Joe Dassin — singer with roots in the Russian Empire
His grandfather Samuel Dassin was a barber who left Odesa for the United States with his wife Berthe and settled eventually in Connecticut, where they raised eight children.
The family's account of the surname is that Samuel arrived without English, could not make the immigration officer understand his name, answered a question about where he had come from, and was written down as Dassin - from Odessa. Joe Dassin told the story himself. It has been doubted, on the reasonable ground that other immigrants from the Russian Empire already bore the name, and no document has settled it either way. It is worth recording as what the family said rather than as fact.
The paternal line traces to Odesa and, on other branches, to Kamianets-Podilskyi and Sataniv in Podolia - all inside the Russian Empire - and to Buchach in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. His maternal grandfather was an Austrian Jew who reached New York at eleven.
His father was Jules Dassin, born in Middletown in 1911, who acted from 1934 to 1939 with the ARTEF Players in New York - a left-wing Yiddish theatre company whose repertoire was largely Sholem Aleichem - before turning to directing, and joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, leaving it in 1939. His mother was Beatrice Launer, a New York violinist trained at Juilliard.
Joe Dassin was born in New York in November 1938 and spent his early childhood between New York and Los Angeles. In 1950 his father was placed on the Hollywood blacklist. FBI agents questioned the children about him. The family left the United States and did not go back.
What followed was a childhood of relocation: eleven schools between the ages of ten and fifteen, following his mother's concerts and his father's productions, then a Swiss boarding school for stability, a baccalaureate at Grenoble and a degree in ethnology at the University of Michigan. His father meanwhile made Rififi in France, took the directing prize at Cannes in 1955, and rebuilt a career in exile that he could not have had at home.
The son became one of the defining French popular singers of the 1970s - Les Champs-Elysees, L'Ete indien, Et si tu n'existais pas - selling in the tens of millions across Europe and remaining, in the Russian-speaking world, among the best-known Western performers of the century. He died of a heart attack at Papeete in Tahiti in August 1980, aged forty-one.
An American born in New York, made French by an American blacklist, singing in French about Paris, with a surname that may be the name of a city on the Black Sea.
"Grandparents emigrated from Odesa; the family left the United States in 1950"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odesa (Ukraine)
The family held that the surname was created at immigration from the answer 'from Odessa'. Joe Dassin told the story himself; it has been doubted because other emigrants from the Empire already bore the name, and no document settles it. His father Jules Dassin was blacklisted in Hollywood in 1950, which took the family to Europe permanently.
Grandson of Samuel Dassin, a barber who emigrated from Odesa with his wife Berthe. Other branches of the paternal line trace to Kamianets-Podilskyi and Sataniv in Podolia, inside the Russian Empire, and to Buchach in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. His maternal grandfather was an Austrian Jew who reached New York at eleven.
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Odesa (Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.