Marcel Sternberger

• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Dec 7 2017, 7:36:42 UTC

From https://www.sternbergercollection.com/jewish-identity/ :

Marcel Sternberger's Jewish heritage played a prominent role in his personal history, his identity, his politics, and ultimately his career. Both he and his wife Ilse came from a long line of Jewish intellectuals. Marcel traced his heritage to Judah Lowe, the famous medieval Rabbi and the ‘creator’ of the Golem of Prague. More importantly, Marcel's life was directly and deeply impacted by the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism in Europe. He fled many countries from the Nazis’ growing reach and lost many relatives and friends in the Holocaust. Throughout his career, Marcel's Jewish identity played a role in his relationship to many of his subjects in both expected and more surprising ways.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Sternberger:

Marcel Sternberger (1899–1956) was a Hungarian-American photographer. He took portraits of many icons of his time including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi of India, and many others.
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Early life and education
Born in Hungary in 1899, Sternberger came of age in the early days of World War I. Hailing from a family of Hungarian patriots, he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army upon graduating high school and served as an intelligence officer. When post-war borders shifted, the Sternbergers found their territory had been reappropriated to Romania, and the family consequently moved to Budapest. He studied law there until political and religious persecution compelled him to flee to the Czech border.
After a stint studying history in Prague, Sternberger attended the Sorbonne in Paris as a law student, ultimately earning a PhD. He began his journalistic career there writing for leading newspapers and magazines.
In 1932, he went to Berlin in the last days of the Weimar Republic where he met film student Ilse Naumann. They wed hastily in 1933, just before the Nazi confiscation of Jewish passports, and then returned to Paris. It was Ilse's gift of a Leica camera in 1934 that prompted Sternberger's interest in photography. A handheld Leica was to remain his camera of choice throughout his career.