Jewish goods. Most of the 150 Jews who escaped to the forest were
murdered. By the end of the war, Tykocin’s two thousand Jews
numbered seventeen.
No sign of this catastrophe greets us when we descend a brief
flight of stairs into the whitewashed masonry synagogue. Our
Esperanto-speaking guide informs us that the synagogue floor had to
be lower than the floor of the church of the Holy Trinity at the
opposite end of the town. The descent makes the nine-meter height
of the white interior seem more lofty, and the nine-bay floor plan
more enveloping. The interior and the women’s sections had been
destroyed by the Nazis, but all was immaculately restored during the
1970s and 1980s as part of the regional Podlaskie Museum: the
furnishings of the ark, the mahogany rails, the cut-glass chandeliers,
and the Hebrew and Aramaic words painted in huge, carefully
aligned black letters on the walls. Our guide points out that these
enabled Jews to pray when it was too dark to read the prayer book.
From cupolas high above come gashes of light on the letters, carving
even holier words among the black Hebrew characters.
Most of the Japanese sit in silence on the benches, as our guide
dilates on rituals and ritual objects—the women’s section, the
Hanukkah menorah, the Ark of the Torah, the bima. There’s a
perfunctory mention of the Nazi plunderers (not murderers), but
anti-Semitism doesn’t come up. No talk of Jews and Poles, or of the
pogroms of 1936 and 1938, before the Nazis had ever set foot in
Poland. “Poland,” says our guide, “has always been a tolerant
place.”
A Japanese man in a golf hat raises his hand. “Diversity!” he says,
cheerfully, “that is the key thing, diversity.” He’s the same man who
an hour earlier had asked me where I was from. “Usono,” I’d
answered, and he’d beamed: “I’m from Obama, Japan! That is my
hometown, Obama! So I love Barack Obama!”
On the matter of diversity, our guide agrees. “I think so, yes,” she
says haltingly. Then with more conviction: “Diversity is why Poland
has always been a tolerant place.”
I want to ask, and don’t want to ask, and then I ask, “What about
the Poles who looted Jews during the pogroms of 1936 and 1938?
What about the complicity of the Polish police in the roundup and
murder of Tykocin’s Jews?” Does anyone else notice that I’m
becoming my mother? Once, when I murmured my affection for
Degas, she’d snapped, “That anti-Semite? Show me his ballerinas
and I’ll show you Dreyfus.”
The guide swigs from her water bottle. “Poland is a country
without scaffolds,” she says evenly; it’s part proverb, part
trademark. She takes another swig, and shifts her purse to the other
shoulder. “Poland is a nation without pyres.”
* * *
That night in Białystok, after the crowds had thinned and the
floodlights blinked out, a young hooded man threw a bottle of pink
paint onto the monumental bronze bust of Zamenhof at the
intersection at Białowny and Malmeda. The next morning,
Zamenhof’s lips, beard, and bust were bright pink, as though la
majstro had just bitten the top off a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. Saturday
morning’s local paper, the Kurier Poranny, reported it as a “racist
attack,” which apparently followed a handful of other incidents
throughout the week. The massive “Zamenhof tent” was set on fire
the night before the inaugural. A group of skinheads entered the
congress hall, some in black shirts with a star of David crossed by a
red bar. An ad for the congress was defaced; bus tires were slashed
in the parking lot. And late Wednesday night someone threw a
bottle with burning liquid against the new Zamenhof Center, which,
being stone, was left unscathed. While sound checks were under way
for the final ceremony, a Brazilian samideano was wounded by a
large stone hurled through the window of a dormitory.
All this I would learn later, from the independent webzine Libera
Folio (Free Page). But the UEA’s daily conference newsletter had
been vandal- and violence-free. During the congress, according to
Libera Folio, *Brunetto Casini, the editor, had been planning to
publish a photo of the paint-spattered bust of Zamenhof and a brief
article by *François Lo Jacomo. Anxious about repercussions, Casini
had checked in with the local Congress Committee, who gave him a
green light. Still anxious, Casini had followed up with a call to
*Osmo Buller, the laconic Finnish director of the UEA. According to
Lo Jacomo, “Osmo looked at the photo, [and] the three lines which I
had written, and without any emotion whatsoever said simply, that
he [Casini] must not publish it.” Instead, the front page bore a photo
of smiling Esperantists gathered around an eighty-millimeter
telescope.
In the weeks and months following the congress, comments flew
back and forth on the Libera Folio website. Some attacked the UEA
for censorship, insisting that the crimes were racist and anti-Semitic;
others minimized the events as adolescent hooliganism. The leaders
of the Israeli Esperantist League wrote in fulsome praise of the
Polish hosts and the city of Białystok. But it was Renato Corsetti,
elder statesman, who posted the classic Esperanto rejoinder:
“Violent nationalism and hatred of foreigners is found everywhere,
not only in Białystok. The existence of these feelings in some part of
humanity vindicates our work to eradicate them in Białystok and in
the whole world.” The paint, the fire, the skinheads: all the more
reason to carry on talking, writing, believing—and planning for the
next granda rondo familia in Havana.
PART THREE
THE HERETIC, THE PRIESTESS,
AND THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE
1. The Heretic
In the fall of 1927, the Associated Press reported that Mrs. Mabel
Wagnalls Jones, heir to the Funk & Wagnalls publishing fortune, had
recently built a memorial to her parents. It was a rambling Tudor-
Gothic edifice in Lithopolis, Ohio, with classrooms, meeting rooms, a
library, and an auditorium that could seat three hundred people, the
entire population of the town. Mabel was not only thinking big; she
was also thinking in Esperanto, planning to turn Lithopolis into the
Esperanto center of the United States. Within two years, she had
acquired the entire library of the former president of the American
Esperanto Association, and Esperanto classes for Bloom Township
schoolchildren and their teachers, as well as night classes for adults,
were in full swing. “This isolated village,” rhapsodized a reporter,
“miles from a railroad and not even touched by motor busses, may
become the Capital of an invisible Empire, founded upon Esperanto,
the Universal Auxiliary language. ”1
This is not something most Esperantists of the 1920s, American or
otherwise, would have said. By almost every standard, Esperanto
failed the test of an empire: it had no imperial center dependent on
far-flung resources; no colonies to govern, and no infrastructure by
which to govern them; and no army or navy. It lacked the essential
requirement of an empire: imperium, that is to say, power. Even so,