DULUTH — "My grandmother's voice possessed a haunting accent, face always set in a half-despairing expression," Bob Dylan wrote in his 2004 memoir. "Life for her hadn't been easy. She'd come to America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water."

Zigman and Anna Zimmerman arrived in Duluth at the beginning of the last century. The Zenith City was the end of a long journey for the Jewish couple and their children, who arrived after fleeing antisemitic persecution in what was then the Russian Empire and in what is today Ukraine. "They were refugees, just like people today," cantor and historian Daniel Singer said. "It's history repeating itself."

In their new home country, the Zimmermans would make history by way of their grandson, Bobby Zimmerman, who would be born in Duluth, grow up in Hibbing, and then move to Minneapolis and adopt his iconic stage name before heading east to New York and stardom.

As the world's eyes turn to Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion , which is sparking a new refugee crisis, the journey of Bob Dylan's grandparents takes on a poignant resonance. The Zimmermans, like Dylan's maternal grandparents, Ben and Florence Stone, were among over 2 million Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who made their way to the United States in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. By the 1920s, about 20,000 Eastern European Jews would settle in Minnesota, and thousands of those came all the way to the Northland.