Patrick McGilligan - Funny Man: Mel Brooks

What made Melvin, the youngest of the Kaminsky kids, so darn funny? Later people saidhe himself saidit was Brooklyn, the Depression, being Jewish and growing up in the shadow of Hitler. But there was also something about birth order and the family genes that contributed to the strange amalgam, the marvelous pastiche that is me.

Before there was Mel Brooks there were the Kaminskys. The Kaminsky family formed their own little world in Brooklyn, the mother and four brothers living in humble circumstances, the brothers sharing the same bed and crawling over one another like a litter of adorable puppies in a cardboard box, as Brooks often said in interviews.

The oldest, Irving, was almost ten when his youngest brother was born. Intelligent and wholesome, Irving acted more like a father than an older brother when Melvin was growing up. He was the only Kaminsky brother to get his college diploma.

Leonard was older than baby Melvin by seven years. Unassuming Lenny was interested in machines and science. As time would tell, he had the stuff of a war hero.

Bernard, only four years older, was closest in age and perhaps also in jaunty-jolly spirit. He was also the best athlete among the brothers. In his youth Bernard was a great softball pitcher (in Brookss words) and a star of Brooklyn bowling leagues.

His older brothers held regular jobs and helped out with household expenses long before Melvin finished high school. Each played a different role inside the family and in life, but birth orderbeing the youngestbenefited Melvin, just as the B for Brooks alphabetically advantaged the sequence of his later writing credits. Melvin was still in diapers when his father passed away; his older brothers mentored and shielded him.

Being the youngest, most pampered brother with the least responsibility in the family, Melvin found that his role from infancy was to make people laugh. His family tossed baby Melbn (as his mother called him in her fractured English) into the air, he made funny sounds, and they all cracked up. Everyone indulged the last born, Brooks recalled in many interviews, so much so my feet never touched the floor until I was two.

Making people laughforging a career out of laughterbecame his lifelong quest. In time millions of people would find the youngest Kaminsky hilarious, whether they experienced his comedy on television or in stage plays, recordings, advertisements, or motion pictures. Eventually hed make several hundred times as much money from his comedy as all his brothers combinedor, for that matter, most of his famous show business friends.

The mother of the four boys had to be a miracle woman, and Kitty Kaminsky was: a little Jewish rhino, in Brookss words, and as good-humored as she was hard-charging. Shorter than her boys, which was really shortso short she could walk under a coffee table with a high hat on, Brooks liked to sayKitty worked like a slave day and night, stretching the dollars and pushing her boys through school, dividing the love and matzah ball soup equally. She was the heart and soul of the family and the supreme boss.

As a boy Irwin Alan Kniberg, who later changed his name to Alan King when he, too, grew up to become a comedian, lived in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood, at the same time as the Kaminskys. He remembered the formidable sight of the family as they arrived as one to pick up the youngest of the bunch after the school bell, the three older boys surrounding Kitty in a phalanx as the Kaminskys swept across the playground and swooped down on little Melvin. They were a tight-knit, fierce, single-minded unit.

Before Brooklyn there was Manhattan, where the Kaminsky clan, the paternal side of the family, turned up on Henry Street in the 1900 census amid the tidal wave of European and Russian Jews flooding into the Lower East Side of New York City. Many immigrant Jews came to the United States to escape religious pogroms in their native lands, while others were seeking economic opportunity. Persecution and opportunity were the yin and yang of Jewish identity, and they were fused in the bloodline of the Kaminskys.

Most Henry Street denizens were Russian Jews. Their number included thirty-two-year-old Abraham Kaminsky and his wife, Bertha, who arrived in America in about 1896, with their eldest child, Martha, and her brother Maximilian James, called Max. Max was born on January 8, 1893; some records say in Grodno, an ancient city near the onetime western border of Poland and Lithuania; others say in Danzig, then a region encompassing the city now known as Gdansk. Grodno was part of the Russian Empire before remapping, and Gdansk was a Baltic Sea industrial port within imperial Germany.

In Russia, Abraham Kaminsky had been a traveling merchant who specialized in sewing and knitting supplies. He had learned to read and write in English by the time of the 1900 census, although his wife relied upon Yiddish for most of her long life. Kaminsky also knew enough Norwegian to strike deals with the Norse captains who arrived in New York with their ship holds filled with herringthe coveted silver of the sea. Selling herring to Eastern European Jews on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century was akin to selling white rice to Chinese. The Kaminsky herring business boomed with, at its height, a storefront on Henry Street, a warehouse close by on Essex, and reportedly a hundred neighborhood pushcarts. Eight Kaminsky children were born in New York following Martha and Max: ten siblings in all.

The Kaminskys were as good-hearted as they were prosperous. Even with twelve members in his own household, Abraham, whom everyone called Shloimy, made room for relatives arriving from Russia. He donated generously to Jewish charities. Perhaps that was how the Kaminskys became acquainted with the Brookmans, who came to the United States in about 1899, initially living on Norfolk Street, a few blocks north of the herring dealer.

Their surname, first reported as Brockman in the 1905 New York census, became Bruckman a few years later. The spelling changes might be ascribed to the familys imperfect English, or perhaps, later, a desire to shed the name of the patriarch, Isaac Bruckman, a tailor from Kiev who arrived in 1899 with his wife, Minnie, and three children, including the last to be born in Kiev, two-year-old Kate or Katie, called Kitty. Three more Brookman children followed. But the Brookman side of the familythe Brooks in Mel Brooksexperienced setbacks and did not flourish like the Kaminskys.

Isaac absconded from his wife and six children in early 1906, according to documents, and was never seen nor heard from again. Minnie did not matriculate beyond primary school and only ever spoke Yiddish; she did not boast a profession. Throughout the ordeal of her abandonment the mother of six kept her two youngest children, four-year-old Dora and one-year-old Sadie, at home. Kitty and one or more of her siblings were sent uptown to the main building of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York on Amsterdam Avenue between 136th and 138th Streets. The Hebrew Benevolent Society paid Minnies rent starting in 1906, and immigrant neighbors pitched in to help out the family.

The original surname disappeared from records for five or ten years, reemerging as Brookman by World War I. The five Brookman sisters and their brother were devoted to one another as a result of this early family ruptureespecially the sisters, who were close to their mother and keenly felt Minnies hardships and humiliation. The weeks if not months that Kitty spent as a young girl in Jewish charity homes fortified her survival skills in preparation for lifes later tribulations and made her a tenacious mother.