Antony Blinken — sec of state with roots in the Russian Empire
His great-grandfather was born in Pereiaslav in the Poltava Governorate in 1879 - the same small town in which Sholem Aleichem had grown up twenty years earlier.
Meir Blinken, registered as Meyer Yankelevich Blinkin, was the son of Yankel Blinkin and Ruth Kelman. He had a Talmud-Torah education, moved with his parents to Kyiv, and in the late 1890s studied at the Kyiv Commercial College, one of the few higher schools open to Jews under the imperial restrictions, funded jointly by Ukrainian and Jewish businessmen. He trained as a cabinetmaker, a carpenter and a massage therapist.
In 1904 he took his young family to the Lower East Side of New York. It was the year in which roughly 105,000 Jews from the Ukrainian provinces entered the United States, in the wave that followed the pogroms. In America he became a writer. He belonged to the group of Yiddish modernists known as Di Yunge and published some fifty stories and essays between 1904 and his death in 1915, at thirty-six - unsentimental work about poverty, marriage and desire among immigrants, which was not what his readers expected of Yiddish fiction and has kept a scholarly following since.
His grandson Donald Blinken became a financier and, from 1994 to 1998, United States ambassador to Hungary. Antony Blinken was born in New York in 1962. When he was nine his mother remarried and he moved to Paris.
His stepfather was Samuel Pisar, born at Bialystok in 1929, who was sent to Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau as a child, lost his parents and his sister, and was the only survivor of some nine hundred children from his school. He broke from a death march into the Bavarian woods, saw a tank with a white star rather than an iron cross, and was lifted inside by an American soldier. Pisar became an international lawyer in Paris and New York and a co-founder of Yad Vashem France. Blinken has told that story publicly many times; he grew up in a household where it was the family history.
He read at Harvard and Columbia Law School, worked in the State Department and the National Security Council, was principal deputy national security adviser and then deputy secretary of state from 2015 to 2017, and served as the seventy-first United States Secretary of State from January 2021 to January 2025.
The line runs from a Yiddish short-story writer on the Lower East Side, dead at thirty-six, to a great-grandson who held the office of Secretary of State - four generations, and rather less than a century.
"Great-grandfather emigrated from Kyiv to New York in 1904"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Pereiaslav (Ukraine)
His stepfather Samuel Pisar, born at Bialystok in 1929, survived Majdanek, Auschwitz and Dachau as a child and lost his whole immediate family; Blinken grew up with that account as the family history. His father Donald Blinken was United States ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1998.
Great-grandson of the Yiddish writer Meir Blinken (1879-1915), born at Pereiaslav in the Poltava Governorate - the town where Sholem Aleichem grew up - to Yankel Blinkin and Ruth Kelman. Meir was educated in Kyiv at the Kyiv Commercial College and emigrated with his family to New York in 1904, in the wave that followed the pogroms.
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Pereiaslav (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.