Suchet's paternal grandfather, Lithuanian Jew Isidor Shokhet ("shochet" means "kosher butcher" in Yiddish; derived from Hebrew), lived in Kretinga, a Lithuanian city in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (until 1791 in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; now in Lithuania). After escaping persecution to relocate away to Memel in the German Empire, Isidor changed his surname to the still Yiddish, but Germanized with a Slavic twist, Suchedowitz, where "Suched+o+witz" resembles the Polish name (Slavic) construction structure of ["root"]+"wicz" with "o" in between when the last letter of the root is "d", "t", "h", "n", etc., e.g. Janowicz="Jan"+"o"+"wicz", made German/Yiddish-like by replacing "cz" with "tz", e.g. Janowitz; also "suche" means "dry" in Polish), and then to Suchet after moving to Cape Town, South Africa.