U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was “glad to be back in Kyiv” as he came to Ukraine on May 5 with an official visit. Blinken has visited Ukraine as a top government official numerous times under President Barack Obama.
Yet Blinken’s connection to Kyiv goes deeper than official visits.
Blinken’s great-grandfather, Meir Blinken, emigrated from Kyiv in 1904. He was accompanied by his wife Hanna and sons Solomon and Maurice Henry, a prominent backer of Israel’s independence and grandfather of the current U.S. secretary of state.
According to documents found by Voice of America news outlet in Ukrainian archives, Blinken’s family was initially from Pereiaslav, a city of 27,000 people located 90 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.
In the early 20th century, Blinken’s family, then spelled Blinkin, appeared in the records of Kyiv’s residents. Back then, Kyiv was the seventh-largest town in the Russian Empire, home to nearly 250,000 people.
The trip to the U.S. played out well for the family: Starting off in the U.S. with just $10, Meir Blinken’s family went to produce many renowned intellectuals.
Meir Blinken became an acclaimed Yiddish writer, dubbed by one Jewish life magazine “the Kurt Cobain of Yiddish lit.” In 1908, he published a book called “Weiber,” one of the earliest Yiddish books to explicitly engage with women’s sexuality.
Maurice H. Blinken became a prominent scholar and one of the early supporters of an independent Jewish state.
After World War II, Maurice Blinken founded the American Palestine Institute which initiated and financed a report by several economists called “Palestine: Problem and Promise,” which argued that an independent Jewish state was economically viable.
The U.S. eventually supported the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine in 1948.
