Early Life
Gary was born in Vilnius under the name Roman Kacew (Yiddish: קצב, Russian: Рома́н Ка́цев). In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his parents' origins, ancestry, occupation and his own childhood. His mother, Mina Owczyńska (1879—?), was a Litvak actress from Švenčionys and his father was a businessman Arieh-Leib Kacew (1883—1942) from Trakai, also a Lithuanian Jew. Arieh Leib abandoned the family in 1925 and remarried. When Gary was fourteen, he and his mother moved to Nice, France. Gary studied law, first in Aix-en-Provence and then in Paris. He learned to pilot an aircraft in the French Air Force in Salon-de-Provence and in Avord Air Base, near Bourges.
Read more about this topic: Romain Gary
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“If, then, we would indeed restore mankind ... let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)