Hermann Zvi Iancu

Unlike the other Romanians at the Meierei and Cabaret Voltaire, the Iancu brothers were born and grew up in Bucharest;9 like both Samuel Rosenstock and Aron Sigalu they belonged to a wealthy Jewish family that still celebrated the old Jewish festivals, even though the family in every other respect considered itself naturalized and more or less assimilated into Romanian society. Hermann Zui Iancu had already reached the age of thirty-nine when his first son was born on 24 May 1895, the mother Rachel Iancu, born Iuster in Ias¸ i, being only twenty-three. The son was given the name of Marcel Hermann and in October of the next year got a brother, named Iuliu, while the youngest brother George was born in February 1899, followed by their sister Lucia in August 1900. According to Marcel Iancu’s birth certificate from 1930, the occupation of his father was a comerciant, i.e., a merchant, a dealer, or simply a tradesman, an occupation most common of the few allowed for Jews. According to his son in 1982, Hermann Iancu had a partnership in Bucharest with his two brothers and a friend called the Iancu Brothers, a business for suits and material.10 Apparently Hermann Iancu did his work pretty successfully because the family could regard itself as uppermiddle- class; in one of the preserved photos Rachel Iancu is posing dressed in a bushy hat decorated with feathers, a necklace, two precious bracelets, long-sleeved gloves, and a stole. The line of business in which Marcel Iancu’s father was engaged was not very uncommon among the Jews either. Being assimilated Jews with a “free” choice, the family had, despite or perhaps thanks to the many Jews in the area, chosen to settle down on 8 Strada Decebal outside the Jewish quarter, where, for example, the big synagogue, Templul Coral,11 built in the mid-nineteenth century, was situated on Strada Vineri, only to move a few years later to Strada Gândului in the absolute center of the city and again, a couple of years later, to Strada Trinita˘ t¸ii, where Hermann Iancu let an architect plan and build one of Bucharest’s largest private houses with a garden of several thousand square meters.