service in Nazi Germany SSOD Soiuz sovetskikh obshchestv druzhby i kul'turnoi sviazi s
zarubezhnymi stranami (Union of Soviet Societies for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) SSR Socialist Soviet Republic
UEA Universala Esperanto-Asocio (Universal Esperanto Association)
UK Universala Kongreso de Esperanto (World Congress of Esperanto)
USSR Union of Socialist Soviet Republics VOKS Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo kultur'noi sviazi s zagranitsei
(All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries)
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Lazar Zamenhof, by Robert Kastor c. 1905. Text:
'When the peoples can freely understand one another, then they will cease to hate one another.' 27
Fig. 3.1 On 1 August 1932, Heroldo de Esperanto, a weekly
newspaper published in Cologne, included a message of greeting from the lord mayor, Konrad Adenauer, to the future attendees at the 25th World Congress, planned to take place in Cologne a year hence. In March 1933 six weeks after Hitler's seizure of power, the Nazis removed Adenauer from office. The Congress did indeed take place, but with far fewer participants than originally anticipated 100
Fig. 4.1 Lazar Zamenhof's three children, murdered by the Nazis:
Lidia, Zofia and Adam 126
Fig. 4.2 With renewed hope after the war, on 14 April 1946 Polish Esperantists marked the 29th anniversary of Zamenhof's death by gathering among the ruins of the building where Zamenhof once lived. His grandson Ludovic holds the flag 154 Fig. 5.1 The Tauride Palace in Petrograd, in June 1921, was the site of the founding congress of the Soviet Esperantist Union (SEU). In front of the flag (no. 6) sits its longtime leader Ernest Drezen 166
xviii List of Figures
Fig. 5.2 Eugene Lanti, founder of SAT, the Sennacieca Asocio
Tutmonda, visited Moscow in August 1922. Here he met with the editors of the literary journal La Nova Epoko (New Era). L-R: Valentin Poliakov, Natan Futerfas, Lanti, Nikolai Nekrasov, Grigorii Demidiuk 174
Fig. 6.1 Members of the Lipetsk Esperanto group, Tambov
Governorate (1927-28) 208
Picture Credits
Hector Hodler Library (UEA), Rotterdam: 1.1, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1 Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, Paris: 5.1, 5,2 German Esperanto Library, Aalen: 3.1
Part I
A Suspicious New Language
1
The Emergence of Esperanto
Zamenhof and the Origins of Esperanto
The author of Esperanto belonged to a persecuted people. Lazar Zamenhof, who in 1887 published his project for an international language, was a Jew living in the Russian Empire, whose four million Jewish inhabitants made up about half of worldwide Jewry.^ This popula- tion continued to suffer discrimination to a degree that the majority of their fellows in Western Europe already regarded as a thing of the past. Zamenhof's birthplace was Bialystok, where Jews, living alongside Poles, Russians, Germans and Belarusians, constituted a majority.2 Each group had its own language and regarded the other groups with suspicion. It was in this environment that Esperanto came into being. As Zamenhof explained in a long letter to the Russian Esperantist Nikolai Borovko:
In a city like this, more than anywhere, a person of an impressionable nature feels the heavy misfortune of language difference and becomes convinced at every step that difference of language is the sole, or at least the principal, factor that divides the human family and separates it into hostile camps.
For this reason, wrote Zamenhof, he decided that 'when I was grown up, I had to eliminate this evil'.[3]
When this letter was published in 1896, the first Esperantists were 'deeply heart-stricken':[4] later, it was often publicly cited as a clear explana- tion of Zamenhof's motives and as a particularly convincing reason for the need of an international language. The letter presented the author of Esperanto as an altruistic advocate of understanding across all national antagonisms, as a person full of modesty and idealism, for whose goals it would be hard not to show respect.
Unknown for four decades, however, was another of Zamenhof's let- ters, written in 1905 to the Frenchman Alfred Michaux. In this letter, Zamenhof put particular emphasis on his Jewish origins and the connec- tion of all his ideals to his membership of 'that ancient, much suffering and struggling people whose entire historical mission consists [...] in the union of the nations and the goal of "one God". Zamenhof asserted that if he 'were not a Jew from the ghetto, the idea of the unification of humankind' would not have occupied him so insistently. No one, he asserted, could feel the need for a 'nationless language, neutrally human', as strongly as a Jew.[5]
We need not see a contradiction between the two letters. They reveal thoughts that came to Zamenhof in different stages of his life. When, as a young man, he worked on his project for an international lan- guage, it is unclear whether he considered the specific usefulness of the language to Jews. His family background did not immediately cause him to discuss the circumstances that drove him to such missionary zeal. The family, which, as of December 1873, was living in Warsaw, was assimilationist, confident in the further improvement of the legal situation of Jews. His father, a teacher of German,[6] identified with the intellectual movement known as Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, and cultivated the hope that ideas of equality would finally prevail also in Russia. Lazar therefore grew up not in the traditionalist atmo- sphere and suffocating poverty of the Jewish ghetto, but in the circle of that minority of bourgeois and intellectual Jews who saw the way to emancipation as lying in maximum integration into the surround- ing society.
In truth, Marcus Zamenhof, Lazar's father, seems a typical representa- tive of the modern urban Jews of Russia. His goal was to be a loyal citizen of the Russian state; he regarded himself as a Russian whose Jewishness was confined to the practice of the Jewish religion, and who desired that his children be allowed to advance in society through access to all avail- able educational opportunities. Characteristic of his point of view is the surviving report on the inauguration of a new synagogue in Biaiystok in 1868. On that occasion Marcus delivered a Russian-language address in which, alluding to earlier persecutions, he expressed his thanks to Tsar Alexander II 'for his just laws and good decrees' and called on Jews to embrace the spirit of the new, liberal era: 'We should no longer distance ourselves from our brothers the Russians, among whom we live, but share with them, equally, all the rights of this country, for our happiness and well-being.'7
Lazar's childhood advanced under the influence of this desire for inte- gration. He himself later remembered that he 'had a passionate love for the Russian language and the whole Russian realm' and that he 'dreamed of one day becoming a great Russian poet'.[7] Languages in general became his hobby. For a while he hoped to revive one of the ancient languages9 and also thought about the reintroduction of Hebrew as a spoken language.[8]In the end, however, he 'began vaguely dreaming of a new, created lan- guage ["nova, arta lingvo"]'.[9] His imagination may well have been stimu- lated, early on, by the legend of the Tower of Babel, of the time when humans could still communicate with one another freely. How might the condition introduced by the fall of the tower be overcome? Characteristic is the comment of 1908 by the mature Zamenhof regarding the biblical story: 'The consequence of the Tower of Babel has now become the cause: once, confusion of languages was a punishment for sin; now the confu- sion of languages is the cause of the sin.'[10]