Steven Spielberg — director with roots in the Russian Empire
Steven Spielberg was born in Cincinnati in December 1946, the eldest of four children of Arnold Spielberg, an electrical engineer who worked on early computer development, and Leah Posner, a concert pianist who later ran a kosher dairy restaurant. The family moved to New Jersey in 1952 and to Phoenix in 1957.
His paternal grandparents were Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire: Shmuel Spielberg from Kamianets-Podilskyi in Podolia, and Rebecca Chechik from Sudylkiv in Volhynia. They left in the early twentieth century and settled in Cincinnati. His grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors in the family home, and Spielberg has described sitting with one of them as a small child while the man taught him numbers using the tattoo on his own forearm, turning his wrist so that a nine became a six. Arnold Spielberg lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Shoah.
He made the short film Amblin' in 1968, which got him a seven-year contract at Universal, and directed Duel for television in 1971. Jaws in 1975 invented the summer blockbuster and made him, at twenty-eight, the most commercially significant director alive. Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. and Jurassic Park followed. He remains the highest-grossing director in history.
In 1993 he released Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year. Schindler's List brought his first Academy Awards, for Best Director and Best Picture, and he refused a salary for it. With the profits he founded what became the USC Shoah Foundation in 1994, which has recorded and archived more than fifty thousand video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses in over sixty countries - an undertaking on a scale no institution had previously attempted.
Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Lincoln and The Fabelmans continued the serious line alongside the popular one. He co-founded DreamWorks in 1994 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
"Paternal grandparents emigrated from Podolia and Volhynia to Cincinnati"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kamianets-Podilskyi / Sudylkiv
His grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors in the family home. He founded the USC Shoah Foundation in 1994 with the profits from Schindler's List; it has archived more than fifty thousand survivor and witness testimonies.
Paternal grandparents Shmuel Spielberg, of Kamianets-Podilskyi in Podolia, and Rebecca Chechik, of Sudylkiv in Volhynia, emigrated from the Russian Empire to Cincinnati in the early twentieth century. Arnold Spielberg lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Holocaust.
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Kamianets-Podilskyi / Sudylkiv. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.