Libet was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. Gamer Libitsky, his paternal grandfather, came to America in 1865 from a town called Brusyliv in Ukraine. His mother, Anna Charovsky, emigrated from Kyiv in 1913. His parents met in Chicago and married in 1915 and had Libet the next year. He had a brother, Meyer, and a sister, Dorothy. Libet attended a public elementary school and John Marshall Hig