Barry Manilow — singer with roots in the Russian Empire
Barry Manilow was born Barry Alan Pincus in Brooklyn, New York, on 17 June 1943, the son of Edna Manilow and Harold Kelliher, a truck driver of Irish descent. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his mother's parents.
His maternal grandparents, Joseph and Esther Manilow, were Jewish immigrants from Russia; published sources do not record the town they came from or when they arrived. His father's side was Irish-American, with one Jewish grandfather, and Manilow has said that the name Pincus was taken from a Jewish uncle in his father's family at his mother's insistence. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and he was raised by his mother and grandparents in a small apartment in Williamsburg. His grandfather once took him as a toddler to a Manhattan booth that recorded customers' voices, to sing Happy Birthday to a cousin; Manilow later played the recording in his concerts. A few weeks before his bar mitzvah his surname was legally changed to Manilow.
He graduated from Eastern District High School in 1961, studied briefly at the City College of New York, then at the New York College of Music and the Juilliard School, working at CBS to pay his way. In 1964 he wrote the score for the off-Broadway musical The Drunkard, which ran for eight years, and through the 1960s he wrote and sang advertising jingles, among them those for State Farm and Band-Aid. In 1971 Bette Midler took him on as her pianist, and he co-produced her first album, The Divine Miss M (1972).
His own recording of Mandy reached number one in January 1975 and began a run of hits that included Could It Be Magic, I Write the Songs, Can't Smile Without You and Copacabana (At the Copa), for which he won a Grammy. In 1977 he received a special Tony Award for his Broadway concerts and an Emmy for his first television special. He has had thirteen number-one hits on the Billboard adult contemporary chart and has sold more than 85 million records. In 2006 The Greatest Songs of the Fifties became his first album in twenty-nine years to reach number one.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002. With the lyricist Bruce Sussman he wrote Harmony, a musical about the Comedian Harmonists, a German vocal group of 1928 to 1934, which reached Broadway in late 2023.
"His maternal grandparents, Joseph and Esther Manilow, emigrated from Russia to the United States; he was raised by them and his mother in Williamsburg, Brooklyn."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Russian Empire (maternal grandparents Joseph and Esther Manilow; town not documented)
His maternal grandparents, Joseph and Esther Manilow, were Jewish immigrants from Russia who helped raise him in Brooklyn; he took their surname shortly before his bar mitzvah. The town they came from is not documented.
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Russian Empire (maternal grandparents Joseph and Esther Manilow; town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.