Nicolae Malaxa
| Nicolae Malaxa | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
22 December 1884 Huşi, Romania |
| Died | 1965 New Jersey, United States |
| Nationality | Romanian |
| Occupation |
Engineer Industrialist |
Nicolae Malaxa (22 December [O.S. 10 December] 1884 – 1965) was a Romanian engineer and industrialist.
Born in a family of Greek origins in Huşi, Malaxa studied engineering in Iaşi (at the University of Iaşi) and Karlsruhe (at the Polytechnic University). Late in his life, Petre Pandrea, a Romanian intellectual who was for long a member of the Communist Party and later became a victim of the Communist regime, wrote a memoir which, in part, dealt with Malaxa's biography, recording it with a dose of hostility. In it, he indicated that Malaxa's father died a young man, and that Nicolae was kept in university with money earned by his mother and sister. Pandrea, who called Malaxa "a mama's boy" and argued that this had shaped his character, also noted that, after graduation and contrary to his family's wishes, the engineer married a divorcée (who had been married to one of his early business partners). In time, he claimed, tensions grew between the two Malaxas, after the "Puritan" Nicolae came to resent his "frivolous" wife.
Malaxa joined the Romanian Railways Company as a constructions engineer. Petre Pandrea implied that this went against procedure, and was the result of Nicolae Malaxa having befriended Chairman Alexandru Cottescu. The same source indicated that Malaxa continued to engage in business ventures, and that, upon the end of World War I and the Romanian Campaign, he was living in Iaşi and managing a grape-selling business. In 1918-1919, he quit his job at the Company and started a new business dealing with maintenance — the venture was instantly successful, a fact which Pandrea attributed to the infrastructure's decay under the previous occupation by the Central Powers. Thus, Malaxa revitalized rail vehicles left into disrepair, which he sold back to the state at ten times the investment.
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