Leonard Nimoy — actor (spock) with roots in the Russian Empire
Leonard Simon Nimoy was born on 26 March 1931 in the West End of Boston, the younger son of Max Nimoy (1901–1987) and Dora, née Spinner (1904–1987), Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews from Iziaslav, known in Yiddish as Zaslav, a small town in Volhynia, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine.
His parents were born there under the Empire and left separately in the early 1920s, in the first years of Soviet rule. According to the account in his memoir, his father walked across the border into Poland, while his mother and grandmother left hidden under bales of hay in a horse-drawn wagon. They were reunited in Boston, where Max became a partner in a barbershop, later in Mattapan. Leonard grew up with his elder brother, Melvin, speaking Yiddish at home and with his grandparents, and as a young man earned small sums in Yiddish theatre, once appearing with the actor Maurice Schwartz.
He acted from the age of eight, studied drama at Boston College and then at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, and took small parts in films such as Them! (1954). After eighteen months in the US Army Reserve he was discharged as a sergeant in 1956. In 1966 he was cast as Spock, the half-Vulcan science officer of Star Trek, a role that brought him three Emmy nominations. For the Vulcan greeting he adapted a gesture he had seen as a boy in synagogue, the hand position of the kohanim giving the priestly blessing.
After the series ended in 1969 he played the spy Paris in Mission: Impossible, narrated the documentary series In Search Of… and returned to Spock in the Star Trek films from 1979. He directed Star Trek III (1984) and Star Trek IV (1986), then the comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987). He wrote two memoirs, I Am Not Spock (1977) and I Am Spock (1995), published poetry and photography, including the collection Shekhina (2002), and in 2009 and 2013 played an older Spock in the new Star Trek films. Among his stage roles was Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, in an eight-week run in New England that, as he told an interviewer, allowed his parents to see him act for the first time since he had left home.
He died at his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, on 27 February 2015, aged eighty-three.
"His parents, born in Iziaslav in 1901 and 1904, left separately in the early 1920s — his father on foot across the border into Poland, his mother and grandmother hidden in a hay wagon — and were reunited in Boston."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Iziaslav (Zaslav), Volhynia Governorate (now Ukraine) — both parents
Both parents, Max Nimoy (born 1901) and Dora Spinner (born 1904), were Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews from Iziaslav (Zaslav) in Volhynia, then in the Russian Empire; they left separately in the early 1920s and settled in Boston, where his father kept a barbershop.
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Iziaslav (Zaslav), Volhynia Governorate (now Ukraine) — both parents. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.