“but not so good in the sky”), and Adrian, an affable, ruddy retired
public-health professor from Maastricht. His mother, he tells me, was
Anne Frank’s third-grade teacher.
“What was Anne Frank like?” I ask. He shrugs, as if to say, No
man is a hero to his valet.
Adrian now runs a B&B called Esperanto Domo, where
Esperantists stay gratis. When we disembark in Iznik, he peers at a
city map, swiftly decodes the iconic beer steins ringing the lake, and
heads off.
As one Turkish conferee puts it, “Iznik is seismologically
interesting.” Located near a fault line where a 1999 earthquake
killed an estimated forty thousand people, Iznik is an unlikely site
for a ceramics industry, but those brilliant aqua and persimmon tiles
that line the walls of Topkapi Palace are all made here. Murat’s nose
for a bargain has sniffed out a dormitory for seismologists on a
dusty road a mile from town, where shared rooms go for twelve
euros per night. Across the road are a bakery that runs out of bread
around eight a.m., and next to it, a bar that closes by nine p.m. In
the dimly lit reception area, there is no registration table, no written
program; when we assemble, there is no solena malfermito (official
opening) at which the Esperanto anthem, Zamenhof’s hymn “La
Espero,” is customarily sung. Nor do I see the numbered nametags
Esperantists always wear to identify themselves. (Names can be
hard to catch by ear, but a number can quickly be looked up in the
program.) With ingenuity in long supply in Esperantujo, participants
soon improvise them from luggage tags.
If you go to a Middle Eastern Esperanto conference expecting
panels on Turkish-Israeli tensions, Iranian armaments, or civilian
casualties in Gaza, you will be disappointed. As far as programming
goes, smaller Esperanto conferences resemble high school student
council meetings, where the agenda is dominated by the student
council itself. The program, scrawled in the lobby on a whiteboard,
indeed revolves around Esperanto—the movement and, as a
secondary matter, the language. This afternoon there will be
sessions on the movement in Israel and Turkey; this morning, to
open the conference, a session on Iran. Nader, a voluble pediatric
cardiologist from Tehran, is busily setting up his PowerPoint
presentation.
I know Nader only through correspondence. A few weeks earlier,
I had sent out a call for Esperanto poems, hoping to set up a
deklamado (reading) in Iznik. Within ten minutes Nader had emailed
me the manuscript of an entire volume of original Esperanto poems
by Iranians, edited by himself. Among dozens of odes to springtime,
friends, and lovers, Nader’s own 2003 poem “The Blackened Gull”
stood out. The gull, begrimed with naphtha from oilfields burned in
Operation Desert Storm, bears witness:
Ligo inter ŝtatoj,
Plene armitaj soldatoj,
Bombo-riĉaj Virkatoj,
Malfeliĉaj atakatoj.
(A league among states,
Heavily armed soldiers,
Bomb-brimming Tomcats,
Unfortunate victims.)
I was surprised to find verse about my own belligerent country
since, except for antifascist satires about fascism, Esperanto poetry
generally falls into line with the movement’s revered tradition of
political neutrality. Did it make a difference that this was a gull, not
an Iraqi, croaking defiance—and in Esperanto? Maybe not; but
maybe. Now, as his bullet points flash on the screen, Nader makes
no mention of Tomcats, nor of Desert Storm, nor of any of the things
Americans talk about when we talk about Iran: nuclear arsenals,
anti-Semitism, homophobia; smiles and guns for Hezbollah. Instead,
it shows Iranian Esperantists, young and old, men and women—
some head-scarved, some not—dancing at a Norouz party, trekking
in Azerbaijan, and teaching the lingvo de paco (language of peace) to
Afghan refugees.
Nader sits down to polite applause, and Gabi goes to the podium.
She’s a hip, black-clad Sephardic Israeli wearing clunky pewter
beads shaped in stars of David, crosses, and crescents. Here’s her
update about the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa clubs: as in Iran, so
in Israel—dancing, trekking, teaching.
Next comes a lecture on landnomoj, the Esperanto names of
countries, a landmine of a topic. The lecturer is *Anna LÖwenstein, a
slim, no-nonsense Briton in corduroys and sensible shoes. Anna’s a
leading woman of letters in the Esperanto world; she’s written two
Esperanto-language historical novels set in Rome, where she and her
husband Renato Corsetti live. She’s also one of a handful of women
members of the academy and, as I would later learn, the founding
editor of the feminist journal Sekso kaj Egaleco (Sex and Equality).
Anna promises to dispel, once and for all, the confusion around
country names. One only needs to understand the rationale, she
insists. Countries based on nationalities are formed from the name
of the people. “Italoj live in Italujo,” she says, motioning to us to
repeat after her, using the “container” suffix, ujo, to denote “the
place containing Italians.” Conversely, she continues, the names of
certain countries, especially multiethnic ones, are the basis for
naming their citizens. Instead of naming the country after the
people, one names the citizens after the country using the “member”
suffix, ano: Israelo, Israelanoj. What Anna doesn’t say is that the
“rationale” has all the rationality of Europe’s borders since 1887,
which have shaped and reshaped themselves around empires,
nations, colonies, and treaties. To complicate matters, there’s a
“tomaytotomahto” factor caused by a tendency to drop the ujo
ending for the more internationalized io. Anna advises us to avoid
the latter practice, since it leads to confusion when the root itself
ends in i.
“For instance, a Burundian—” she continues.
“But why not ask the Burundians?” demands Agnes, a gravel-
voiced, pugnacious Fleming who, during breaks on the dorm patio,
is the lone smoker among us. “For example, Esperanto for ‘Flanders’
is Flandrio—but that’s a romanization; a more natural, Germanic
ending would be Flandren. So why should the Academy dictate to
the Burundians what to call themselves?”
“We’re not doing that,” replies Miguel, whose Spanish accent
slices through his Esperanto. “Anyway, why should the international
language honor tribal practices? No nation’s calling itself by a
natural name; language is a cultural convention.” Last night, he
directed me to his website, where I found an mp3 of his Esperanto
poem about a shamed samurai, recited to a doleful accompaniment
of shakuhachi flutes. “It’s crucial for academics like you to get the
word out about the movement,” he added, urgently. “Chomsky, you
remember, says it isn’t really a language.” Miguel’s a full-time
Esperanto teacher, one of the few people in Esperantujo who makes
a living (or most of one) from his expertise in the lingvo internacia.
To be told it “isn’t really a language” cuts deeply into his self-