A Coat Of Many Colours

The purpose of this book is twofold. First, it is a biography of a European Jewish family, the Kranzthors, who migrated from Hungary to the USA near the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of the20th. A fully-referenced narrative of that family’s history is here presented, accompanied by genealogical trees, charts, photographs, and correspondence – including a reconstruction of an unpublished Holocaust letter. The lives of most of the members – four brothers (Max, Jacob, Alexander, Samuel) and three sisters (Katie, Fanny, Jenni) – and their descendants to the third generation, are examined, in order to reflect interrelations and interactions. Second, this book includes the full text of two historical plays with commentaries. How did they occur? After fascinating adventures through various American states (such as New York, Illinois, and primarily Texas of the silver rush period) and Mexico (of the gold rush period to the time of the 1910 revolution), a senior member of the family, Max Kranzthor (1853-1934), finally settled in Los Angeles just before World War I. There in the 1920s, after a change of direction to his career, from previously being a dry-good businessman to a real estate agent, and in his mid-70s, he wrote two plays. Both seem to have been aimed at the then embryonic ‘sound’ cinema in Hollywood: the first was about the famous gladiator-rebel Spartacus, the second about the famous (or infamous) King Herod. Although privately and fleetingly published, they have never been discussed or produced. They contribute to the long tradition of stage dramas written in Shakespearean style, featuring larger -than- life characters from both Roman history and Biblical history.