Joan Rivers — comedian with roots in the Russian Empire
Joan Rivers was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn on 8 June 1933, the younger daughter of Meyer C. Molinsky, a doctor, and Beatrice, née Grushman. Both her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants from the Odessa region of the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine.
Her father was born in Nemirov, in the Podolia region, around 1900. The ship's manifest of the Mauretania records that he sailed from Liverpool with his mother and two siblings, having lived in Odessa before their departure, and arrived in New York on 16 September 1910, aged nine; by 1920 his widowed mother was raising the family in Brooklyn. His family had been poor in Russia and remained so in their first years in America; he became a physician. Her mother's family, by contrast, had been wealthy merchants in Odessa, and one account says they lost their fortune in the Revolution.
She grew up in Brooklyn and in Larchmont, in Westchester County, attended Connecticut College for Women and graduated from Barnard College in 1954 with a degree in English literature and anthropology, as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She worked as a fashion coordinator and publicist, appeared in off-Broadway plays, performed in clubs under the name Pepper January, played with Second City in Chicago in 1961-62 and wrote for Candid Camera.
After several unsuccessful attempts, she made her first appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on 17 February 1965, which began her national career. From 1983 to 1986 she was the programme's permanent guest host, and in 1986, with The Late Show on the new Fox network, she became the first woman to host a late-night network talk show. She later hosted The Joan Rivers Show (1989-1994), was nominated for a Tony Award for the play Sally Marr... and Her Escorts (1994), and from 2010 co-hosted Fashion Police on E!, also appearing with her daughter Melissa in Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?. The documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work appeared in 2010.
She died in New York on 4 September 2014, aged eighty-one. Her audiobook Diary of a Mad Diva won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album the following year.
"Her father, Meyer Molinsky, born in Nemirov about 1900, sailed from Liverpool on the Mauretania with his mother and two siblings, having lived in Odessa, and reached New York on 16 September 1910, aged nine."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Nemirov, Podolia Governorate (father); Odessa (mother's family) (now Ukraine)
Born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn in 1933 to Meyer C. Molinsky, a doctor, and Beatrice (née Grushman), both Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father was born about 1900 in Nemirov (Russian Empire, now Nemyriv, Ukraine) and his family left from Odessa in 1910; her mother's family had been wealthy merchants in Odessa.
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Nemirov, Podolia Governorate (father); Odessa (mother's family) (now Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I succeeded by saying what everyone else is thinking."