of hormones … a sort of Grand Awakening. And it filled a need for
me to break out of a highly judgmental world.” The following year,
he traveled to Warsaw for Zamenhof’s centennial, bringing with him
a suitcase filled to the brim with English sweaters; selling these on
the street financed three weeks in iron-curtain Poland. “Poland was
waking up; there was energy all over. My friends in England had
prejudiced assumptions about life in Eastern Europe, but I was
discovering that these people in Poland were living complete lives;
they had value systems that were coherent and integrated. Yes, they
might be under pressure, they might not like their government, but
they were not brain-washed.”
During the mid-sixties, Tonkin became the first TEJO president to
sit on the UEA board. He was being groomed for leadership by the
UEA president, a charismatic Croatian jurist named *Ivo Lapenna.
Lapenna’s passion for discipline and his quest for world recognition
would both leave a deep imprint on the UEA. Famously controlling
and autocratic, he was not above humiliating his opponents; as
Tonkin puts it, “He chewed up colleagues who were not as smart as
he was.” After a beat, he chuckles; “Well, I was sort of an arrogant
son of a bitch myself.” In 1974, Tonkin succeeded Lapenna as UEA
president, trying to steer an even course amid bitter infighting. “I
was willing to take insults and defeats without responding. I was
accused of being a communist faggot in France. Nasty personal stuff.
Since I was neither one nor the other, I brushed it off easily.”
“Were you disillusioned by all this animosity among
Esperantists?” I ask.
“No, Esperantists quarrel like crazy. People quarrel when they
fail, or when they’ve screwed up in some way. But that said, here’s
the thing: Esperanto works. Its success is as a language community;
it’s a collection of shared values: the value of cooperation; openness
to other ways of thinking; peace. Talking rather than fighting.” It
was on Tonkin’s watch that the Esperanto world officially gave up
its losing battle against global English. “Zamenhof was invested in
the idea that diversity of languages was a curse, but since 1974,
there’s been a seismic shift in the way we think about language:
Babel is good. Multilingualism is good. With respect to English, they
need to convince people that using English is not value-free; we
need to stop the aggression of English with more multilingualism.
The real issue is not now; it’s what happens a hundred years from
now.” If only Tonkin could stick around till then.
I ask him if there are any general characteristics that Esperantists
share. “There’s a bifurcation in the way they operate, moving
between a career and Esperanto.” He’s talking about himself now,
about making his career in an elite world of university intellectuals
as skeptical of utopian solutions as they are of the “grand
narratives” of history and knowledge. And he’s talking about me, as
I navigate between exuberant Esperanto gatherings and dispiriting
English Department meetings where my colleagues grouse about a
steep decline in the number of English majors (to which someone
invariably responds that the decline is a national trend; small
consolation). I’m sure Tonkin’s heard the question I get at literature
conferences when I tell colleagues what I’m working on.
“Esperanto?” they ask in puzzlement. “Isn’t it dead?”
If I’d wanted to work on a dead language, I’d have chosen Latin—
so much more useful.
“Esperantists are more adventurous than ordinary mortals,”
Tonkin continues. While we’ve talked, his responses have become a
bit looser, more improvisatory. “They’re people who [have been]
looking for something—and for themselves—and failing to find it.
Often, people who don’t fit in. Or people who understand something
other people don’t. I think there are some people who are
Esperantists who never find their way to Esperanto at all; I call
them virtual Esperantists.” Clearly that doesn’t mean me, on two
counts: I’ve found my way to Esperanto and according to the
Declaration of Boulogne, simply using the language qualifies me as
an Esperantist. On the other hand, I’m always something of an
outsider here. For one thing, Esperantists know that a Princeton
professor can bring much-needed prestige to their cause, all the
more so if she can enthuse about Esperantic fraternity—the granda
rondo familia—while remaining unseduced by utopian dreams of a
universal language. Ironically, I’m one of the few people in the
Esperanto world to have a professional interest in it. Amid all the
ravishing, free-flowing, multicultural conversation, my chats with
Esperantists always involve a tacit exchange: they give me access so
I’ll give them status.
And for another thing, I’m a practicing, public Jew—not simply
judadivena (of Jewish descent)—and when I hear condescension
about particularism, I reach for my pistol. I wouldn’t still be
wandering in Esperantujo if I believed that Zamenhof regarded
Judaism with condescension or contempt; in my mind’s eye, while
he “crosses the Rubicon” to universalism, he’s carrying Judaism on
his back. A decade ago, my children’s school celebrated “United
Nations Day” by asking parents to send in “the bread you eat in
your culture.” Instead of giving me joy in my bread-eating brothers
and sisters, the hypercarb communion set my teeth on edge. It
mattered to me that focaccia is focaccia and naan, naan; it still does.
Which is all to say that here in Białystok, among these meta-Jews
—this “great family circle” of Esperantists—I suddenly realize what I
am: a meta-Esperantist Jew.
5. Big-endians and Little-endians
The Akademio de Esperanto is about to hold its annual public
meeting. “The academy,” Tonkin once told me, “is a sort of fire
brigade to watch out for misuses. Since most people write Esperanto
before speaking it, there’s less of a gap between the spoken and the
written word than in many languages; it’s used fairly
conservatively. But there are some great fights. Take the famous
‘ata-ita’ debate, the Esperanto version of Swift’s Big-endians versus
Little-endians.” I’ve heard of this famous controversy about whether
Esperanto verbs express tenses (present, past, future) or aspects
(whether an act is completed or ongoing). All discussions about the
debate, which include several entire books, cite a famously
contradictory statement of Zamenhof, who couldn’t seem to decide
himself. The “ata-ita” debate may be the only grammatical
controversy with its own Wikipedia entry—in the Esperanto
Vikipedio.
Seventeen of the forty-four academicians, four women and
thirteen men, take their places on the stage, specialists in
astrophysics,
banking,
education,
literature,
linguistics,
mathematics. Among them are Tonkin, LÖwenstein, and *Otto Prytz,
a blind professor emeritus of Spanish from Oslo. Nearly half of the