Good to know that I wasn’t going crazy or just plain wrong.
From lefty left internet source
..author’s father spelled it with an S, believing this letter to be pronounced like Z (as in German), and so it became xxxxxx. This later inspired one of xxxxxx’s short stories...
Same with my dad. He left post war Europe for a new life in America. Folks processing his paper work dropped his given European name and replace it with “John”