Conference of Esperantists. As it happened, the gathering coincided
precisely with a meeting of the G20 in London. Just as the movers,
shakers, makers, and breakers of the world’s twenty richest nations
convened in London, I arrived in Iznik, a sleepy lakeside town three
hours east of Istanbul. At this ingathering of nations, thirty-five
citizens of seventeen countries talked about finances, dined at long
communal tables, and assembled, like our counterparts in London,
for a group photo. My Esperanto was far from fluent, but it had
progressed beyond novice level, and it improved once I’d had a few
conversations and recovered from jetlag; a glass or two of wine
improved it further. Which was all to the good: here, unlike London,
no interpreters were in evidence; none was needed, since our four-
day summit of talks and tours, cabaret and chit-chat all took place in
la bela lingvo, Esperanto.
Eran Regev, a young Israeli computer scientist, was one of three
organizers of the gathering. The previous year, while the Israeli
government was building a separation barrier twenty-five feet high
between Israel and the West Bank, Eran decided it was time to talk
through walls. To this end, along with UEA ex-President *Renato
Corsetti and a Jordanian, Eran convened the First Middle Eastern
Conference in Amman. Most of the twenty-five attendees were
Israelis; also on hand were three Turks and a few venturesome
Europeans. That only a handful of Arabs attended, all but one
Jordanian, disappointed Eran, but didn’t surprise him.
But, as I was surprised to learn from another Israeli Esperantist,
the composer *Doron Modan, this was actually not the first Middle
Eastern Esperanto Conference. Between 1934 and 1948, there was a
series of encounters—conferences, excursions, informal visits, and
joint educational ventures—between Jewish Esperantists living in
Mandate-era Palestine and the Egipta Esperanto-Asocio (EEA), a
contingent of Arabs, Britons, and others who convened in Cairo.
Esperanto had had an erratic presence in Jersualem since 1908,
when the (non-Jewish) director of the German Hospital founded the
first Esperanto group. By 1925, sustained activity led to a congress
in Jerusalem; the second congress, a joint effort of Paco kaj Frateco
(Peace and Brotherhood), the Jerusalem Esperanto circle, and
Konkordo (Concord) was held in May 1934, during a three-day
“Oriental Fair” in Tel Aviv. It drew more than one hundred
participants, including several Egyptians; a street in Tel Aviv, still
called Zamenhof Street, was solemnly dedicated to the memory of
Doktoro Esperanto. During the next decade, Jews and Arabs in
Palestine collaborated on Esperanto instructional materials,
published both in Hebrew and Arabic. Meanwhile, in Egypt, a Coptic
Esperantist named Tadros Megalli had begun teaching Esperanto to
small groups of Egyptians, soldiers from Britain and New Zealand,
and a class of young girls.
In April 1944, Megalli went to Palestine with his student, Nassif
Isaac, to attend the first congress of the Palestine Esperanto League
(PEL), founded in 1941. While there, he visited a couple of Jewish
agricultural settlements. Megalli’s post-congress effusions, in the
Arabic-language magazine Asyut, were worthy of a Jewish Agency
propaganda newsreeclass="underline" “We truly admired the magnificent labors
undertaken by the Jews, who created, from the rocks and desert soil,
fecund and fruit-bearing earth.” An invitation to PEL members to
attend the first Egyptian national congress, an eight-day
extravaganza to include visits to mosques and synagogues, as well
as a train trip to the pyramids, elicited 110 enthusiastic pledges. A
failure to obtain visas for PEL members spurred one Jewish
Esperantist to propose a new umbrella organization, the Near
Eastern Esperanto League (PROEL), to be based in Cairo. A
counterproposal emerged from another Jewish member of PEL: a
series of coordinated joint ventures for the EEA and the PEL,
including a shared headquarters that would alternate between Tel
Aviv and Cairo, a committee to entreat the UEA to hold an
upcoming annual congress in the Near East, and a jointly edited
bulletin. As Jews, they were building a Jewish state; as samideanoj,
they were transforming the Near East into an Esperantist utopia.
But when the PEL next convened in Jerusalem two weeks before
the liberation of Buchenwald, neither the Egyptians nor the local
Arabs attended. Between the end of World War II and 1948, there
were only sporadic visits between EEA and PEL and occasional
gestures of goodwill. When the grapeshot of scattered Arab-Jewish
conflicts became artillery rounds, relations between the PEL and
EEA ceased and their fortunes diverged. The PEL, now the Esperanto
League of Israel (ELI), licked its wounds and welcomed a new influx
of samideanoj from among the Jewish refugees. By 1951 the EEA
collapsed, most of its foreign membership having dispersed. Nassif
Isaac, photographed in 1944 on a Jerusalem street, arm in arm with
his Egyptian mentor and Jewish samideanoj, went on to write books
about spiritualism and reincarnation. He himself became a revenant,
year after year, the sole Arab delegate to the Universal Congress.
2. “The Blackened Gull”
The road from Istanbul to Iznik winds past high-rises, sport
stadiums, and blacktops, bumps up against the ferry port at the Sea
of Marmara, and resumes, on the far shore, in countryside. We drive
past olive groves and fields of anemones studded with beehives;
their honeycombs are tangy, as if the bees went out for curry the
night before.
The conference organizer, *Murat Ozdizdar, is a compact, smooth-
shaven high school chemistry teacher in his mid-forties. In an olive-
green Timberland fleece, he looks game and prepared, like a hiker
heading into the backwoods. Murat is the sort of affable and plucky
traveler who totes Lonely Planet guidebooks, except that he spends
most of his off hours organizing Esperanto events, for both Turks
and visitors. In fluent, expressive Esperanto, he tells me about his
travels overland in Nepal and Cambodia, and itemizes on his fingers
(in euros) the fantastic economies he discovered there. When he
visited America, the generosity of American acquaintances—the in-
laws of a cousin’s friend, the friend of a cousin’s in-laws—had
proved a perfect complement, in dollars, for his own stunning feats
of thrift.
Murat, with an eye to the future of the Turkish movement, has in
tow three of his star chemistry students. Someday they might be star
Esperanto students, but just now they’ve barely finished a two-week
crash course taught by a teacher Murat had flown in from Serbia.
Still in their school uniforms, the boys are chatting in Turkish,
sprawled over comic books, dozing over their iPhones. From time to
time, a tinny voice begins to sing “In the towowown where I was
born” and one of them answers his phone with a sleepy, “Alo?” Also
on the bus are Branko, a Serbian actor and Esperanto broadcaster,
formerly in aeronautics (“times were okay on earth,” he tells me,