Mel Brooks — comedian with roots in the Russian Empire
Mel Brooks was born Melvin James Kaminsky on 28 June 1926, on the kitchen table of a tenement at 515 Powell Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the youngest of four sons of Kate "Kitty" Kaminsky, née Brookman, and Max Kaminsky.
His mother, born in 1896, was a Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Russian Empire. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig, now Gdansk, so the Russian connection runs through his mother alone. Max Kaminsky died of tuberculosis of the kidney at thirty-four, when Melvin was two, and Kate raised the four boys in Williamsburg. She lived until 1989.
In his teens he was confused with the trumpeter Max Kaminsky, and took a new surname from his mother's: Brookman became Brooks. He graduated from Eastern District High School in January 1944 and served in the Army. After the war he wrote for Sid Caesar, and with Carl Reiner developed the 2000 Year Old Man, whose first album, in 1961, sold more than a million copies.
His first film, The Producers (1967), won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. His second went back to Russia. The Twelve Chairs (1970) adapts the 1928 Soviet novel by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, the hunt for a family's jewels sewn into one of twelve dining chairs. Brooks said he had first read it at fifteen. He shot it mostly in Yugoslavia, played the former servant Tikhon himself, and wrote its theme song, "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst", taking the title from the story's Russian setting.
Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein followed in 1974; both stand in the top fifteen of the American Film Institute's list of the hundred greatest American comedies, with The Producers at number eleven. Spaceballs (1987) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) came later. The Broadway musical of The Producers, which opened in 2001, brought him three Tony Awards and completed his EGOT. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, the National Medal of Arts in 2016 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2024.
In 2021, at ninety-four, he published a memoir, All About Me!
"Mother Kate Brookman (1896-1989) emigrated from Kiev, Russian Empire, to New York; father Max Kaminsky's family were German Jews from Danzig."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine)
Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brownsville, Brooklyn, on 28 June 1926. His mother, Kate (née Brookman), was a Jewish immigrant from Kiev in the Russian Empire; his father's family were German Jews from Danzig. His professional surname comes from his mother's maiden name.
Mother Kate 'Kitty' Brookman (1896-1989), a Jewish immigrant from Kiev in the Russian Empire. Father Max Kaminsky (1895-1929), of a German Jewish family from Danzig. Brooks took his professional name from his mother's maiden name.
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Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."