Romain Gary
French writer and diplomat (1914–1980)
Romain Gary (born Roman Leibovich Kacew; 21 May [O.S. 8 May] 1914 – 2 December 1980), also known by the pen name Émile Ajar, was a Lithuanian-born French novelist, diplomat, film director, and military aviator. He is the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt twice (once under a pen name). He is considered a major writer of French literature of the second half of the 20th century.
Early life
Gary was born Roman Leibovich Kacew (Yiddish: רומן קצב, romanized: Roman Katsev Russian: Рома́н Ле́йбович Ка́цев, romanized: Roman Leibovich Katsev) in Vilnius (at that time in the Russian Empire). In his books and interviews, he presented many different versions of his parents' origins, ancestry, occupation and his own childhood. His mother, Mina Owczyńska (1879–1941), was a Polish-Jewish actress from Švenčionys (Svintsyán, Święciany) and his father was a businessman named Arje-Lejb Kacew (1883–1942) from Trakai (Troki), also a Lithuanian Jew. The couple divorced in 1925 and Arieh-Leib remarried. Gary later claimed that his actual biological father was the celebrated actor and film star Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom his actress mother had worked and to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Mosjoukine appears in his memoir Promise at Dawn.
Deported to central Russia in 1915, they stayed in Moscow until 1920.
“Romain Gary” enters the record as french writer and diplomat (1914–1980). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Romain, Gary and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Romain Gary” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Romain, Gary and French provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q157322. VIAF identifies the subject as 30780842. The Library of Congress control number is n50016999. 6 of 8 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1914, 1980, 1879 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Romain Gary” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.