The project started as “a modest family memoir.” Kimmel is a great-great-nephew of Morris Michtom, born Moshe Charmatz in a Minsk shtetl. After faking his own death to escape conscription from the Russian Army and making it to Manhattan, Michtom invented, with his wife, Rose, the American teddy bear. (“The only software that’s never going to be obsolete,” as one of many other writers Kimmel speeds by put it.)