Michael T. Kaufman was a reporter, editor, columnist, and foreign correspondent during his 40 years with the New York Times. He has won a George Polk Award for his journalism and was a Guggenheim Fellow. This is his sixth book. He lives in New York City. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

chapter 1

Erzebet and Tivadar

In 1985, George Soros arranged for his mother to dictate her recollections and for them to be taped and transcribed. That way his children would have access to them and he would be able to check his own memories against hers. Erzebet Soros was then an eighty-two-year-old widow with failing eyesight who had repeatedly rejected offers by her two very rich sons to house her in a grand style with maids and a driver. She preferred her modest two-room apartment in Manhattan near Columbus Circle, with its mismatched furniture, paintings by Hungarian artist friends, and small African animal carvings. At her death in 1989 she willed the apartment to George Soros's Open Society Institute to be used as accommodations for visitors from overseas who were in New York for brief periods. Though many people have stayed there, the place has remained quite the way it was when she lived in it, shelves filled with dog-eared books in several languages, including works by Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, as well as several Bibles.

In this setting Erzebet recorded her story and that of her family. Her tone was basically reportorial, with very few rhapsodic flights of pride. Instead, with often rich detail, she described how her family had endured the vicissitudes of war, separation, and displacement. She told of the prewar years when the upper-middle-class family pursued an unconventional and bohemian lifestyle. She recounted how, once the Nazis came, she, her husband Tivadar, and their sons, Paul and George, lived under false names and Christian identities. In her down-to-earth chronicle she went on to tell of the time when George, then barely seventeen, escaped from Communist Hungary to a life in the West, with the entire family assuming that they would never again be reunited. Then, as she explained, in 1956, in the wake of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, she and her husband were able to walk away from their native land to join their sons in New York, where the boys were becoming successful. "So," as she said in her Hungarian-accented English, "that is the story; that is how we loved each other and how we grew."

Though the telling was for the most part as prosaically modest as her apartment, her story clearly had its hero. Over and over, during the months that she talked into the tape recorder, she spoke in worshipful terms of her husband and his profound role in shaping the life of the family, assuring its survival and determining its unfolding destiny through the rearing of his sons. She mentioned how once when George was a child of seven or eight, he had written a poem in which he had portrayed his father, Tivadar, as Zeus, or, as she added, "the father God." The impact of her husband's life upon the family had been so powerful, she declared, that even then, as she was taping her memories years after his death in New York, Tivadar continued to dominate the thoughts and feelings of those he had loved most and who in turn had loved him so intensely.

"George really has now the problem," she said. "I think that is the reason he is going to a shrink, to find out how to get completely rid of his father."

When, fifteen years later, this passage was pointed out to George, he laughed, recalling that at the time, "if anything, I was trying to get rid of my mother." Nevertheless, he conceded that Erzebet's overall point was valid. Tivadar was indeed the central and dominant figure in the saga. It was he who shaped the family, defined its character, and instilled in its members a loyalty to each other that superseded all other identities, whether of a wider family, friends, religion, class, nationality, or citizenship. "There was definitely an awareness that we were different," said Soros. He does not remember the poem he wrote about Zeus, but as he talked at length about his youth, Tivadar emerged both as a loving and innovative father and a Platonic demiurge, a man who, using what life had taught him, prepared his sons for the unpredictable and unforeseen and set everything in motion.

Then on the verge of seventy, George Soros gave the impression that his dialogue with his long-dead father was far from over. During long conversations at his baronial Westchester County estate, he would digress into what appeared to be lifelong musings about Tivadar. "I guess he could be best described by the German word lebenkunstler, or artist of life," he observed. "Was he a strong man or a weak man? Even to this day I am in doubt. On the one hand, he was very strong and this had to do with his First World War experience when he obviously went through very trying times as a prisoner in Siberia and then witnessing the Russian civil war. People were getting killed and he went through hell. Obviously, the very fact that he lived through it may have marked him so powerfully that maybe he didn't want that kind of exposure again. And so he may have bought himself a comfortable life by marrying my mother. Here there was a sense that he had withdrawn, lost ambition."

As Soros weighed such judgments his thoughts moved forward to 1944, the most instructive year of his own adolescence and perhaps of his entire life, when Tivadar, no longer simply an artist of life, drew upon his experiences of Siberian rigors to make sure that his immediate family, as well as many other endangered Hungarian Jews, would escape the Nazis and their Hungarian Arrow Cross henchmen. Here Tivadar had undoubtedly been strong, and his son would later write of that year, when Budapest was in flames and when people like him were being deported or taken to the Danube and shot, that it had been "the happiest of his life," for it had provided him with an opportunity to observe a man he adored and admired act bravely and well.

Clearly, Tivadar has persisted as a dominating presence in George's mind, and on a wintry day in 1999, as he sat in the sun room of his resplendently furnished home, surrounded by paintings by Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and Childe Hassam, the multibillionaire and pioneering global philanthropist casually found parallels between Tivadar's life and his own, seemingly questioning how he had measured up.

He explained how he had experienced the lowest point in his own life, or his own Siberia, when after leaving Hungary he found himself a seventeen-year-old in England, without money, friends, or likely prospects. "I had the feeling that I had touched bottom, and that I could only rise from there. That is a strong thing. It has also marked me for life, because I don't ever want to be there again. I have a bit of a phobia about having to live through it again. Why do you think I made so much money? I may not feel menaced now but there is a feeling in me that if I were in that position again, or if I were in the position that my father was in in 1944, that I would not actually survive, that I am no longer in condition, no longer in training. I've gotten soft, you know."

Tivadar was born in 1893 into an Orthodox Jewish family, whose name was not Soros but Schwartz, in Nyirbakta, a rural village not far from Hungary's border with Ukraine. His own father had a general store and sold farm equipment. The business prospered, and when Tivadar, the second of eight children, was still quite young the family moved to Nyiregyhaza, the regional center in northeastern Hungary. By giving their oldest son a typically Hungarian name like Tivadar instead of its German equivalent, Teodor, his parents were reflecting the respectful identification that many successful, rising, and assimilating Jews were showing for the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. Though the family had roots in Jewish piety, by the time Tivadar and his siblings were born, many of its members were becoming less visibly devout. George believes his paternal grandparents spoke Yiddish, and he remembers being amused when as a child he noticed that one of his father's sisters was bald. The traditional wig that as a married Jewish woman she wore over her shaved head had slipped as she dozed on the living room couch while she visited her brother's family in Budapest. Tivadar, who has left separate biographical accounts of his experiences in each of the century's world wars, noted in one of them that his father had lost his religious zeal but that he kept this from his friends and neighbors in the interest of community harmony and continued to regularly attend synagogue.

Tivadar himself grew openly less religious and more assimilated than his brothers and sisters, though he too never broke ties with the more religious part of his family, nor they with him. In Maskerado: Dancing around Death in Nazi Hungary,* a memoir he wrote in Esperanto, Tivadar reflected on his religious beliefs, saying that there were periods in his youth "when the problems of god and religion and of mankind and the universe were foremost in my mind," with the "preoccupation strongest around the age of thirteen." He added that he had been particularly interested in the problem of death and afterlife. However, he added that after much reading, he ultimately concluded that "not only did God make man in his own image, but also man imagines God in his own human way. The anthropomorphic nature of the deity frightened me away from organized religion. Instead of going to services I was happier worrying about human lives. Understanding, a love of people, tolerance-these were the virtues I cultivated." With a touch of self-mockery he added that such tolerance was soon tested since his Erzebet was an "enthusiast for all kinds of religious mysticism."

During the latter part of the nineteenth century Jews in Hungary had grown markedly in numbers, prosperity, and prominence. They fared better under Magyar rule than virtually anywhere else in Europe, and Soros's grandfather Schwartz was among the Jewish merchants who benefited as capitalism and the industrial age continued to alter a ... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"For those who know little about this remarkable . . . billionaire, a titillating first chapter."
--The Economist

"Soros is never fawning, and the psychological portrait it draws is convincing and illuminating. Soros' life, no matter how you slice it, has been extraordinary. The first several chapters read like a thriller. Kaufman excels at dissecting and explaining Soros' psychological makeup."
--Andrew Leonard, Salon

"George Soros's story is full of drama and determination, personal growth and bold action, idealism and big money, failures and soaring successes. If you learn what makes him tick, you will understand more about all of us. Kaufman has written an excellent book."
--Bill Bradley

"In this compelling portrait Michael Kaufman reveals the unknown and unexpected George Soros."
--Kati Marton

"A fascinating account of one of the great men of our times."
--Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

"The value of this beautifully written book is that while writing about such an unusual, dynamic, and rich personality as George Soros, Michael T. Kaufman has carefully avoided the dangers of facile hagiography. Thanks to this we have an extraordinarily vivid and colorful portrait of one of the most interesting and farsighted figures of our time—a man who through his achievements showed that one can build and use a fortune to help others live better and more wisely."
--Ryszard Kapuciski

"A flinty-eyed exposition of a brilliant capitalist, devoted provocateur and accidental humanitarian. You come away believing it is possible to be a really rich man and a really good man after all."
--John Rothchild, New York Times

"George Soros is no ordinary rich man. And Soros is not an ordinary rich man's biography . . . [In this] richly textured portrait . . . Soros emerges a deeply fascinating and appealing man. Kaufman writes with both insight and compassion."
--Judith Warner, Washington Post Book World --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

ography of George Soros written with his cooperation--a dramatic story of the capitalistic genius who has become the leading philanthropist of our time.<br><br>In a fascinating narrative, we follow Soros from European dislocation to unfathomable success and wealth. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, he was on his own by age 14, passing as an Aryan to survive World War II. As a penniless 17-year-old in London, he dreamed both of personal glory and making the world less harsh. Ambition and opportunity drove him to Wall Street, where he arrived in 1956. Soon he was "the greatest money manager in the world." In his early 50s, restless and having made his fortune, Soros turned to doing good as a full-time occupation, showing the same energy, imagination, and courage in spending his money as he had in making it. He has invested more than $1 billion worldwide through his Open Society foundations, undermining the kind of totalitarianism he knew in his youth. Kaufman reveals how Soro --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

George Soros was once described as "the only private citizen [of the U.S.] who has his own foreign policy." In this penetrating biography, Michael Kaufman explores the multifaceted life of a man who instead describes himself as "a financial, philanthropic, and philosophical speculator."

Like Intel chairman Andrew Grove, whose memoir Swimming Across touches on some of the same territory, Soros grew up as the scion of a Hungarian Jewish family, many of whose members did not survive the Holocaust. Inclined toward philosophy (a field in which he sometimes writes even today, though many philosophers wish he would not), Soros escaped to England, and later America, and put his sharp mind to work making a huge fortune. Not content to live a leisurely or unexamined life, Soros put more than $1 billion to use in bettering the lives of citizens of formerly totalitarian regimes--and even in hastening the end of dictatorships around the world.

Former New York Times columnist Kaufman delivers a respectful account, closeted skeletons and all, of Soros's life and work, and his book will interest a wide range of readers. --Gregory McNamee --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

What makes George Soros such a fascinating topic for biographers? The year 1995 saw Robert Slater's Soros: The Life, Times and Trading Secrets of the World's Greatest Investor and Soros's own Soros on Soros, written with Byron Wien and Krisztina Koenan. Now Kaufman, a former New York Times award-winning reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor, documents the life of this successful but controversial figure, drawing on unpublished manuscripts and interviews with Soros, his family, and acquaintances. The result is this wide-ranging and absorbing book. Although the work covers the full spectrum of Soros's activities, the recurring theme is of Soros the person and his never-ending pursuit of universal truths. Despite his achievements as a remarkable money manager and generous philanthropist, Soros's lifelong dream was to become a noted philosopher. Leaving his home in Budapest at 14, he eventually became a Wall Street maverick and made billions so that he could give it away. Soros has used his wealth to create a network of Open Society foundations in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union to foster democratic institutions. More recently, he has expanded his philanthropic network to the United States, focusing on various social issues. This comprehensive biography is a good selection for business collections. Bellinda Wise, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, NY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.