Sophie Tucker — singer with roots in the Russian Empire
She was born Sofia Kalish, called Sonya, to a Jewish family of Tulchyn in the Podolia Governorate - inside the Pale of Settlement, the strip of the Russian Empire where Jews were permitted to live. The year is given as 1884, 1886 or 1887, and the place is disputed too: some accounts have her born at Tulchyn, others say she was born on the road, somewhere between there and the Baltic, while her mother was carrying the children west to join her husband.
Her father had gone ahead. He had deserted from the Imperial Russian army and was travelling under whatever cover he could find. According to the account she gave in her own memoir, he fell in with an Italian on the road who sickened and died, and he took the dead man's papers and name and used them to enter the United States - which is how the family came to be called Abuza, and how, as she put it, American immigration processed an Italian who spoke nothing but Russian and Yiddish.
The family reached Boston in 1887 and lived there some eight years before moving to Hartford, where her parents opened Abuza's Home Restaurant above the Connecticut River. They cooked eastern European food, and the clientele included the Yiddish theatre and vaudeville performers passing through the city. Between waiting tables and washing dishes, the daughter of the house stood in the narrow space by the door and sang for the customers. She entered amateur contests, where audiences called for the fat girl, and she went on.
She took her stage name from Louis Tuck, a beer-cart driver she eloped with at sixteen; the marriage ended quickly, and she left her infant son with her family and went to look for work in show business. Her professional career began in 1906, initially in a blackface routine at a New York music hall, which was standard practice in the vaudeville of the period. She was with the Ziegfeld Follies by 1909.
From there she was famous for sixty years. She built a persona - loud, knowing, unembarrassed about appetite, money or age - that had no real precedent for a woman on the American stage, sang risque material that other performers would not touch, and became one of the most popular entertainers in the country through vaudeville, records, radio, film and finally television. She called herself the Last of the Red Hot Mamas. Her signature song, Some of These Days, gave the title to the memoir she published in 1945.
She died in New York in February 1966. She had never been back.
"Tulchyn to Boston, 1887; Hartford from the mid-1890s"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tulchyn (Ukr)
Her father had deserted the Imperial Russian army and, by her own account, entered the United States on the papers of an Italian traveller who died on the road - which is how the family acquired the surname Abuza.
Born Sofia 'Sonya' Kalish to a Jewish family of Tulchyn, Podolia Governorate, inside the Pale of Settlement. Sources give her birth year as 1884, 1886 or 1887, and differ on whether she was born at Tulchyn or on the road during the family's journey west. They reached Boston in 1887.
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Tulchyn (Ukr). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.