Leon Kane was born as Natan Leon Kohn in Rzeszów, Poland, on the 20th of March 1913. He grow up in Vienna with his parents and his four sisters. His brother Jakob Kohn died in 1932, at the age of 29. Only four years later, in 1936, his father died, too. Kane began to study at the University of Vienna, but was expelled in 1938. After his first attempt to leave Austria had failed, he crossed the German/Dutch border in fall 1938. Kane obtained a visa to Cuba and went via Belgium to France aboard a boat. As his entry to Cuba was refused, he had to return to France, where he was sent to a labor battalion in Nantes; the German invasion in 1940 offered him the possibility to escape. Kane fled south, crossed the Pyrenees and was imprisoned in Spain for three months before he obtained a visa to the United States. He finally left Europe via Portugal in 1943. Kane got the chance to complete his degree in German studies, which he had started in Vienna, and from 1945 onwards worked for the Engineering Societies Library. His son Felice Kane Morel, was born in New York in 1943. In 1973, at the age of sixty, Leon Kane returned to Vienna in order to start his research on the life and work of Robert Danneberg. He was supported by a grant from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute. The book was finally published in 1980. Four years later Kane went back to New York where he dedicated himself to private studies. He died in 2003.
From the guide to the Leon Kane Collection, 1903-2006, (Leo Baeck Institute)
