Sid Caesar — comedian with roots in the Russian Empire
Sid Caesar was an American comedian and actor whose Your Show of Shows (NBC, 1950-1954) was the most acclaimed television comedy programme of its era. His writing staff — including Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, and Larry Gelbart — became the most influential comedy writers in American history.
Tracing the roots — USA
Born in Yonkers, New York in 1922 to Max Caesar and Ida Raphael, both children of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia (Russian Empire), Caesar grew up in the immigrant Jewish world of New York. The extraordinary concentration of Russian-Jewish immigrant talent in his writers' room — Brooks, Reiner, Simon, Allen — was no coincidence: it was an entire generation's worth of immigrant intelligence finding its commercial expression.
A career defined by ambition
"The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man."