Tibor Sekelj
Tibor Sekelj · Exploration & Discovery
Explorateur, ethnographe et écrivain espérantiste, auteur de Kumeŭaŭa, le fils de la jungle
14 février 1912 — 20 septembre 1988
Spišská Sobota (Hongrie, aujourd'hui Slovaquie) — mort à Subotica (Yougoslavie)
Tibor Sekelj is recognized among Jewish contributors to Exploration & Discovery — Explorateur, ethnographe et écrivain espérantiste, auteur de Kumeŭaŭa, le fils de la jungle
Origins and early life
Tibor Sekelj was born on 14 February 1912 at Spišská Sobota, then in Hungary and today in Slovakia, into a Jewish family; the sources do not settle whether it was his father or his mother who carried the descent, and this fiche says so rather than inventing a certainty, noting that he himself spoke publicly at Leuven in 1982 of his Sephardi Jewish ancestry and that the Croatian Jewish biographical lexicon of the Miroslav Krleža Institute devotes an entry to him.
The family moved often, and he grew up speaking Hungarian, Croatian, German and Esperanto, eventually working in some twenty languages.
Work and career
He studied law at Zagreb, turned to journalism, and in 1939 left for Argentina, from where his life became a series of expeditions: he climbed Aconcagua in 1944 in a party whose survival he described in his first successful book, explored unmapped regions of the Amazon and of Mato Grosso, crossed India, Nepal and Japan, and travelled through Africa and Oceania. He lived among the peoples he visited rather than passing through, and his ethnographic collections went to the museum at Subotica, which he later directed.
He wrote some thirty books, most of them in Esperanto, including Kumeŭaŭa, the son of the jungle, a story of an Amazonian boy that was named best children's book of the year in Japan in 1983 and translated into more than twenty languages. He worked for UNESCO and for the Universal Esperanto Association and died at Subotica on 20 September 1988.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://zbl.lzmk.hr/
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Explorateur, ethnographe et écrivain espérantiste, auteur de Kumeŭaŭa, le fils de la jungle
Source: https://zbl.lzmk.hr/
