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Magaziners of Humenne |
Updated 30 May 2022 |
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Lajos (Levi) Magaziner was born in Humenne on July 27, 1860, the son of Samuel Magaziner and Eszter Jacubovits. His name appeared as Louis Magaziner in Vienna and America. Lajos was a manufacturer of windows, window blinds and window shutters, founding a business in Budapest in 1886 with his nephew Antal Weinberger (who was a few years older than Lajos). Lajos was also an inventor, creating new systems of jalousie windows that opened with a simple lever or pushbutton instead of the usual crank. Emperor Franz Joseph I was so delighted with Lajos's pushbutton jalousies that had them installed in the royal palace. In 1910, he was made Knight of the Order of Franz Joseph (a Ferenc Jozsef-rend lovagja) for his work on a new building for the Joseph Technical University in Budapest.
On August 16, 1885, Lajos married Maria Boehm in Budapest. Maria Boehm was born on November 6, 1866 in Nagyvarad (then a part of Hungary; now known as Oradea, Romania). They had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood.
Lajos and Maria visited their daughter Elsa in New York in 1926, and their contact in America was architect Eugene Schoen (1880-1957), whom they described as a friend. Their son Julius also used Eugene as a contact in his 1908 trip to New York, and described Eugene as a cousin. Eugene was the son of a Hungarian immigrant (Jacob Schoen, Grand Master of the Order of B'rith Abraham), but I haven't found any connection between them and the Magaziners.
Lajos died of heart failure in Budapest on May 8, 1939 at the age of 78. His obituaries identified him as a Knight of the Order of Franz Joseph. He was buried at Kozma Utcai Izraelita Temeto, as are many other Magaziners.
Elemer Magaziner was born on November 30, 1887 in Budapest. He was more interested in intellectual pursuits than in the family blinds factory, but he took over the family business out of a sense of duty.
Edith
Elemer married Edit Balogh, a much younger woman. Edit was born in Budapest on October 10, 1923. They had two sons. Edit was not Jewish, so the factory was put into her name to protect it from Nazi restrictions on Jewish-owned businesses. Unfortunately Elemer was not so easily protected. During the Holocaust, he was sent to a forced labor camp, where he died on March 18, 1945. The family business was later nationalized when the Soviets took over Hungary.
Edit remarried and traveled with their sons under the name Lukacs from Brussels to New York in October, 1947. She later divorced Lukacs, moved to Mexico with the sons, and married a third time to a man named Propper. In 1952, she came to America with the sons. In America, she was known as Edith and remarried again, to Oscar Schuman. The boys took the surname Schuman, though the older son took back his original Magaziner name later in life. After Oscar died, Edith remarried to a fifth husband.
Edith died on October 12, 2015, at the age of 92.
Gyula Magaziner was born on January 30, 1890 in Budapest. He used the name Julius outside of Hungary. He visited America in 1908, using architect Eugene Schoen (1880-1957) as his contact. He identified Schoen as his cousin, but I have found no evidence of Schoen's relationship to the Magaziners.
In 1927, Julius came to America to return the body of Bernath Markovitz, the husband of Lajos's cousin, Sadie Magaziner Markovitz. The ship's manifest indicates that Julius was an engineer. Julius apparently never returned to Hungary. He settled in London, England, where he married a woman named Irene, and apparently changed his name. I don't know if Julius and Irene had any children. Julius was still living in London in 1963, when his sister Elsa told a newspaper that she was planning to visit her brother in England in the spring.
Elsa
Erzsebet Magaziner was born on August 20, 1893 in Budapest. Her family called her Boske, a common Hungarian nickname for Erzsebet, like Betsy for Elizabeth. Later, she used the stage name Elsa Ersi (Erzsi is another common nickname for Erzsebet). From an early age, Elsa wanted to be an actress or an opera singer, but her father Lajos didn't approve. Elsa went to boarding school in England in 1911. For her parents, she attended the University of Budapest, majoring in architecture and philosophy, but for herself, she earned a degree from the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, studying under Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly.
Elsa fell in love with Erno Landsberger and married him secretly in Budapest on February 10, 1915. She told her parents after the marriage. Erno was a much older man, born November 16, 1878, almost 15 years older than Elsa. The marriage didn't last. They divorced on May 8, 1918, and Erno remarried on November 3, 1921 and again on January 26, 1924.
Elsa had some success in musical theater in Budapest, then set out for Broadway, arriving on the Berengaria on October 27, 1923. She was 30 years old, but claimed to be 26. Later, she claimed to be born in 1900, seven years younger than her actual age. Elsa worked as an actress and singer in vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies, and on and off Broadway. She received very good reviews, and some success, but never achieved the level of fame she had hoped for.
On April 2, 1932, Elsa married William Richard Faddis in New York. William was born in Corbit, Texas on October 26, 1907. They had a daughter. They divorced in the 1940s, and Elsa remarried to Joseph Fletcher Calvert, a retired private utilities executive. Joseph was an older man, born in Sunderland, England on November 23, 1875. Elsa converted to Christian Science at some point, because a 1963 newspaper interview described her as an active member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist.
Elsa and Joseph moved to Connecticut in 1958. Elsa probably didn't know that her second cousin, Anthony Balkany (aka Antal Magaziner) was also living in Connecticut, though Anthony died there around the same time that Elsa moved there. Elsa stayed in touch with her brother Julius when he moved to London and visited him there several times.
Elsa's second husband, Joseph, died on January 10, 1965. Elsa died on January 22, 1979. She was 85 years old.
Pal in the Alps
Pal
Pal Magaziner was born in Budapest on July 2, 1898. He apparently served in Hungary's military in World War I, because his name appears in a book about the 38th K. u. K. Infantry Regiment. Like his brother Elemer, the family blinds factory would not have been his first choice of occupation, but he took over the family business out of a sense of duty. His true love was mountain climbing and skiing. In fact, he wrote a book about skiing called Sielni nem boszorkányság (Skiing is not witchcraft!), which provided short, simple explanations of some basic skiing techniques.
Magdolna
Pal married Magdolna Rona in Budapest on November 23, 1923. Magdolna was born in Budapest on May 21, 1902. She was also known as Magda or Mici. Like Pal, Mici was also an alpine guide, the first female high alpine ski guide. She was also an actress like Pal's sister Elsa. They had a daughter.
During the Holocaust, Pal was taken to a forced labor camp with his brother Elemer. His wife and daughter avoided that fate by assuming other identities, using birth certificates of Catholic people who had died. They were forced to live apart to maintain the charade, but they both survived the war. Pal died of starvation at Mathausen a week before the camp was liberated, on April 28, 1945.
Mici reunited with her daughter after the war and remarried. She died at Janos Hospital in Budapest on February 10, 1989.
George 1960
Gyorgy Iztvan Magaziner was born in Budapest on November 16, 1942, the son of Elemer Magaziner and Edith Balogh. In October 1947, he came to America with his mother and older brother under the name Lukacs, apparently the name of Edith's second husband. They then emigrated to Mexico, and came back to America in 1952. In America, Edith remarried to Oscar Schuman, and Gyorgy took the name George Schuman.
George married in California to a woman who is living, and they had one son. George and his wife divorced after 10 years of marriage. George died in California on October 21, 2001, at the age of 58.
Marianna 2000
Marianna Magaziner was born in Budapest on April 10, 1924, the daughter of Pal and Magdolna. She survived the Holocaust by assuming the identity of a Catholic person who had died, using the Catholic person's birth certificate. This ruse required the young girl to live separate from her mother, but they both survived this way. They were reunited after the war. She provided a Holocaust survivor interview to the USC Shoah Foundation. A slideshow from it is available HERE.
Marianna worked in the movie industry in Hungary as a writer and director and won a Golden Dragon award at the Cracow Film Festival in 1965.
Marianna married Mihaly Szemes, another Hungarian film director. Mihaly was born on July 23, 1920 in Budapest. They had two daughters. Mihaly died on October 3, 1977 in Budapest. Marianna died on November 3, 2003.
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