Alexander Salomon Lichtblau, later Levai, was the son of Joachim Lichtblau and Katharina Lichtblau, née Goldberger. In 1900, he married Elsa Soffer, born in Pressburg [Bratislava] in 1880. From 1908, together with his brothers-in-law Arthur and Siegmund Soffer, he was the owner of the Soffer brothers' furniture and antiques store, from which he left in 1922, having already founded the unregistered company A. Lévai, trading in antiques and period furniture, located at Weihburggasse 15 in Vienna’s 1st district in 1919. At the same address, he established the art and antiques dealership Kurtz & Levai Ges.m.b.H. [Ltd.] with Kommerzialrat [commercial councillor] Willy Kurtz in 1935, with Kurtz and Elsa Levai as managing directors. Kurtz surrendered his trade licence in November 1937.

After the annexation of Austria to the National Socialist German Reich in March 1938, Kurtz & Levai Ges.m.b.H. [Ltd.] went into liquidation in April 1938 and was deleted from the commercial register in August. The architect Johann Lender was appointed provisional administrator of the A. Levai company; the architect and expert Franz Wilfert appraised both the art dealer's warehouse and the inventory of Alexander and Elsa Levai's flat at Weihburggasse 13-15 in Vienna’s 1st district. The house, which the Levais had owned since 1927, was expropriated, as was their family home in Baden bei Wien. After resigning from the trade, Alexander Levai had his company deleted from the commercial register in September 1938. In February 1939, the Property Transaction Office assigned the task of final liquidation to Otto Faltis, the general liquidator for art and antique dealers in Vienna. Until 1938, one of the Levai couple's four sons, Franz Kurt Levai, born in Weikersdorf in Lower Austria in 1911, had been involved in the trade and production of mineral oil products in two companies based at Bauernmarkt 24 in Vienna’s 1st district, and in which his parents were also involved as silent partners: F. K. Levai and ‘Optimol’ Ges.m.b.H. [Ltd.], of which he had been managing director since 1937. Otto Lautenbacher ‘aryanised’ the F. K. Levai company, the Levai family's shares in ‘Optimol’ Ges.m.b.H. [Ltd.] were taken over by the head operation in Munich. Franz Kurt Levai fled to France at the end of 1938; his parents, who had to live in boarding houses until their departure, followed him in April 1939, settling in Paris, later in Mérignac near Bordeaux and finally in Biarritz. On 11 November 1942, Alexander and Elsa Levai were deported on Transport No. 45 from the Drancy transit camp near Paris to Auschwitz, where they were murdered on 16 November 1942. After being briefly interned by the Vichy regime, Franz Kurt Levai escaped to London, where he changed his name to Francis Kenneth Lloyd and founded the Malborough Fine Art gallery in 1946, the year of his naturalisation, together with the bookseller and antiquarian bookseller Heinrich Robert (now Harry) Fischer (1903–1977), who had also fled Vienna. With the establishment of a branch in New York in 1963, he laid the foundations for his career – overshadowed by fraud scandals – as a globally active art dealer. Francis Kenneth Lloyd died in Nassau (Bahamas) in 1998. His three brothers, Geza Laszlo, Victor Paul and the art dealer Georg (George) Hans Lévai, survived the Shoah in France and Sweden. After the end of Nazi rule, the house on Weihburggasse was placed under the administration of the British occupation authorities and restituted to the heirs of Alexander and Elsa Levai in 1949.