by the end of World War I, Esperanto had acquired a geographical
reach that would have been the envy of any empire. It had spread
beyond Eastern and Western Europe to the United States; to Asia,
including China, Japan, and Korea; to South Africa, Egypt, and
North Africa; to Australia and New Zealand; and to Brazil.
But in the years between the world wars, far from Lithopolis,
Ohio, the fate of the “invisible Empire” of Esperanto lay largely in
the hands of the three most visible empires on the globe: Stalin’s
USSR, Japan, and Hitler’s Third Reich. Speakers of “the dangerous
language,” as it was called by Stalin, were perceived as a menace
onto which virtually any enemy could be projected: communists,
Jews, Trotskyites, “bourgeois elements,” and democratic socialists,
among others. Ulrich Lins, in his landmark study, La Danĝera Lingvo,
documents the brutality of totalitarian regimes in the USSR, Japan,
occupied China and Korea, and Germany toward Esperantists and
their organizations. Free to realize their own versions of the interna
ideo, Esperantists coped with such regimes in vastly different ways.
Some made common cause with imperial powers for ideological
aims; some made compromises simply to survive; and many stolidly
chose opposition, sometimes at the cost of their lives.
The vague interna ideo also allowed for competing visions of the
movement itself. There were suprantionalists, like Hector Hodler,
whose vision of the UEA was a decentralized network of consuls
serving local constituencies. There were internationalists,
represented by the Paris-based Central Office, who reconceived
Zamenhof’s vision of interethnic harmony as an affair of nation-
states; the UEA would be dominated by the largest national
organizations, which provided the movement with its largest
financial base. There were anationalists, who split off from the UEA
to bring Esperanto into the service of world socialism. There were
anarchists, chiefly Chinese and Japanese reformers trying to usher a
Confucian, pan-Asian vision of world harmony into a new century.
And it was left to Zamenhof’s own daughter, Lidia, to keep alive the
universalist, transcendental strain of Zamenhof’s vision.
Zamenhof himself had placed his hopes in yet another world
power: the United States. In his early days, he’d envisioned the
United States as a homeland for the Jews, and later predicted
(wrongly) that the country would become a world center for
Esperanto. He also believed that instead of flexing its imperial
power, the United States would become increasingly woven into a
pan-American union of states. Despite a flurry of interest around the
1910 Universal Congress in Washington, resistance to Esperanto in
the States came from many corners: from xenophobic nativists, from
those still in thrall to what Emerson called “the courtly muses of
Europe,” and from capitalists who associated Esperanto with
socialism. Even so, its passionate advocates made it a Rorschach for
diverse concepts of their country’s identity as a multicultural and
multiracial society, a nation-state, and a burgeoning world power.
This chapter is framed by two European Esperantists, a man and
a woman, who refused to compromise with empires and, in vastly
different ways, were undone by them. He called himself “the
heretic”; people called her “the Priestess.” He was a poor Catholic
from a village in Normandy; she was a middle-class Jew born in
Warsaw. He, a carpenter, educated himself at the feet of anarchists;
she earned a law degree at Warsaw University but never practiced.
He talked and wrote about sennacieco (anationalism); she, a Bahá’í,
lectured ceaselessly about “the way.” In 1936, he renounced his
nation and left it forever; two years later, weeks after Kristallnacht,
she sailed back to her homeland, where she was imprisoned,
immured in the Warsaw Ghetto, and finally murdered at Treblinka.
No two Esperantists had ever been more certain of Esperanto’s
interna ideo, and no two “internal ideas” could have been more
different. In every way but one—their common tongue, Esperanto—
they were poles apart. His name was Adam; hers, Zamenhof.
* * *
In 1879, six months after L. L. Zamenhof launched an early version
of Esperanto at a birthday party, Eugène Aristide Alfred Adam was
born in Saint-Jacques-de-Néhou, Normandy. In Fredo, his
fragmentary autobiographical novel, the infant hero is baptized
once with water, and a second time with cider, by his roguish,
alcoholic uncle. Adam’s childhood, like his protagonist’s, was a
battle between piety and skepticism, with the latter always getting
the upper hand. It was also an education in the power of money;
like Fredo, Adam saw his beloved sister, Nata, married off at twenty
to a rich man whom she despised. It was as if she’d been stolen
away, and when she died, a year later, he blamed the thief. A
talented woodworker, Adam became skilled at making faux-antique
furniture but when he learned how exorbitantly a merchant had
marked up his work, he saw exploitation, not opportunity.
Gradually, he made his way to Paris, where the skeptical child
grew into an iconoclast bent on smashing idols of all kinds: religion,
money, and patriotism. By day he taught technical drawing; by
night, he attended anarchist meetings. As an ambulance driver
during the war, he insisted on treating German as well as French
soldiers, and by the end of the war, he had renounced nationalism.
Romantic love was the next idol to be smashed, when a brief
marriage ended in separation. He would know better the next time,
seeking a woman for rational partnership rather than love or
marriage. The woman he found, a brilliant, well-to-do British
Esperantist named Hélène (Nellie) Kate Limouzin, had an adoring
nephew named Eric Blair, who sojourned with them and their
Esperantic circle in Paris. Though Blair never became an
Esperantist, under the name George Orwell he would later write the
shrewdest statement in English about the role of language in
politics.
Adam learned Esperanto in Paris, in his mid-thirties, among
socialists and anarchists. Active in a group of left-wing Esperantists
in Paris, “comrade” Adam took on the task of editing the journal of
the Esperanto workers’ group Esperantista Laboristo. And in its pages,
in 1920, he began to publish the manifesto that would split the
Esperanto world in two. For la Neutralismon (Away with Neutrality)
called for a new movement that would use Esperanto as a tool for
“overturn[ing] the capitalist order”; 2 he called it the Sennacieca
Asocio Tutmonda, or SAT (Worldwide Anational Association).
National organizations would play no role in the new entity except
to propagandize to ministries of education and local governments.
As Adam demonstrated in a technical diagram resembling an
elaborate system of pulleys, SAT would be decentralized. No
particular political party would be endorsed, so that social