Namesake.(The Talk of the Town)(Felsenfeld Movement)

The Felsenfeld Movement was well under way when Michael Chabon arrived at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, to work on a novel, in February of 2004. By that time, four novelists at the colony had already created fictional characters called Felsenfeld, named after a quirky and charismatic classical composer from Brooklyn who was also in residence. Eventually, there would be a grand total of seven Felsenfelds: three in books that have been published in the United States since 2006, one in an Austrian best-seller, and three in works that are still in progress.

"It just immediately sounded like a name that I already would have been using," Chabon said recently. "It's not only an intrinsically interesting name but it seemed it would fit perfectly with the book I was writing, which was 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.' I was so happy to have the name, because it had the sound of a likely Jewish surname but was not overly familiar.""

A writer named Ellen Slezak had inadvertently started the movement when she arrived at MacDowell a few weeks before Chabon. "I needed a Jewish name, and I didn't have my usual sources to find one--I don't know, looking through a phone book or taking a walk in a Jewish cemetery," she said. "I was sitting there in my little studio that day, and I started saying to myself, 'Felsenfeld, Felsenfeld, Danny--that guy who's always around.' " So came into being the character of Sarah Felsenfeld, a University of Michigan student in the late seventies who works on the grounds crew at the school's athletic complex and "looks great in overalls," according to Slezak's upcoming novel.

The nonfictional Danny Felsenfeld is gregarious, bespectacled, and possessed of the uncanny ability to be present anytime someone was looking for a conversation, making him something of a human water cooler for idling writers. Charmed by him, and by his memorable last name, they began inserting namesakes into their manuscripts. "Danny was a central character for all of us," Lisa Carey, a fellow-MacDowellite, said. (Dr. Felsenfeld, in her novel "Every Visible Thing," is a pipe-smoking high-school principal.) "Whenever someone arrived and we found that that person was ...