Tivadar Soros
Hungarian lawyer, writer and editor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tivadar Soros[1] (Esperanto: Teodoro Ŝvarc; born Theodor Schwartz; 7 April 1893 – 22 February 1968) was a Hungarian lawyer, author and editor.[2][3] He is best known for being the father of billionaire George Soros, and engineer Paul Soros.
7 April 1893
Austria-HungaryTivadar Soros | |
|---|---|
Soros c. 1930s | |
| Native name | Soros Tivadar (after 1936) |
| Born | Theodor Schwartz 7 April 1893 |
| Died | 22 February 1968 (aged 74) |
| Allegiance | Austria-Hungary |
| Branch | Austro-Hungarian Army |
| Service years | 1914–1918 |
| Known for | Esperanto magazine editor, lawyer |
| Conflicts | World War I |
| Alma mater | Franz Joseph University, Kolozsvár (now Cluj) |
| Spouse |
Erzsébet Szücs (m. 1924) |
| Children | |
He was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Nyírbakta, Hungary, near the border with Ukraine. His father had a general store and sold farm equipment. When Tivadar was eight, his father moved the family to Nyiregyhaza, the regional center in north-eastern Hungary, providing a somewhat less isolated life experience.[4]
He first met his wife Erzsébet when she was eleven years old during a visit to the home of her father Mor Szücs, a cousin of his own father.[4]
He studied law at the Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca), in what was then Hungarian Transylvania.[4]
Soros fought in World War I and spent years in a prison camp in Siberia before escaping. He founded the Esperanto literary magazine Literatura Mondo (Literary World) in 1922, having learned the language from a fellow soldier during the war, and edited it until 1924.
In 1936, Soros changed the family's surname from the German-Jewish "Schwartz" to "Soros", in an attempt to protect the family from Hungary's increasing antisemitism.[5][6] Soros was said to like the new name because it is a palindrome and because of its meaning; in Hungarian, soros means "next"; in Esperanto it means "will soar".[7][8][9]
Soros forged paperwork, giving the family's new alias, as the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944.[10] The family fled to safe houses for nearly a year, until Soviet forces invaded the country.[11]
Soros died of cancer in New York in 1968.
Publications
- Modernaj Robinzonoj ("Modern Robinsons") (1923), a short account of his escape from a Russian prison camp, which was republished in 1999 by Esperanto publisher Bero and was translated into several languages, including English (Crusoes in Siberia, Mondial, 2010).
- Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto ("Masquerade around death") (1965), an autobiographical novel about Soros's experience during the Nazi occupation of Budapest. It has been translated into English (Maskerado: Dancing Around Death London: Canongate, 2000), French, Hungarian,[12] Italian, Polish, Czech, Russian, German and Turkish.