fact, the more urgently he tried to propound Homaranism (by
whatever name), the more he found himself detaching it from
Esperanto. In Boulogne in 1905, he had been willing to sacrifice
Homaranism to give Esperanto a fighting chance in Western Europe;
now he was willing to cleave Esperanto from Homaranism, that his
precious, beleaguered creed might survive him. He was ready to
underwrite, at his own expense, a printed prospectus to be sent to
five thousand world newspapers and five thousand “of the most
important people in the world of knowledge.” 120 In 1915, he told his
friend Marie Henkel, an Esperanto poet from Dresden, that he
wanted his pamphlet Homaranismo to be translated into four
national languages and published in “every influential newspaper in
the world.” He had once asked Esperantists to translate masterworks
of all European literatures into Esperanto; now he wanted his
Esperanto tract rendered in the most powerful national languages of
Europe.
The war put paid to Zamenhof’s dreams of both congress and
campaign, but it did not stop him entirely. He had realized a hard
fact: that the interna ideo, once he’d nobly handed it over to the
conscience of each Esperantist, had irretrievably fallen out of his
grasp. In the early weeks of 1917, revising Homaranism once again,
he took pains to distinguish between the interna ideo of Esperanto
and Homaranism. As it stood, he now wrote, the interna ideo was an
“undefined feeling or hope,” which each Esperantist was free to
embrace or reject, but in time, he hoped, individuals of conscience
would embrace Homaranismo, “a special and completely defined
political-religious program.” 121 Esperanto on its own was not
enough to repair the world; only a community that embraced the
values of Homaranism could advance the common good.
Zamenhof’s hope had dimmed, perhaps, but it was never entirely
eclipsed. His final version of Homaranismo, like the Unua Libro of
1887, contained coupons for those willing to endorse and sign on to
a new way of thinking, speaking, and acting. But it was too late for
coupons and pledges. Homaranismo was to be Zamenhof’s letter to
Babel, but it never appeared, as he’d hoped, in foreign languages;
only six decades later was it finally published, in Esperanto, in
Zamenhof’s collected works.
When Zamenhof made this final visit to the temple of
Homaranism shortly before his death in 1917, he found himself
alone, as he had after his call to the Jews of Russia. A photograph
taken at that time is the only portrait extant in which he does not
meet the camera’s gaze. Instead, he gazes off with the serenity of a
bespectacled bodhisattva. When he died of heart failure, in April
1917, he had been trying for thirty years to create a people worthy
of the coming, better world. He had seen the Esperantists through
schism and betrayal, through defection and disaffection. But in the
end, he knew that they would never become the people he’d tried to
create, who would share a future but not a past; who would cherish
their creed, pass it to their children, and bring others into the fold.
What Zamenhof could not know was that Esperanto would
survive the brutal twentieth century because women and men in
each generation reinvented it—at times, during the century’s most
bloody decades, at risk of their lives. The shadowy “inner idea” in
which Zamenhof had wanted to lodge his ideal of community turned
out to harbor many other contradictory ideals, some frankly
incompatible with Zamenhof’s. Sometimes it would seem that there
were as many “inner ideas” as Esperantists. But it was the
Esperantists after all, flawed, bickering, merely human, who would
shadow forth the people of a more just, harmonious world.
Samideanoj II
Iznik to Białystok, or unu granda rondo familia
IZNIK
1. Revenants
A few years ago, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
New Jersey, the philosopher Avishai Margalit asked whatever
became of the third member of the revolutionary trinity of liberty,
equality, fraternity. Having just returned from an Esperanto
congress, I wanted to tell him that he wasn’t looking in the right
place; fraternity, the runt of the litter, was being fed on royal jelly
in Esperantujo. During gatherings such as the annual Middle Eastern
Conference (Mezorienta Kunveno), dislocated, sped-up, and 24–7ed,
samideanoj form bonds quickly. Just speaking the language, with its
railroad-flat compounds and exotic adverbs, makes them tipsy with
pleasure. Strangers just yesterday, they’re now as familiar with one
another as college roommates, army buddies, colleagues denied
tenure the same day. They’re more than friends; they’re family.
As Margalit argues in his essay “Fraternity” (2005), the ideal of
fraternalism dismantled the ancien regime of paternalism, in which
a figurative, ruling “father” decides what is good for his figurative,
“subjected” children. So it’s no accident that fraternity flourishes in
Esperantujo, since Zamenhof, by ceding his paternal authority over
Esperanto to its users from the start, freed Esperanto from the “dead
hand” of its founding father. Instead he created, in the words of his
inaugural anthem, “La Espero,” unu granda rondo familia—one great
family circle.
On the ground, however, Esperantist fraternalism does not evoke
a lot of family resemblances; that’s what happens when people
share a future but not a past. Esperantists are as mixed as Esperantic
phonemes, thrown together from many languages. They are
multilingual and multicultural, and many are multinational and
multiethnic as well. When you ask where they’re from, they draw
invisible maps with a finger on the table, then trace their trajectory.
It takes about five minutes of conversation to learn that Dora Patel
from Copenhagen is an Englishwoman raised in St. Albans, England;
Mateo, an Israeli computer scientist, is a Turinese Catholic; Ambrus
is a Hungarian living in Luxembourg. During a coffee break on an
excursion in Turkey, Miguel, a Spaniard, and a German named
Albert tell me their surnames are judadivena—of Jewish origin.
(Albert tries out his English on me with a Scottish brogue, the residue
of a sojourn in Aberdeen.)
Like Jews, Esperantists navigate among multiple identities at
once, moving fluidly from their nuclear families to Esperantic circles
to the workplace, and on to a world indifferent to matters of
fraternity and harmony. I’ll confess that at Esperanto gatherings, I
sometimes feel that I’m among meta-Jews; after all, Esperanto was
invented by a Jew who renounced peoplehood, but couldn’t imagine
a world without it. And although in Hilelismo and Homaranismo
Zamenhof conceived of a widening gyre of meta-Jewish people, his
experience at Boulogne warned him that he must not speak of them
this way. After Boulogne, he would always speak of Esperantists as
the para-people of Esperantujo, and the germ of the “great family
circle” of all humanity.
* * *
In the spring of 2009, I flew to Turkey for the Second Middle Eastern