Jerry Stiller — comedian with roots in the Russian Empire
Jerry Stiller was an American comedian and actor who built a career spanning six decades — from stand-up comedy with his wife Anne Meara, to his beloved role as Frank Costanza in Seinfeld, to Arthur Spooner in The King of Queens. He was the father of actor-director Ben Stiller.
Tracing the roots — Galicia / Russia
Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to William Stiller, who had emigrated from Galicia (then shared between the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary), Jerry grew up in the Jewish immigrant world of New York. Frank Costanza — explosive, aggrieved, magnificently unreasonable — is the comedy of an immigrant family's unprocessed historical trauma turned into cathartic laughter.
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Galicia / Russia. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Serenity now!"