Jack Benny

Jack Benny — comedian with roots in the Russian Empire

Jack Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago on 14 February 1894 and grew up in nearby Waukegan, Illinois. Both his parents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His father, Meyer Kubelsky (1864-1946), had emigrated from Congress Poland, according to Wikipedia; other accounts say simply Poland, and one calls him a Lithuanian Jew. His mother, Naomi Emma Sachs (1869-1917), came from Lithuania. In Waukegan Meyer kept a saloon and later a haberdashery, and the family lived at 518 Clayton Street, where a plaque now marks the house.

His parents hoped he would become a concert violinist, and he began lessons at six. By fourteen he was playing in the school orchestra and in local dance bands, and at seventeen he was playing violin in vaudeville theatres for seven dollars fifty a week. On the same circuit he met the Marx Brothers; their mother, Minnie, wanted him as the act's permanent accompanist, but his parents would not let him go on the road, though it began a long friendship with Zeppo Marx. Under legal pressure over his name he had already become Ben K. Benny. In 1917 he joined the US Navy and, at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, began adding comedy to his violin act; a story that he had been due to sail on the Eastland, which capsized in Chicago in 1915, has no reliable evidence behind it. After the war the bandleader Ben Bernie objected to his name too, and by 1921 he was Jack Benny, with the fiddle mostly a prop.

He developed a stage character who was vain, stingy, insisted that he was thirty-nine and played the violin badly, and took it to radio in 1932. The Jack Benny Program ran on radio until 1955 and on television from 1950 to 1965, and its regular cast and running jokes were a lasting influence on the American situation comedy. He won Emmy Awards in 1957 and 1959. His films include Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942).

In later years he appeared without fee as violin soloist with almost a hundred symphony orchestras in the United States, Canada, Britain and Israel, in benefit concerts that raised money for the orchestras and for causes including Carnegie Hall. He kept working into his eighties. He died at his home in Los Angeles on 26 December 1974, aged eighty, and is interred at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. A statue of him with his violin stands on Genesee Street in Waukegan.

Tracing the roots — Russian Empire (town not documented)

Born Benjamin Kubelsky in Chicago on 14 February 1894 and raised in nearby Waukegan, he was the son of Meyer Kubelsky, who emigrated from Congress Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and Naomi Emma Sachs, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant also from the Russian Empire. Sources differ on the father: Encyclopedia.com calls him a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Russian Empire (town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition