Novikoff was born to Jewish parents in the small town of Semenivka in the Russian Empire. Hoping to overcome severe poverty under the then Soviet Union, his family emigrated to the United States. The family settled in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. His father earned their living by working as a salesman in a garment factory. Novikoff was a precocious boy, developing an early fascination for biology. His hobbies included skinning and dissecting animal corpses, and he once boiled a dead cat to observe its skeleton. He skipped four grades, and completed high school when he was only fourteen years of age. He graduated with B.S. degree from Columbia University in 1931 at the age of eighteen. Even under financial constraints, the family encouraged him to study medicine. However, antisemitism at the time prevented him from entering medical school. He therefore pursued the only open opportunity by continuing at the same university to study zoology. He joined the graduate school in 1931, and completed his M.A. in 1933.
