Noam Chomsky — linguist / philosopher with roots in the Russian Empire
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928 in the East Oak Lane neighbourhood of Philadelphia, the elder son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky. Both his parents were born in the Russian Empire.
His father was born Ze'ev Chomsky in 1896 in Kupil, in the Volhynian Governorate, now in Ukraine, the son of Meyer and Esther Chomsky. He left the Empire to avoid conscription and arrived in Baltimore with his mother and two sisters; his biography gives the date as July 1912, other accounts as 1913. In America he worked in sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before going to university, then became principal of the religious school of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia and joined the faculty of Gratz College in 1924. He became a noted grammarian of Hebrew and from 1955 to 1977 was professor of Hebrew at Dropsie College.
Elsie Simonofsky, born in 1903 in what is now Belarus, came to the United States in 1906 and grew up in New York; she also taught at Mikveh Israel. Yiddish was the first language of both parents, though it was not spoken at home. William and Elsie married in 1927, and their second son, David Eli, born five years after Noam, became a cardiologist.
Noam attended the Oak Lane Country Day School, Central High School and the Hebrew high school at Gratz College, where his father taught. At the University of Pennsylvania he studied under the linguist Zellig Harris, taking his BA in 1949, his MA in 1951 and his doctorate in 1955.
In 1955 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than half a century. Syntactic Structures (1957) set out the generative approach to grammar, and his work on formal grammars produced what is known as the Chomsky hierarchy; he is widely described as a founder of modern linguistics and of cognitive science. He has also written extensively on politics and the media, including Manufacturing Consent (1988) with Edward S. Herman.
In 2017 he took up a post at the University of Arizona. William Chomsky died in July 1977, aged eighty-one; The New York Times remembered him as a Hebrew grammarian.
"Father William Chomsky, born 1896 in Kupil, Volhynian Governorate, reached Baltimore in 1912 or 1913 (sources differ); mother Elsie Simonofsky emigrated from present-day Belarus in 1906."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kupil, Volhynian Governorate (father); Belarus (mother)
His father, William (Ze'ev) Chomsky, was born in 1896 in Kupil, in the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire, and emigrated to the United States in 1912 or 1913 to avoid conscription; his mother, Elsie Simonofsky, came from present-day Belarus in 1906.
Father William (Ze'ev) Chomsky (1896-1977), born in Kupil in the Volhynian Governorate, Hebrew grammarian and teacher at Gratz College; mother Elsie Simonofsky (1903-1972), from present-day Belarus. Both spoke Yiddish as a first language.
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Kupil, Volhynian Governorate (father); Belarus (mother). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.