The Perks and Pitfalls of Being an Oppenheimer

“Maybe people will now pronounce my name correctly.”

That’s been my stock reply over the past few months, as friends and colleagues, as well as strangers I must have met once and given my email to, have sent me endless variations on the question, “What’s it like to be the movie of the summer?”

In case you’ve missed it—in which case you live a web-, TV- and ad-free lifestyle that I envy—the Hollywood hype machine has spent the past six months insinuating Christopher Nolan’s new movie “ Oppenheimer, ” a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, into our collective couch-potato consciousness. The movie was released on July 21 and is already a hit, bringing in $81 million on its opening weekend.

It’s a strange twist of fate for the name that my family has carried for centuries, one we likely picked up in the small town of Oppenheim, on the banks of the Rhine, an hour southwest of Frankfurt, Germany. For most of our history as Oppenheimers, my relatives were presumed to be related to Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, who was the banker for Duke Karl Alexander in Stuttgart. That Oppenheimer was hanged in 1738 after being convicted on various trumped-up charges, and his name was assured a place in history by Joseph Goebbels, who made “Jew Suss” the subject of a 1940 Nazi propaganda movie.

By that time, Oppenheimers were more likely to be asked if they were any relation to Sir Ernest Oppenheimer (1880-1957), chairman of the De Beers diamond consortium in South Africa. (His heirs continue to be a big deal in their hemisphere.) In the U.S., they were often presumed to be related to the Oppenheimers of what’s now OppenheimerFunds, the mutual-fund company.

Alas, my branch of the family comprises neither diamond barons, nor mutual fund purveyors, nor world-class physicists like the subject of the new movie, who was name-checked in Sting’s 1985 song “Russians,” which contains the line that Nolan says first alerted him to the historical figure: “How can I save my little boy / From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”

My folk came to the U.S. in the mid-19th century and made our way in unglamorous industries like manufacturing steel drums and exporting farm equipment (to Cuba, among other places, where some money my grandfather made selling cultivators was sitting in the National Bank of Cuba when Castro claimed it for La Revolución). Whenever I get asked if I am related to the diamond Oppenheimers or the mutual-fund Oppenheimers, I can only answer, “I wish.”

But what all Oppenheimers have, no matter the size of our bank account, is a great name. It has terrific mouth feel. People like saying the whole thing, especially when annoyed to see one of us: “Hello, Oppenheimer.” It also lends itself to an easy, memorable nickname, “Oppy,” which several generations in my lineage have borne. And to many people, especially those encountering it for the first time, it simply sounds funny. Many’s the time I have answered the phone to hear a telemarketer say, “Hello, Mr. Opp…Mr. Oppen…” and then just give up and start giggling, as if the name is too ridiculous to waste any more time on.

I have no beef with those who are completely flummoxed. After all, four syllables is a lot. I reserve my impatience for the people—and there are many of them—who pronounce the name as Open-heimer, which reveals them to be indifferent to the rich histories of bankers, diamonds, mutual funds and atomic energy. In my experience, the people who say Open-heimer can’t be reasoned with. You can correct them, and they’ll repeat it right back at you: “That’s what I said—Open-heimer!”

So my hope is that this, my summer as an eponym, does something more than drive Christopher Nolan’s Oscar hopes and make people squint at me, searching for a resemblance to Cillian Murphy. I dare to imagine that it will help more people get my name right. Mission impossible? Perhaps. “Oppenheimer” is no “Barbie.”

Mark Oppenheimer is director of open learning at American Jewish University and author of a forthcoming biography of Judy Blume.