Father of Sydney Altman, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1989. The Alrmans were immigrants to Canada, each coming from Eastern Europe as a young adult, in the 1920s. Altman's father, born in Ukraine, had been a worker on a collective farm in the Soviet Union. He was originally sponsored to come to Canada as a farm worker, but later, as a husband and a father of two sons, he supported the family by running a small grocery store in Montreal.