About a month ago, I was surprised when a childhood friend wrote and said she’d found me on Facebook. I changed my name 10 years ago and knew there was virtually no trace of “Alina Vilenkin” on the Web. Out of curiosity, I typed “Vilenkin” into Facebook. As expected, my name did not come up (I later learned she found my new name through my college alumni magazine first), but those of 19 other Vilenkins did. The only Vilenkin I’d ever known was my own father. An idea came to me: What if I contacted these other Vilenkins?

Because the funny thing was, after changing my name, I became paradoxically obsessed with rediscovering my roots. I traveled to St. Petersburg to find my mother’s family and returned to Kharkov to take snapshots at the zoo. I even lived in Siberia for five months and resuscitated my long-abandoned Russian.

I sent all 19 Vilenkins the same message — subject line: “Hello from another Vilenkin” — and heard back from several. There were no family connections, but one thing was apparent: being a Vilenkin wasn’t easy. One branch was wiped out by the Nazis in Odessa; others died in the German bombardment of Moscow. Some fled to Samarkand, where it was more possible to live as observant Jews under the Communist regime. Some were orphaned during the revolution. Many left the Soviet Union entirely, to settle in Cana­da, France or Israel.

Just after contacting the Vilenkins, I got another surprising bit of news: I was pregnant. One night my husband and I started discussing names, and I found myself bringing up Sasha, my father’s name. Passing on some little bit of aural history suddenly seemed important. Maybe I wasn’t so unsentimental after all.