Bob Dylan — singer with roots in the Russian Empire
Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in May 1941, and raised in Hibbing, an iron-mining town on the Mesabi Range. His paternal grandparents, Zigman Zimmerman and Anna Kirghiz, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire to the United States after the pogroms of 1905; Anna's own family had come to Odessa from the Kagizman district of Kars, in what is now north-eastern Turkey. His maternal grandparents, Ben and Florence Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in 1902. All four grandparents, in other words, left the Empire inside a decade, for the reasons that emptied a large part of its Jewish population in those years.
He was raised with that history as ordinary family knowledge rather than as anything ceremonial. He took the name Dylan in 1961 and changed it legally in August 1962, in the St Louis County court at Hibbing, with his father Abraham Zimmerman standing as witness - a detail that says more about the family than the name change does.
The body of work runs from the early topical songs through the three records of 1965 and 1966 that severed popular song from its own conventions - Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde - to Blood on the Tracks, the gospel albums, Time Out of Mind and the late standards records. He has toured more or less continuously since 1988.
In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition, the first songwriter to receive it. He also holds ten Grammy awards, an Academy Award for Things Have Changed in 2001, a Pulitzer special citation in 2008, the Kennedy Center Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
"Paternal grandparents left Odessa after the 1905 pogroms; maternal grandparents left Lithuania in 1902"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa (Ukraine)
All four grandparents left the Russian Empire within a decade of each other. He took the name Dylan in 1961 and changed it legally in 1962, with his father Abraham Zimmerman as witness.
Paternal grandparents Zigman Zimmerman and Anna Kirghiz emigrated from Odessa after the 1905 pogroms; Anna's family had reached Odessa from the Kagizman district of Kars. Maternal grandparents Ben and Florence Stone were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in 1902.
.svg?width=900)
Odessa (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.