Larry King

Larry King — tv host with roots in the Russian Empire

Larry King was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn on 19 November 1933, one of two sons of Jennie Zeiger, née Gitlitz, a garment worker, and Aaron Zeiger, a restaurant owner. His parents were Orthodox Jews who had emigrated to the United States from Belarus, in the 1920s according to Wikipedia, though other accounts say the 1930s.

His mother was born in Minsk, in the Russian Empire; one version gives Vilnius. Current sources give his father's birthplace as Pinsk, also in the Russian Empire, now in Belarus; an earlier version said Kolomyia, in Austrian Galicia, and his Jewish Chronicle obituary says Aaron came from Austria. In Brooklyn his father ran a bar and grill and, in the Second World War, went to work in a defence plant.

His father died of a heart attack when Larry was nine or ten, in 1942 or 1944 by different accounts, and the family relied for a time on welfare while his mother worked as a seamstress. He attended Lafayette High School and did not go on to college. In 1957 he found a job at WMBM, a small radio station in Miami Beach; minutes before his first broadcast the station manager told him that Zeiger was too hard to remember (his Jewish Chronicle obituary says he was told it sounded too German and too Jewish), and he took the name King from a newspaper advertisement for King's Wholesale Liquor. He changed his name legally about two years later.

After years as an interviewer on radio and local television in the Miami area, he became nationally known in 1978 as host of The Larry King Show, an all-night call-in programme on the Mutual Broadcasting System. From 1985 to 2010 he hosted Larry King Live, CNN's nightly interview programme, for twenty-five years, and from 2012 to 2020 Larry King Now, distributed by Hulu, Ora TV and RT America. Over his career he conducted more than 50,000 interviews, and his awards included two Peabodys, an Emmy and ten CableACE Awards. He set up the Larry King Cardiac Foundation.

He died on 23 January 2021, aged eighty-seven.

Tracing the roots — Minsk, Minsk Governorate (mother); Pinsk or Kolomyia (father, disputed) (now Belarus / Ukraine)

Born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in Brooklyn in 1933 to Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Belarus. His mother, Jennie Gitlitz, was born in Minsk in the Russian Empire; his father, Aaron Zeiger, is given in current sources as born in Pinsk, also in the Empire, though some accounts say he came from Austria.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Minsk, Minsk Governorate (mother); Pinsk or Kolomyia (father, disputed) (now Belarus / Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition