon that happens to people with oddly spelled names.

Q: So how do you react to the thinking that the name was somehow changed?

A: People believe some really weird things. Of course, the question I come up with is: Well, does this include my grandparents birth certificates and things? Did the name change on them? On my father’s draft records from World War II, did it get changed there too? I mean, what happened here? Does my birth certificate, with the name spelled with an A, magically get changed in some alternate reality? No.