Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman ( Hebrew name שבתאי זיסל בן אברהם [ Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham ] ) in St Mary 's Hospital on May 24 , 1941 , in Duluth , Minnesota , and raised in Hibbing , Minnesota , on the Mesabi Range west of Lake Superior . He have a younger brother , David . Dylan 's paternal grandparents , Zigman and Anna Zimmerman , emigrated from Odessa , in the Russian Empire ( now Ukraine ) , to the United States following the anti @-@ Semitic pogroms of 1905 . His maternal grandparents , Ben and Florence Stone , was Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United States in 1902 . In his autobiography , Chronicles : Volume One , Dylan wrote that his paternal grandmother 's maiden name was Kirghiz and her family originated from Kağızman district of Kars Province in northeastern Turkey .