Searching for my Grandfather: A post-mortem.

It is autumn 2003. Somewhere in the southern suburbs of Bucharest, in a dark and musty room, my father and I are crouched beside an old reel-to-reel projector in a poorly lit, poorly ventilated room, waiting for the projectionist, garbed in a drab, Soviet-style grey uniform, to feed a film reel into the machine. Anticipation builds. I pray that I didn’t schlep my father thousands of miles from Canada back to his birthplace only to be disappointed.

Although this reel hasn’t seen the light of day in decades, it finally clicks into place. The lights are dimmed and the screen flickers. It’s a silent film from 1929 that I discovered in the film archives; its grainy black-and-white moving images periodically interjected by static title cards that recount details of a narrative that has been part of our family lore for years. I dare not blink lest I miss a key moment. Suddenly, among the clipped gestures, my late grandfather comes to life on the silver screen as the young gentleman he was long before I knew him. I gasp and turn to my father, who has missed the sight. I tug at the projectionist’s sleeve and motion for him to rewind and replay the reel. Then I pull my father in closer to the table.

Our eyes are trained on every frame, until the man with the hat comes back into view: A sprightly 32-year-old, my father’s father is sporting a tie and suit (minus the jacket, for the summer heat), smiling broadly while gesticulating towards his brother and others by his side. They are walking through the construction site of a massive swimming and entertainment complex that was built, in record speed, in the northern sector of Bucharest in 1929. This vast project, designed by my grandfather (perhaps jointly with his brother), supervised and managed by him once completed, was called Strandul Kiseleff.

The entrance to Strandul Kiseleff (circa 1929).

My grandfather, Jules Janco, born Iuliu Iancu in Bucharest in 1896, died in Montreal in 1985. I’ve been searching for him – and remnants of his life and career – ever since.

Jules lived in Zurich during the First World War, during which time he and his older brother Marcel studied architecture. Both launched their careers in France when post-war reconstruction efforts were at their height, then established themselves back in Romania in the early 1920s. During the interwar period, Jules designed and built many projects in Bucharest, and elsewhere in the country; many of them with Marcel, with whom he collaborated in the architectural office that they founded together. Long after Jules died, when I sought to learn more about his career, I found little to nothing about his work. Unlike his brother Marcel, a renowned avant-garde artist, about whom I found extensive records and writings (including architectural commissions)), Jules’ work and legacy were unknown.

As I leafed through Jules’ old photographs and documents, it dawned on me that a permanent home had to be found for all the memorabilia and documents that he had carefully kept and carried from Romania decades earlier; first to Palestine (later Israel) where he lived with his family for over a decade, and on to Canada. And so, in the summer of 2022, my family donated the bulk of his papers, photographs and precious objects of history and affection to the Jewish Public Library Archives in Montreal, the city in which he lived and worked for the last 30 years of his life.

When the pandemic cancelled the launch of my entrepreneurial venture, I felt called to revisit and question my grandfather’s career: why was his name and work virtually absent, in books, architectural monographs and online? I had too many questions that had no answer.

A sunbathing area at Strandul Kiseleff.

In the fall of 2022, I bought a one-way ticket to Bucharest intent on piecing together disparate parts of Jules’ life; a life that I realized I knew little about. Trouble was, I didn’t know a soul in Bucharest: My ancestral pool had fled or otherwise left Romania, dispersing throughout the diaspora, so there was no family left to meet and guide me in my quest. And while I was familiar with a handful of Romanian words and phrases – my grandparents continued to speak with my father long after they fled the country – I had no idea how I would manage to decipher documents I couldn’t freely understand.  But, language or no language, I was curious and stubborn enough to find a way. How hard could it be? For starters, I hadn’t counted on the resistance, but even worse: nobody warned me about dealing with (post-) Communist red tape or about employees who will reject your request outright rather than lift a finger.

In short, finding traces of my grandfather’s life in Romania was proving to be a daunting endeavour – for other reasons as well. I soon understood that the name and signature of ‘Iuliu Iancu’ would likely never surface in any official documents and architectural plans for commissions that he designed and drafted: Through a series of odd and not-fully-explained occurrences, only Marcel was granted the right to sign plans and official papers. Even though this slight against Jules may not have been ruinous to his career in Romania, it followed Jules for the remainder of his life and career, preventing him from signing his name to the many projects that he designed, built and supervised. This one blunder made all the difference in Jules’ world: it led to the widespread though incorrect conclusion that Marcel was the sole author of all Iancu projects, including any that Jules might have designed and built himself.

After more than a year of sifting through papers, plans and photographs – in city and national archives, libraries, museums, flea markets, antique stores and trade fairs, bookstores, private collections; after meeting with architects, collectors, historians and some current owners of properties that were built by Jules (and possibly Marcel), I made new discoveries, unearthing more than a handful of buildings that were previously unknown to the same architects, historians and authors who have written extensively about “Marcel Iancu’s” architecture.

My father exiting the site of the former Strandul Kiseleff in 2003

If the goal of research is to expand on a body of knowledge, it is also utilized to contribute to a corpus by filling in gaps, revising records, and correcting misinformation. Even when it could be considered blasphemous to question a widely accepted narrative, sometimes history must be observed through a different lens in order to more fully understand a legacy that may have been more mythic than true.

In the early days of winter 2022, I rode a bus up to the site that once was Strandul Kiseleff. However, this time I was barred from entering (unlike previous visits) by a security guard who said that it was private property, and only members of the tennis court could gain entry. I was tempted to ask: Do you know that this was the site of the former Strandul Kiseleff? I wanted to tell her that it was designed and built by my grandfather nearly a century ago (though even Marcel’s name does not appear on the original plans), and that I wanted to walk through it as I had done before. For a moment, I wondered if those details would light up her eyes, soften her heart and ease her mind. But then I remembered that I was in Romania, a country whose legacy of suspicion has not entirely faded. She did not look like she would be moved, so I turned away and left.