📍Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY 11226, USA
1942 – 1959“Barbra Streisand was born in Brooklyn in April 1942. Her father, Emanuel, a teacher and scholar, died suddenly when she was just fifteen months old, and her mother, Diana, a former singer who had dreamed of an operatic career, struggled to support Barbra and her older brother, Sheldon. They lived for a time with Diana's parents in a cramped apartment, and later, after Diana remarried, the family settled in a small apartment on Newkirk Avenue in Flatbush, a busy, mostly Jewish neighbourhood of apartment blocks, delis and synagogues. She has described her childhood as lonely and painful; she longed for her lost father, found little warmth from her stepfather, and felt her mother did not believe in her dreams. But she sang constantly, in the echoing hallway of her building, and at the yeshiva she attended as a small girl she gave her first concert. She escaped into films at the local cinema and imagined a different life. At Erasmus Hall High School, one of Brooklyn's oldest and largest schools, she sang in the choral club alongside a classmate named Neil Diamond, and she graduated in 1959 at sixteen, fourth in her class. That summer she left Brooklyn for Manhattan, determined to become an actress. She began singing in Greenwich Village nightclubs, and in 1962 she made her Broadway debut. Funny Girl, on stage and screen, made her a star, and she became one of the best-selling recording artists of all time. In her 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, she wrote at length about the Brooklyn girl who would not give up.”
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