Marianna D. Birnbaum

Marianna D. Birnbaum was a literary scholar and cultural historian who taught at UCLA, first as a bibliographer in 1960 and later as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Germanic Languages from 1968 until her retirement in 1997. She taught Hungarian and Central European literature and culture. She was a specialist of 16^th century Renaissance and Humanism in Hungary and Croatia as well as contemporary Hungarian literature. After her retirement, she held the position of Research Professor at UCLA and also served as a guest professor at the Central European University where she was involved in the Medieval Studies program. Tragically, her home in Pacific Palisades burned down in January of 2025 during the wildfires, with her large library and archive, and she only narrowly escaped. She moved to Pécs, Hungary, where she had a second home, and died several weeks later, on February 26, 2025, at the age of 90.

Marianna Daisy Birnbaum, née Daisy László, was born on April 28, 1934, in Budapest. At the age of 10, she survived the Holocaust by wandering the streets of Nazi-occupied Budapest alone and later hiding with her family in the basement walls of her uncle’s apartment in Budapest for six weeks. She lost many relatives in the Holocaust, but her immediate family survived. She gave an oral history interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1983 in which she recounts her family’s survival: Oral History Interview

In 1956, as a Budapest University student, she participated in the Hungarian Uprising and managed to escape from the Soviet occupation of Hungary. She was admitted as a refugee to the United States, where her parents were later able to join her. At UCLA, she met and married Henrik Birnbaum, a distinguished scholar of Slavic languages and literatures and linguistics, her husband and intellectual partner of more than 30 years, who died in 2002.

Educated at the University of Budapest (B.A. in English and Hungarian, 1956), she received her M.A. in Library Science from UCLA in 1960 and a Ph.D. from the University of Budapest in 1967. Her dissertation on the Hungarian Renaissance Latinist, poet, and diplomat Janus Pannonius was published as a book, Janus Pannonius, Poet and Politician by the Yugoslav Academy Zagreb in 1981. She was elected as a Foreign Member of the Hungarian Academy of Science in 2001.

Over her career, Marianna Birnbaum actively pursued research in the areas of Hungarian Literature, Renaissance culture of Central Europe, and Jewish Studies, with a specific focus on Jews in Renaissance Europe. Her major publications include several books (a monograph and collections of articles), Humanists in a Shattered World: Croatian and Hungarian Latinity in the Sixteenth Century (1986), The Orb and the Pen: Janus Pannonius, Matthias Corvinus and the Buda Court (1996), Behind the Image: Another Text. Six Essays on Art and Literature (2008), and Practices of Coexistence, co-edited with Marcell Sebők (2017). In 2003, she published a historical biography of a Jewish heroine in her day, Gracia Mendes (1510-1569), a female merchant whose journey took her from Portugal to Antwerp to Venice and Ferrara, ending in the Ottoman Empire, The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes. Birnbaum was well known in Hungary for her groundbreaking work on the contemporary Hungarian writer Péter Esterházy. Her conversation with Péter Esterházy, Die Flucht der Jahre: Ein Gespräch mit Péter Esterházy, appeared in German from Hanser Verlag in 2017.

In her later life, Marianna Birnbaum wrote memoirs, fiction, and autobiographical fiction in her native Hungarian. She wrote a book about members of her family lost in the Holocaust, Emlékalbum 1944-ből [Memory Album from 1944] and a book of literary portraits, Miniaturak [Miniatures] devoted to the people she knew (both published in 2022). She also created literary memorials to her mother and father, who barely survived the Holocaust. Another book, Láthatatlan történetek (2018) [Invisible Stories] tells the life stories of five Jewish women–both fictional and real–who lived alongside her mother. An excerpt from her fiction in English can be found online here.

A truly remarkable person and intellectual, Marianna Birnbaum remained active as a scholar and author until the very end of her long life. She is survived by her husband of the last twenty years, Csaba Gaál, and her step-children Eva and Staffan Birnbaum.