Inner Muses

As I described before, Yuriko and I chose to pass on both our cultures to our children.  Please see: American Jewpanese Family . When it came to names for our kids, this combination gave us a wonderful, unique opportunity.  Japanese and Hebrew have similar acoustic phonetics for many of their sound patterns.  In other words, their syllables often consist of consonants followed by vowels and the vowels can be the same, simple, pure vowels. The goal we set out for ourselves was to give Kinori and then Rina a single name that works in Japanese, Hebrew and English.  All grandparents and both parents were going to be happy with, and be able to pronounce, their names. Kinori, כינורי and 暉徳 . There were a number of names in the running, but Kinori won out.  It's a modern Hebrew name that's found in Israel.  It basically means "my violin" or "my harp".  A kinor (כינור) is a violin in modern Hebrew and it's the harp that King David played.  The Sea of Galile

When you create a multi-cultural family through the marriage of two people from very different heritages, you get to choose what kind of life to give your children. Do you choose one spouse's culture, or both, or none or something completely different? We choose both and we thought we coined the term Jewpanese (not!). Our kids were very busy. They attended Japanese school on Saturdays and Jewish school on Sundays. They are members of a very small set of people who answer "yes" to both questions: "Are you Japanese?" and "Are you Jewish?". That didn't just happen. It took work and commitment. It took negotiation, deciding what's in and what's out, and choosing to be together over all else. We wouldn't have it any other way and it creates amazing and unique opportunities. I do my best to support Yuriko passing on her ethnic identity to our kids. To be fair, I'm fascinated by all things Japanese, so it was no burden. Yuri

This post was originally published on 12/22/08 to my first blog, Internal Muses. However, I then found the much better name Inner Muses and left my few posts lingering there. So, now NINE years later almost to the day, I'm reposting those initial posts and finally taking this better name. Here it is: At long last, a blog of my own! The blogosphere is *so* crowded that it's difficult to find a name that's not taken. Internal Muses Inner Muses comes after a number of name attempts. It's that wonderful mix of intention and accident I experience every day. I like it. My name is Harley Michael Rosnow. I live in Kirkland, Washington with my wife, Yuriko, and my kids, Kinori and Rina. I grew up in Concord and Walnut Creek, California. I attended the Head-Royce School in Oakland, California for high school and am in the Harvard College Class of 1985. My first job was at Kurzweil Applied Intelligence where I worked on Speech Recognition from 1984 through 1996. I then joined