In her death, I found her birth.
When I began my research into Maria Lani, no historian had yet made a serious study of her, and little reliable information could be found, mostly just scattered news reports and unsourced rumors in memoirs.
The more I read about Maria, the less I felt I knew her, even concerning the basic facts of her life. Some observers said she was born in Paris, others Berlin, still others Warsaw. (None were correct.) They all agreed that she had been born in 1905, but in the portraits of her from 1929, she didn’t exactly look twenty-four. (She was thirty-four.) None doubted Lani was her real name, but it didn’t seem to me very Jewish, which I suspected she was.
My big break came in 2011, half a decade after I started, when I found an American Foreign Service document, issued fifty days after she died in Paris, titled “Report on the Death of an American Citizen.”
This FS-192 report teems with juicy details, but one proved especially invaluable for my future research. Although incorrect about her birthdate and birthplace (and more), it got right her surname at birth, Gelenievicz, which I’d never seen. In the first (or at least one of the first) of her many inventions, Maria reduced her surname to its middle two syllables and shifted the “e” to an “a” to create “Lani.”
