Yarema

Yarema is the Ukrainian form of the biblical Jeremiah, and it reached Polish speakers through the Slavic east. The Hebrew source behind it, Yirmeyahu, has long been read as "God will exalt," which in Polish becomes bóg podnosi. Yarema kept that meaning while losing the sound of its older origin.

In Poland the name is best known in its variant, Jarema. Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, the seventeenth-century magnate of the eastern borderlands, was called Jarema by his soldiers and by the chroniclers who wrote him down, and that short, hard nickname clung to him more firmly than his baptismal name. Through him the form came to sound almost like a Polish word for a fierce commander.

A boy named Yarema today sits between two languages. On a school register the spelling can lean Ukrainian, while the imieniny still tracks the day of Jeremiasz. Two spellings, one root. The name means bóg podnosi, God will exalt.