Allen Ginsberg — poet (beat gen) with roots in the Russian Empire
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on 3 June 1926, the younger son of Louis Ginsberg, a high-school English teacher and published lyric poet, and Naomi Ginsberg. He grew up with his brother Eugene in nearby Paterson. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his mother.
Naomi was born in 1894 in Nevel, a town in the Vitebsk Governorate, now in the Pskov region of Russia. Her father went to America first, and after the pogroms of 1905 the rest of the family followed. She grew up on the Lower East Side of New York and in Newark, qualified as a teacher, and married Louis Ginsberg, who had been born in Newark. Wikipedia gives her maiden name as Levy; Bill Morgan's biography gives it as Livergant.
Naomi was a member of the Communist Party and took her sons to party meetings; Louis was a socialist. She suffered from serious mental illness, was treated in hospitals for much of her son's childhood and youth, and died at Pilgrim State Hospital in 1956.
Ginsberg graduated from Eastside High School in Paterson in 1943 and went to Columbia University, where he met Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, the circle that became the core of the Beat Generation. In San Francisco in 1955 he read Howl, and its publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights the following year led to an obscenity trial, in which Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.
The long poem Kaddish, begun after his return to America in 1958 and published in 1961, takes its form from the Jewish prayer for the dead and draws on the details of his mother's life, including a letter she wrote to him after reading Howl that reached him after her death.
His collection The Fall of America shared the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974, the year he and the poet Anne Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995. He died in New York on 5 April 1997, aged seventy.
"Mother Naomi, born in Nevel in 1894, emigrated to the United States with her family after the pogroms of 1905; her father had gone ahead. She grew up on the Lower East Side and in Newark."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Nevel, Vitebsk Governorate (now Pskov Oblast, Russia)
His mother, Naomi, was born in Nevel, in the Russian Empire, in 1894 and came to the United States with her family after the pogroms of 1905. His father, the poet Louis Ginsberg, was born in Newark.
Mother Naomi Ginsberg, born 1894 in Nevel (Russia), recorded as Levy (Wikipedia) and as Livergant (Bill Morgan); a teacher. Father Louis Ginsberg, born in Newark, a schoolteacher and lyric poet.
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Nevel, Vitebsk Governorate (now Pskov Oblast, Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.