At a table across the corridor, behind a sign reading “Bona
Espero,” sits an elegantly coiffed blond woman in her seventies with
a creamy silk outfit, chatting with a couple of Koreans. Bona Espero,
Esperanto for “good hope,” is an orphanage in rural Brazil founded
in the 1950s, run since the 1970s by German-born *Ursula
Grattapaglia and her Italian husband, *Giuseppe Grattapaglia. It
has always seemed more a legend than an institution, and I’m taken
aback to be face to face with Ursula herself.
“Are you Ursula Grattapaglia?” I ask.
“Of course!” she says heartily. Her light blue eyes are flecked with
coffee grinds.
“All the way from Brazil?”
“Of course! We come to the congress every summer, then we visit
family for a couple of weeks. We’ll go back at the end of the
month.” I tell her I’m an American professor writing a book about
the Esperanto movement, and ask for a leaflet.
“A leaflet?” she says in disgust. “Kara, kara, you must come and
visit,” she says, as if Brazil were just north of Hoboken. “Here’s my
card, find a time that convenes and come and stay with us.” We chat
for a few minutes and then she says, “I will be hearing from you”
with sublime certainty.
At the opening ceremony the next morning, some people are in
ribboned, gaitered national costumes; others, sombreros or alpine
hats. A substantial contingent sport Kelly green T-shirts bearing
Esperanto slogans: Vivu! Revu! Amu! (Live! Dream! Love!), or Ĉu vi
parolas ĝin? (Do you speak it?). One T-shirt features a grid
containing the entire table of correlatives. As the temperature rises
in the fiberglass hall, so does the noise level; the air grows pungent
with summer sweat. People, mostly over fifty, shuffle about,
embrace and chat, and move on. The ceremony is an irony-free
affair of speeches, greetings, performances, anthems, all transacted
with a sort of shabby pomp. Delegates from each national
association approach the podium, offer a brief greeting from their
country, and move offstage. Next, a few words from the organizing
committee, several more from the mayor of Białystok, and a lengthy
address by the UEA’s president, *Probal Dasgupta, an Indian
linguist. The guest of honor is “La Nepo”—the grandson of
Zamenhof, small, wizened and puckish. *Louis-Christophe Zaleski-
Zamenhof, né Ludwik Zamenhof, is affectionately referred to as
“LoZoZo”—which is how you pronounce his initials, LZZ, in
Esperanto. LZZ, who emigrated to France in the 1960s, is something
between a household god and a mascot, and his story, thanks to
Roman Dobrzyński’s 2003 biography, Zamenhof Street, is well
known.
After his father, Adam Zamenhof, was arrested and shot by the
Nazis in 1940, young Ludwik and his mother Wanda escaped the
Warsaw Ghetto and lived under assumed identities. To honor the
Polish pseudonym that had kept him alive—Krzysztof Zaleski—he
had embedded it in his legal name. His grandfather, LZZ now tells
us, described Esperanto as a “peace bridge” over a river of
incomprehension and intolerance, and now he, “La Nepo,” is a
builder of real bridges made of steel and concrete. Bridges are for
crossing, and what better place than Białystok to ponder his
grandfather’s intuition that a language of peace might enable us to
cross the bridge of understanding? Besides, he adds, 2009 is the UN’s
International Year of Reconciliation, and when has Esperanto ever
been as timely? (Sotto voce, the goateed man on my right points out
that 2009 is also the UN year of natural fibers.)
In sessions devoted to the conference theme, there’s a lot of talk
of bridges, some of it achingly sincere, much of it rather ironic.
*István Ertl, a Hungarian translator for the EU Court of Auditors in
Luxembourg, improvises on the theme: “Bridges? Bridges are crossed
by refugees and armies. And what do we do? We celebrate,
celebrate, celebrate; we’re old people running to and fro with green
flags.” He speaks rapidly; hip, blunt, dry. Suddenly an elderly man
in the audience stands up, and in a flat, American accent, blurts out
his name and conference number. His hand trembling visibly, he
points to István: “That man! That man is … incomprehensible!
Esperanto is meant to be understood. I ask you: how many people
here in Białystok could understand him?”
István deadpans, “Twenty-seven percent,” and goes on with his
oration.
Everyone agrees that bridges would connect Esperanto to those
who lack language rights or suffer from linguistic inequality—
bridges such as that built between the UEA and UNESCO in 1954,
when the latter accorded the UEA the status of “organization in
consultative relations.” Esperanto’s man at the UN, these days, is
*Neil Blonstein, a retired New York City schoolteacher who runs the
UEA’s tiny New York office—or third of an office. Since NGO
budgets are tight, the UEA shares a cramped basement space with
the U.S. Federation for Middle East Peace and the Earth Child
Institute. Neil has boiled the rationale for Esperanto down to an
elevator pitch, and he undoubtedly spends more time in elevators
than most people. Periodically he scouts the UN lobby, trying to
snag a precious few minutes with ambassadors and their staffs. He
makes his pitch, gets his picture taken, and attaches it to a mass
emaiclass="underline" “Subject: Four minutes today with Ban Ki-moon.”
“The problem with bridges,” remarks a gruff Slovenian, “is that
people don’t see themselves on the other side of anything. We have
a solution, but people don’t feel there is a problem.”
Tonkin, the former UEA head, has heard it before. “We need to
inform people, through outreach, clearly. But we also need to
strategize how to be effective within institutions; we’re one of the
only NGOs devoted to language rights. And we have to do all this
while we manage the paradox of inclusiveness and exclusiveness. So
we start by spreading the problem. The problem isn’t English. The
problem is that language is an institution of power.”
* * *
Tonkin knows a thing or two about power. He is ex-president of a
great many things: the University of Hartford, the UEA, and its
youth wing, TEJO, before that. Though gray and eminent, he’s
anything but an éminence grise; witness the way he dashes from
podium to podium, introducing, lecturing, even auctioneering in
rapid-fire Esperanto. He brings to mind Alice Roosevelt’s famous
comment about her father, Theodore: “He wanted to be the bride at
every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every
christening.” Now in his early seventies, Tonkin has been an
Esperantist for more than half a century.
Like many Esperantists of his generation, he fell in love with the
language in his teens, a time when identity is malleable and life
itself is a grand experiment—at least one’s own life is. In 1958
Tonkin attended his first TEJO conference, in Germany, a gathering
that was “astounding to a relatively sheltered eighteen-year-old full