The Vulnerable Millionaire

by Zsuzsanna Ferencz MagyarOnline.net

Zoltán Böszörményi is a well-turned-out, good-looking Western-style businessman. His appearance shows he attracts not only money but women, too.

Sensational (auto)biographies are nothing new to Eastern Europeans. But even the most audacious of them will be dwarfed by Zoltán Böszörményi’s life story. He’s managed to squeeze several lives into his fifty years so far, and destiny is likely to have several more in store for him. His business career has given him the security money can offer, whereas his literary activities have left him vulnerable.

There is one thing his short bio note does not betray: the interaction between him and his books. Yes, he writes his books, but they too keep forming him, writing him. The two sides take each other seriously.

After some initial struggles as an Eastern-European refugee in Canada, he was able to start his own business in advertising in Toronto and thus get on the road to riches.

The collapse of Communism  presented him with a new opportunity: he immediately realized there was a lot of money to be made in Romania under the new regime. He zeroed in on making light bulbs.

He bought a broken-down old factory in Bucharest for $1.4 M and turned it into Luxten Lighting Co, Inc, retaining majority control for 10  years.

When he moved to Monaco as a millionaire he decided to “invest” some of his money into literature. First he was a principal shareholder in the Jelenkor Publishing House of Hungary, and then in 2001 he extended his publishing and cultural empire to the city of Arad, in Transylvania, Romania, consisting of a Hungarian daily (Nyugati Jelen) and a monthly literary journal the (Irodalmi Jelen), a theater and a Romanian language daily.

At present he commutes between Barbados, Monaco, Budapest, Bucharest and Arad, and places unknown. He has had four volumes of poetry and one novel published, but none of them by his own publishing company.

His current occupation: writer, poet, reader, editor-in-chief and patron of the arts. In other words, he’s losing money now, instead of making it.

Boszormenyi’s answers to some questions:

I’m crazy about women. And I don’t discriminate against any particular type, but I prefer them pleasant without being given to flattery. On the other hand, I stay away from the aggressive type. As it is, a man over fifty tends to be overly sentimental and calculating even while being a skirt chaser; a fool for short. Why should I be an exception?

And why do I write, if the world revolves around money and sex? The most important reason is that I want to describe the way I see the world. By writing about it, I can give true meaning to my life. And I want to arouse the reader’s consciousness. Alexander the Great is said to have had two things under his pillow: his sword and Homer’s Iliad. That shows the power of literature. Montaigne said somewhere that a book was happiness itself. If a book can make one happy, then that’s another reason for me to write. I believe the written word is a form of immortality. And I, too, would like to be immortal.

Money can be a goal as well as a means. But we can’t use it to purchase life, not even perfect health. Ultimately, it’s meaningless, worthless. And yet you have to treat it with respect, use it in appropriate doses, otherwise it’ll jilt you, it’ll pull away from you like an estranged lover. I am not a scrooge, except to myself, I don’t treat myself to little “toys”, like a yacht or a Rolls Royce. Instead, I try to find good causes on which to spend my ‘excess’ money.