for a beer in Luxembourg, dinner in Aachen and then home.” Only
he has no car … but no worries, he’ll borrow one. Adrian has been
an Esperantist since his university days in Amsterdam, but raising
four children (the younger two adopted from Korea) as a single
parent has kept him away from congresses for many years. Now,
pensioned and supplemented by his B&B income, he’s back in
Esperantic action.
Not that Adrian has stayed close to home all those years; quite the
contrary. After retiring as a public-health professor, he had a second
career as the international affairs director of an aviation university.
He’d flown from Dar es Salaam to Jakarta, Sydney, Morocco, Cyprus
—just about everywhere, setting up consortia, meeting with aviation
officials, researching crashes. It takes half an hour to discover three
places he has not visited: the Galapagos, Vietnam, and Princeton.
Invariably, he finds an Esperantist to show him around town, put
him up for a few days, perhaps drive him down to the beach. “I
don’t go places to see a valley or a tower,” he says with disdain; he’s
a sojourner, not a tourist. His habit, on visiting a new city, is to find
the best café or taverna and revisit it daily, shmoozing with regulars
and flirting with waitresses. And here in Białystok, he’s fast
becoming a regular at the Esperanto Café on the Rynek, where he
addresses the waitress in Polish: “I remember you from yesterday!
Enneke?—no, Emilie!” After the congress, he’ll head to Warsaw to
see friends, “but perhaps I’ll hit Belarus for a day from here, it’s only
just over the border.” He’ll look into a visa tomorrow. “You can plan
and plan,” he says, leaning back from his glass of Chianti
contentedly, “but the best plan is no plan.”
Adrian makes an excellent guide to the congress, by day and by
night. He knows everyone, the denaskuloj (native speakers), the
gravuloj (VIPs) and the stranguloj, who, besides our unicycling friend,
include a bearded French teen sprouting three pontyails and several
gray-braided elders dressed more or less like John the Baptist but for
the Guatemalan bags draped over their shoulders. Rarely do the
categories of gravuloj and stranguloj coincide, but when they do,
Adrian supplies the deep background. We meet the five Kazakh
teens who’ve come to Białystok by train, over three days and nights.
We take in a concert by Guinness World Record winner *Jean-Marc
Leclerq (known as JoMo), who sings in twenty-two languages. We
watch the tender one-man show about Zamenhof written and
performed by *Georgo (Jerzy) Handzlik, a Polish singer, actor, and
broadcaster.
Adrian points out the long-married couples, the exes and their
exes and theirs, and the kongresedzoj—elective “spouses,” invariably
from different countries where their husbands and wives are
working or minding kids or parents. They meet once a year at the
Universal Congress, their affair an open secret, fodder for gossip,
but worthy of respect. They’re fickle in their constancy, and constant
in fickleness; some of them have been at it for decades. After the
day’s councils and talks, they’ll meet for a glass of wine and dine in
cheap eateries with plank floors. After dinner, they’ll stroll into
town, chatting in Esperanto until the light dwindles and they return
to the hotel, the guesthouse, the B&B. And after that, Esperanto
dissolves into the common language of flesh.
7. Flickering Shadows
During the run-up to Zamenhof’s centenary in 1959, his Judaism
became an explicit theme for discussion. That year, an Israeli
Esperantist named Naftali Zvi Maimon published an exquisitely
researched article about Zamenhof’s Zionist activities. This was soon
joined by Maimon’s articles on Zamenhof’s early years, student
period, Esperantist activity, and Hillelism; on the Zamenhof family,
especially Markus; and on how little attention the Esperanto world
had thus far paid to Zamenhof’s Jewishness and Jewish milieu. Not
until 1978 did Maimon collect the articles into his landmark book,
provocatively titled La Kaŝita Vivo de Zamenhof (The Hidden Life of
Zamenhof). But hidden no more: here in Białystok, Zamenhof’s
Jewish life has taken center stage. In the weeks before the congress,
the “Zamenhofology” listserv was primarily concerned with various
strands of Zamenhof’s Jewishness: Yiddish, Zionism, Hillelism.
This morning, Tonkin launches a session called “Zamenhof
Today” by asking us to put ourselves in his “shoes, beard, and
spectacles” as a man of a specific place, time, and ethnic
background. Only then can we get beyond our icon of the kind
visionary grandfather and gauge the immensity of his decision to
invent a new way, a new option. At the end of a series of questions
to launch the session, Tonkin asks, “Did Zamenhof want to Judaize
everyone?” I flash back to Zamenhof’s strange statement to the
Jewish Chronicle: “Instead of being absorbed by the Christian world,
we [Jews] shall absorb them; for that is our mission.” If “to Judaize”
means, as Zamenhof put it, “to spread among humanity the truth of
monotheism and the principles of justice and fraternity,” then the
answer is yes, that was precisely what Zamenhof had in mind. But if
“to Judaize” means “to turn them into Jews,” then the answer was,
decidedly, no.
Our next speaker has been Judaized in the latter manner, but not
by Zamenhof. *Tsvi Sadan, an Israeli professor of linguistics, looks
far younger than his forty-six years. With his yarmulke, wire-rim
glasses, scraggly beard, white shirt, and black slacks, he might
resemble a yeshiva boy; he might, did he not resemble more closely
a Japanese scholar in an Edo-period scroll. In his native Japan,
Sadan had been Tsuguya Sasaki, but after emigrating to Israel, he
changed his name, converted to Judaism, became an Israeli citizen,
and earned a doctorate in Hebrew linguistics. (I’m told that he’s the
sole Israeli Esperantist who wears a yarmulke and sticks to kosher
food.) His website lists his languages as follows:
Native: Japanese
Active: Hebrew, English
Quite active: Yiddish, Esperanto
Passive: German, French, Russian
Very passive: Arabic, Aramaic, Italian, Spanish, Polish
Sadan is lecturing today as part of the International Congress
University, a series of carefully vetted, high-level lectures delivered
mostly by academics. His lecture, “A Sociolinguistic Comparison of
Two Diasporic Languages, Yiddish and Esperanto, on the Internet,”
has mustered a healthy audience who are rewarded for their
attention with the news that Esperanto has a far larger presence on
the Internet than Yiddish. Toward the end of the rather technical
talk, the topic changes to Sadan’s passion: traditional Ashkenazic
dances. Suddenly he walks in front of the podium, strikes a dancer’s
pose, and begins to gambol across the stage, dropping low for a
kazatzka, and all to the beat of a klezmer band that only he can
hear. It’s distinctly a man’s dance, the kind flamboyantly performed
at Orthodox Jewish weddings, and it brings on a familiar sour taste.