Eugene Ionesco's Great-Grandmother
And other vitally relevant topics.
The world is full of genealogical mysteries if you’re willing to look. I don’t remember exactly why I landed on the Wiki page of French-Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco. I’m a bit of a philistine when it comes to the legitimate theater. I’ve never seen his plays. For me he’s mainly a good crossword filler.
But Eugène, born Eugen, has more to offer than that. Check out this Genealogian bait:
Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania. His father belonged to the Orthodox Christian church. His mother was of French and Romanian heritage. According to some sources, her faith was Protestant (the faith into which her father was born and to which her originally Greek Orthodox Christian mother had converted). According to other sources his mother was Jewish. Eugène was baptized into the Orthodox Christian faith.
And then the footnoted explanation for the fourth sentence:
In his now-famous diary, Romanian playwright Mihail Sebastian recorded that Ionesco told him his mother "had been Jewish, from Craiova." Marie-France Ionesco, Eugène's daughter, details a more complex genealogy of her family. Marie-Therese Ipcar's father was Jean Ipcar, a Lutheran from France and her mother was Aneta Ioanid, a Romanian woman of Greek parentage and Orthodox Christian faith. Jean's biological father was a Frenchman of Lutheran faith named Émile Marin. His mother, Anna, later married a man named Sebastien Ipcher, from whom Jean got his surname, a French-Catholic variation of "Ipcher" or "Ipchier". Rumors of Marie-Therese's Jewish origin, Marie-France writes, may have originated from the fact that her paternal grandmother's surname is disputed between the French Lebel or German-Jewish Lindenberg.
What a delicious fin de siècle mess. Orthodox Romanians, Greeks, Jews, French Catholics, and mon Dieu, French Lutherans. We can’t let these sleeping dogs lie.
I’ve taken the liberty of sketching out what we’ll call Marie-France’s version. She was, remember, the playwright’s daughter.
Let’s take this as our first draft. There are a couple oddities—things I would want to push on if a genealogical client gave them to me. First, does it make sense for the French same Ipcher to become Ipcar within one nineteenth century generation? Upon reflection, it is at least possible—Romanians would have pronounced the “cher” closer to “car” than Cher. So maybe Sebastian went to Romania from France, his name got scrambled, and his children or grandchildren brought it back to France like that.
Then there’s this fastidious interest in religious denominations. And maybe this is just a 2023 guy talking. Times have changed. Protestants and Catholics were literally blowing each other up in the recent past. But doesn’t it sound a little bit like they’re trying to explain away some sort of Old Testamenty-predilections with this Lutheran thing? Along the lines of “oh no, of course we’re not Jewish—just old fashioned!” It’s the opposite of the Latin American phenomenon, where every evangelical inclination is prima facie anusimic.
Finally, Ioanid is not Greek. Ioannides, Ioannidou, yes. But perhaps that’s another name that was reconfigured in Romania. I should tell you guys I really know very little about Romanian genealogy. The country is a genealogical black box. You can’t just page through their church records from the comfort of your home. Somehow Ceaușescu is to blame. At any rate, I don’t claim to speak from any position of authority.
Jean Ipcar
First, let’s see what we can find out about Ionesco’s grandfather. The secondary sources, mainly biographical treatments of Eugène have a reasonable amount to say, but they are contradictory. In that case, I like to take note of those sources, but rely only on the primary source records.
Ancestry has a nicely indexed civil records database for the city of Paris. And as it turns out, Jean Ipcar died in Paris.
He died the 10th of August, 1924 at his apartment, 16 rue de l’Avre. He was born in Bucharest, 2 February 1850, to Sébastian Ipcar and Anna Lindenberg, both deceased. His own wife was Annette Ioanid. And he was an electrical engineer. Lots of good biographical data there.
Unfortunately I could not find Annette’s death record in the database, which makes sense: the records run to 1929 and the secondary sources say she died in 1933. But there are other Ipcars.
In 1911, a student named Alfred Ipcar died at the age of 26. His parents were Jean Ipcar and Annette Ioanid. We’ll slot him in as the playwright’s uncle.
Then in 1912, a very rich marriage record. Emile Ipcar, born in Bucharest on 16 February 1883, an electrical engineer, married Marie Franco, another Romanian. But first, check out his parents.
J.S. Ipcar, engineer, and Ety Avram. And they live not in Paris, but in Craiova, Romania. Recall the 1942 war diary, wherein Ionesco confided that his mother had been a “Jew from Craiova.” Ety seems a serviceable form of Aneta, but of course Avram is not Ioanid. We’ll get back to that, but we need to at least consider the possibility that J.S. Ipcar married twice, first to an Ety and later to an Aneta, who survived him.
But first—is J.S. Ipcar even the same person as Jean?
Most assuredly. Take a look at the witnesses to the marriage:
Eugène Ionesco, 30 years old, secretary general of a prefecture in Romania, though he lives at rue Monsieur le Prince 14 in Paris. Brother of the groom.
Sabine Ipcar, 28 years old, dentist of Paris. Living at rue Clodion 8, which was the home of uncle Alfred at his death a year earlier. Sister of the groom.
Moseau Franco, 39 years old, a medical doctor in Douai. Brother of the bride.
León Franco, 30, pharmacist in Paris, also brother of the bride.
So now we’ve got Uncle Emile and Aunt Sabine. And, at the risk of stating the obvious, these people were Jewish or recently Jewish. If, as Ionesco’s daughter proposed, Jean Ipcar was maybe half-Jewish, but professedly Lutheran, and Anneta Ioanid was Greek Orthodox, we should all be a little surprised to see their son marrying into a clearly Jewish family from the same Romanian city after both families had all moved to Paris.
That’s it from the Paris records. But Jean Ipcar was an educated man, and he left us more of a record than that.
Here he is getting a German patent in 1891 (though note he lives in Craiova):
Here he is (most likely) getting a French patent in 1899, so it seems he moved between the cities.
And by 1905 he was hanging out a shingle in the 15th arrondissement, where he and his family later lived (at both the rue Clodion and rue de l’Avre addresses).
But I wanted to find some earlier reference to the man, perhaps from his days in Craiova or even Bucharest, so I ran some Romanian newspaper searches. By the by, if you’re not using ChatGPT or Claude to clean-up ancient and very poorly OCR’d text, you should be.
I started with this:
Claude made this for me, in one fell swoop:
A new invention - We read in "Secolul" from Craiova (No. from Dec 4): We can announce with great pleasure that Mr. I.S. Ipcar, electrician from Craiova, invented an Electro-automatic switch and a galvanic battery very constant called "Ipcar", applicable for light, motive power, State Telegraphy, emission currents for long distances, large power plants, microtelephonic. This device successfully replaces any galvanic battery combined with copper acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, potassium bichromate and other very expensive and difficult to maintain electrochemical substances. Recognized by the most renowned electricians as one of the most ingenious and useful inventions of our century, patented in all states of Europe and America, this invention will bring great benefits to electricity and will honor Romania and especially Craiova. Soon Mr. Ipcar will make public experiments with his new device, on which he has worked for many years. We congratulate our fellow citizen and advise him to continue on the path he has taken, without being deterred by any sacrifices.
That’s from the 18 December 1891 daily edition of the newspaper Egalitatea out of Bucharest. Of course he wouldn’t be Jean in Romania, he would be Ioan or Iancu, hence the I.S. Ipcar. About ten months later, they reported he had been voted into the “Academy of Inventors” in Paris, which is perhaps what sent him west.
Then in 1903:
Mr. J. Ipcaru, technician, was appointed general inspector of all electro-technical installations at the International Exhibition in Athens.
Egalitatea, the first issue of which came out in 1890, was “dedicated exclusively to Israelite interests within the country.” So if weren’t sure Jean was Jewish before, we can be sure now.
I said Romanian records are hard to get outside of the country. That’s slightly less true for the records of Jewish families, thanks to JewishGen.org. They have precious little from Craiova, but recall that Jean and his children claimed to be born in Bucharest. And though JewishGen has a pretty narrow set of Bucharest birth records, it’s wide enough to catch one Thereze Ipscar, born to Iancu S. (30) and Etty (21) on March 21, 1881. That is, I can assure you, the playwright’s mother.
You will have noticed the middle initial “S” popping up a couple times now. Given Jean/Iancu’s background, there’s a good chance that stands for the first name of his father. In the the playwrights’s daughter’s version of the tree, Jean was a son or step-son of man named Sebastian Ipcar.
Look at these interesting marriages:
I can tell you for certain that Jean’s father’s name wasn’t actually Sebastian. But if my father’s name were Sabetai and I wanted to Frenchify it, Sebastian would be my first choice. And the mother’s name—Anna Lindenberg—of course matches as well.
Anna Lindenberg and Sabetai Ipcar
Once more into the breach. Egalitatea, the Romanian-Jewish newspaper, has more to say about the Ipcars. In 1893, Anna Ipcar died at an advanced age, probably around 86, but as the newspaper would have it:
Obituary - On Monday, July 31st, Ana Ipcar, widow of S. Ipcar, who in his time founded, together with the regretted philanthropist I.L. Weimberg, the school for native Israelis in the Capital, passed away. She was 90 years old. The old woman, who until her death enjoyed the fullness of all her faculties, leaves behind her almost 80 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She was the grandmother, on the mother's side, of Mrs. Dr. E. Schwarzfeld, born to Leon B. Löbel.
Dr. E. Schwarzfeld happened to be publisher of the newspaper, and volunteers have also transcribed his marriage:
Note from way back that Marie-France Ionesco attributed the rumors of Jewish ancestry to some confusion about whether her great-great-grandmother’s surname was Lindenberg or Lobel. Well, it turns out both names were Jewish, Löbel being a variant of Leibel and thus connected to the Yiddish for Lion, the name Yehuda, and so on. It could have been the French name “Lobel,” but it’s not.
Dr. Schwarzfeld gave us a little more about his wife’s grandfather in 1898, when he noted:
In 1850, Mr. I.L. Weinberg and S. Ipcar took the initiative to establish a boys' school in Bucharest because until then there was no school for Jewish education. But although they encountered great difficulties from several fanatics, somehow, with the help of the Board of Schools, especially with the help of the late Petrache Poenaru, they succeeded in having a school, which as we all see has made progress. This school also received some aid - from some money collected at the Vornicia from spornici, meaning those who paid the tax as vornici but were not listed in the census, and with this money and some money from the Trusteeship, the first school was built, near the Great Synagogue, and later not much time passed and a traveler from France visited the boys' school and asked Mr. I.L. Weinberg where is the girls' school? And Mr. Weinberg replied that we do not yet have a girls' school. The traveler replied: Where will the youth get their wives if you don't have a girls' school? Then Mr. Weinberg strove with other members and established a girls' school, for which all the inhabitants must thank those men who took the trouble for such an institution.
I.L. or Isaac Leib Weinberg is credited with leading the progressive wing of the Jewish community in Bucharest, as well as with the initiative for the building of the Choral Temple, which still stands in the city. Sabetai Ipcar seems to have been largely forgotten, even as great-grandfather to the great playwright Eugène Ionesco. The poor fellow has been written out of the story.
As to a Monsieur Emile Marin, the French Lutheran who had some sort of affair with a Romanian Jew in Bucharest: did he exist at all? I find no trace of him.