Zino Davidoff

Davidoff was born on 11 March 1906 in Novhorod-Siverskyi, a small town in Chernihiv Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine), to a Jewish family in the tobacco trade. He was the second of five children of Hillel Davidoff (often Westernised as Henri) and his wife Rachel; his siblings were León, Joseph, Nina and Helène. His father operated a small tobacco business in Kyiv where, despite official restrictions, he blended oriental tobaccos and rolled cigarettes for friends and customers.

In 1911, against the background of the anti-Jewish pogroms that had swept the Russian Empire from 1905 onward, the Davidoff family fled westward and settled in Geneva, Switzerland. The five-year-old Zino arrived with his parents and siblings as refugees. His father quickly opened a small tobacco shop on the Place des Philosophes (later moved to premises on the Rue de la Confédération and the Rue du Marché) which rapidly became a meeting place for Russian émigrés and political exiles, including, by some accounts, Russian Social Democrats then living in Switzerland.

Davidoff was educated at the Collège Calvin in Geneva, the secondary school founded by John Calvin in 1559 and one of the oldest in Europe. He was inclined toward languages, the humanities and music — he had wanted to study the violin — rather than the sciences, and left school at the age of around twenty without continuing to university.

Davidoff and his wife Marthe were, by all accounts, inseparable for sixty years; she worked alongside him at the shop and is said to have left it only once during their working life, to give birth to their daughter. Their daughter Sonia developed an allergy to tobacco in childhood and did not enter the family business. Davidoff was multilingual — Russian, French and Spanish and held both Argentine and Swiss citizenships acquired in the course of his early travels.

In person he was a small, dapper, white-haired figure invariably photographed with a Davidoff White Label between his fingers. He cultivated, and embodied, the persona of the cosmopolitan European bon vivant; the slogan he chose for his brand — "When you know" — reflected the discreet snobbery on which his commercial appeal rested. Late in life he is said to have remarked that he had spent his career "trading in dreams and illusions".