Emil "Izzy" Sher was a Jewish American sculptor who lived in Berkeley, California

Berkeley, California

Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...

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Sher was born in 1912 or 1913 in Odessa, Russia. His father died when he was 6 and he and his younger sister were placed for a time in an orphanage. After the revolution of 1917, it became difficult to leave the Soviet Union, but Sher’s mother convinced the authorities that the family was not Russian but Polish, and the Shers were allowed to leave in 1926.

Assisted by relatives in the United States the Shers travelled first to Mexico, where they lived for a year and a half.