Harvey Kurtzman spoke little of his parents in interviews, and not much is known of their pre-American lives. David Kurtzman and Edith Sherman grew up in Ukraine in Odessa, and were literate urbanites. They belonged to the city's large Jewish community, and the city had fallen into economic hardship following the Russian Revolution. Shortly after World War I David emigrated to New York and Edith soon followed in what she called "a desperate journey" escaping the new Soviet Union. There the non-observant pair married in a civil ceremony. The first of their two sons, Zachary, was born April 8, 1923.