Bob Dylan Family History

Jewish Roots – Bob’s Father’s Side

Bob’s father side in Minnesota ran:

• Zigman Zimmerman from Ukraine (1875-1936), who had come to Duluth, Minnesota in 1907
• and Abe Zimmerman (1911- 1968), home here was Duluth and later Hibbing, Minnesota.

Bob’s Grandfather.  Zigman Zimmerman grew up in Odessa, Ukraine at a time when anti-Semitic feeling was rising in the Russian Empire.  This hysteria reached a peak in Odessa in late 1905.  Fifty thousand Czarists marched through the streets, screaming “Down with the Jews,” and shot, stabbed, and strangled a thousand to death.

In the wake of this massacre Zigman fled the country, telling his wife and children that he would send for them when he had found a place to settle.  He caught a ship to the United States in 1907 and made his way to Duluth, Minnesota, a port on the Great Lakes.  This was a place where other Jews from Odessa had sought refuge so that there was already something of a Jewish community there.

Zigman started out as a street peddler, mending shoes.  When he was settled, he called for his Russian wife and their three children back in Odessa.  By 1910 they had arrived.  They squeezed into a small apartment on 221 West 1st Street.  Their next son and Bob’s father Abe was born there in 1911.

By 1917 Zigman, now styling himself as Zigmond H. Zimmerman, was a ‘solicitor’ working for the Prudential Life Insurance Company.  That job did not last long and he was later a dry goods salesman and a shoe salesman.

He died  in July 1936 from a heart attack on the street during a heatwave.

Bob’s Father.  Abe had the following to say about his growing up in Duluth.

“I was born in Duluth in 1911 and went to school there.  In those days you were just required to pass, which everybody did.  We were all from immigrant parents and everybody worked when they were seven years old.  You sold papers or shone shoes because that was the thing that was done and you didn’t know of anyone who wasn’t doing anything like this.”

Abe first met his wife-to-be Beatty at a New Year’s Eve party in Duluth at the end of 1931.  He was twenty at the time.  Someone who was there said that Abe was a quiet almost withdrawn young man and that Beatty was vivacity itself.  But their differences were complementary.

They married in Duluth in 1934 after a courtship which had been somewhat slowed by snow.  The two towns of Duluth and Hibbing were seventy-five miles apart.  Given the era’s modes of conveyance, a Duluthian to be dating a girl from Hibbing definitely counted as a long-distance relationship.

Duluth was to be their home and Abe had secured a steady job with Standard Oil, first as a messenger and then as a clerk.

However, in 1946 Abe was struck with polio.  He stayed home for six months and lost his job.  Without work, short of money, and needing relatives to help them, Abe and Beatty moved to Hibbing where Beatty’s family lived and where two of Abe’s brothers Maurice and Paul had already started up an appliance store.

Like his father Abe dropped dead from a heart attack, this time in Hibbing, in the summer of 1968.  He was fifty-six years old.

Jewish Roots – Bob’s Mother’s Side

They were Lithuanian Jews.  There are two families here.

The Two Families.  The first were the Solemovitz/Stones:

• Sam Solemovitz the immigrant (1855-1928), who had come to America in 1895, settling in Superior, Wisconsin
• and Benjamin Solemovitz (1883-1945), his son who had Americanized himself as Ben Stone and moved to Hibbing, Minnesota.

And then there were the Edelsteins:

• Benjamin (B.H.) Edelstein the immigrant (1869-1961), who had come to America around 1900, initially to Superior, Wisconsin and then moving with his family to Hibbing, Minnesota.
• and Florence Edelstein (1892-1961), his daughter who married Ben Stone in Hibbing, Minnesota.

On the Solemovitz side there was early tragedy in Superior, Wisconsin.  In 1906 Sam’s oldest child Ida was shot dead by her lover, a Scotsman, who later killed himself.  Religion (the Christian and Jewish differences) may have been a factor here.  And Sam’s wife Boska died just a year later.

Sam remarried and lived out his life in Superior, Wisconsin.  But his three surviving children moved onto Hibbing, Minnesota.

Meanwhile entrepreneurship flourished on the Edelstein side of the family.  B.H. Edelstein had first come to Superior, Wisconsin.  There he had started an upmarket clothing store for children.

B.H. then moved to Minnesota and set himself up in Hibbing, a small mining town on Minnesota’s Iron Range, around the year 1905.  He opened a furniture store and ran the local picture theater. which he named after his wife Lybba, for nigh on fifty years.

Later in Hibbing.  Ben Stone married Florence Edelstein there in 1911.  They ran a clothing store selling to the families of miners, most of whom were also immigrants.  It was their daughter Beatty, born in 1915, who married Abe Zimmerman in 1934.

The Stones, Edelsteins and Zimmermans all came together in Hibbing in 1947 after Abe and Beatty had moved there from Duluth.  Hibbing’s population by that time had expanded to 18,000 due to the wartime demand for iron ore.

Yet Hibbing remained a quintessential small town.  American flags hung from every building on Independence Day.  Virtually everybody knew one another and probably knew their parents too.  And it had a European flavor.  Woodsmen and miners had come to this part of northern Minnesota from all over Europe, in particular from eastern Europe and from Scandinavia.

In this environment the Zimmerman home life was very stable.  Abe and his brothers had their store to run.  Beatty worked part-time at Feldman’s department store.   And they were among the first in town in 1952 to own a TV set.

Bob Dylan’s Family Tree

• Russia and America

• Benjamin Solemovitz aka Ben Stone came to America in 1895 and m. Florence Edelstein in Minnesota in 1911.  They made their home in Hibbing, Minnesota.
• – Vernon Stone (1912-1997) m. Wilma Cox and Winifred Sorensen
• – Beatrice (Beatty) Stone (1915-2000) m. Abram Zimmerman (1911-1968)
• – Lewis Stone (1918-2005), married and ran a clothing shop
• – Irene Stone (1923 -2019) m. Henry Goldfine

• Abram (Abe) Zimmerman m. Beatrice (Beatty) Stone in Duluth, Minnesota in 1934 and moved tp Hibbing in 1947
• – Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan (b. 1941)
• – David Zimmerman (b. 1946)

• Bob Dylan m. Sara Lownds nee Nozmisky (b. 1939) in 1965, divorced in 1977;  rem. Carolyn Dennis (b. 1954) in 1986, divorced in 1992
• – Maria Lownds Dylan (b. 1961), adopted from Sara’s prior marriage
• – Jesse Byron Dylan (b. 1966) m. Susan Traylor, film director, with Sara
• – Anna Lea Dylan (b. 1967), with Sara
• – Samuel Dylan (b. 1968), with Sara
• – Jakob Luke Dylan (b. 1969) m. Paige, singer-songwriter. with Sara
• – Desiree Dennis-Dylan (b. 1986), with Carolyn