Romain Gary — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born Roman Kacew in Vilna, in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire, in May 1914 - a city that would be Polish before he was ten and Lithuanian long after he left it. His mother, Mina Owczynska, was a Litvak actress from the small town of Svencionys; his father, Arieh-Leib Kacew, was a merchant from Trakai whose own father was a well-known Vilna fur trader.
The facts are worth stating plainly because almost nothing else about his early life can be. Gary told a great many versions of his parentage, his childhood and his education, revising them freely across books and interviews for the rest of his life, at one point suggesting that the silent film actor Ivan Mozzhukhin had been his real father. He is one of the few subjects in this archive whose own testimony is the least reliable source available.
His parents separated when he was small. His father remarried and later died with his second family in the Holocaust; his mother died in 1941. She had moved the boy from Vilnius to Warsaw and then, when he was fourteen, to Nice, telling the Warsaw authorities that she could not live on the alimony she was owed. She was convinced her son was a genius and intended France to prove it. That relationship became the subject of his memoir Promise at Dawn.
He held the citizenship of the Russian Empire until 1917, then Poland, then France from 1935. He read law at Aix-en-Provence and Paris, joined the French air force in 1938, and after the fall of France made his way out by light aircraft to Casablanca and by ship to England, flying for the Free French Air Forces until 1945 as a captain with the Lorraine bomber group. He was made a Compagnon de la Liberation.
His first novel appeared in 1945. He spent years in the French diplomatic service, including as consul general in Los Angeles, and wrote steadily in French and English. Les Racines du ciel won the Prix Goncourt in 1956.
The Goncourt can be awarded to an author only once. In 1975 it went to La Vie devant soi, by a writer named Emile Ajar, whom nobody could find; Gary's cousin's son Paul Pavlowitch stood in as the author for a period. Gary had written it. He remains the only person to have won the prize twice, and the deception held until after his death, when he set it out in a posthumous book about the invention and killing-off of Ajar. He had published under several other names as well.
He also wrote the screenplay for The Longest Day and directed a film starring his second wife, the American actress Jean Seberg, whom he married in 1962. She died in 1979. Gary took his own life in Paris in December 1980, leaving a note that said he had finished what he had to say - and that revealed the whole of the Ajar affair.
"Vilnius to Warsaw to Nice by 1928; French citizen from 1935"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Vilnius (Lithuania)
He gave many conflicting accounts of his own origins throughout his life, and his own testimony is the least reliable source on his childhood. His father died with his second family in the Holocaust; his mother, who brought him from Vilnius via Warsaw to Nice, died in 1941.
Born Roman Leibovich Kacew in Vilna, Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire, to the Litvak actress Mina Owczynska of Svencionys and the merchant Arieh-Leib Kacew of Trakai. He held Russian imperial citizenship until 1917, then Polish, then French from 1935.
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Vilnius (Lithuania). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Humour is a means of survival. But don't ask me to take it seriously."