J.D. Salinger's father's family originally came from Sudargas, a small shtetl (Jewish village), which was then located in the Russian Empire near the present day border of Poland and Lithuania. His great-grandfather Hyman Joseph Salinger moved from Sudargas to the town of Taurage when he married the daughter of a prominent family. Hyman's son Simon F. Salinger emigrated to the United States in 1881, marrying Fannie Copland, a Lithuanian immigrant living in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Simon Salinger went to medical school and became a physician. When he died in 1960, he was just shy of his 100th birthday. J.D. Salinger's father Solomon was born in 1887, the second child of five children.
