<div dir="ltr"><h1 id="gmail-headline" class="gmail-headline">The Jewish Roots of Esperanto</h1>
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<p class="gmail-byline-dateline"><span class="gmail-byline">By <span class="gmail-byline-author">MICHAEL WEX</span></span><time class="gmail-dateline" datetime="2016-11-11T09:41:08-05:00">NOV. 11, 2016</time>
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<span class="gmail-caption-text">“A tongue intelligible to all.”</span>
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<p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content"><strong>BRIDGE OF WORDS</strong><br><strong>Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language</strong><br>By Esther Schor<br>364 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $32.</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">There’s
an old Yiddish joke about an Esperanto convention where participants
were given license to “crocodile” — speak their native languages —
during a break in the proceedings. After a long day of speaking
Esperanto, listening to speeches in Esperanto, singing songs and reading
signs in Esperanto, they were relieved to be able to stop reaching for
words. As they streamed out of the hall, one Esperantist after the other
turned to his or her fellows and exclaimed with a sigh, <em>“A mekhaye shoyn, redn a yidish vort”</em> — “It’s such a pleasure to be able to speak Yiddish already.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">It’s
an exaggeration, to be sure. Esperantujo, the unlocalizable community
of Esperanto speakers, has never been particularly Jewish, but as Esther
Schor points out at welcome length in “Bridge of Words: Esperanto and
the Dream of a Universal Language,” Esperanto arose in response to
Jewish concerns. Although Ludovik Zamenhof, the language’s sole
begetter, developed a plan for a lingvo internacia while still a
teenager, it took him until the ripe age of 28 to revise and refine it
enough for public consumption. His “Unua Libro” (“First Book”), which
introduced Esperanto to the world, was published in 1887 — roughly nine
years after Zamenhof devised a plan for the renovation and
standardization of Yiddish, a project with which he continued to tinker
for at least 30 more years. Though Schor never says so in so many words,
she makes it clear that Esperanto, in its origins at any rate, was
intended as Yiddish for everybody; Yiddish, that is, for goyim. But
where Yiddish is the national language of nowhere, Esperanto was meant
to be the alternate language of everywhere, a universal second language,
“neutral, nonethnic and nonimperial,” that would “commit its users to
transcend nationalism.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">Zamenhof’s
hope that “All translations would be made into it alone, as into a
tongue intelligible to all” anchors the language even more deeply in
Yiddish, which served for a thousand years as taytsh<em>,</em> the
language into which students at every level of the Central and East
European Jewish school system translated and explained the biblical and
rabbinical texts that they were studying. There is a direct line from
the <em>kheyder</em><em>,</em> the traditional Jewish elementary school,
to a language that Schor characterizes as “invented not to transcend
translation but to transact it.”</p><p class="gmail-story-body-text gmail-story-content">But
there’s more to it than Yiddish. Schor’s account of Zamenhof’s dreams
and disappointments, including the religious ideas that he — and he
alone — saw as essential to Esperanto’s mission, turns into an
increasingly anecdotal survey of the language and its culture in the
century since Zamenhof’s death. Although Esperantists refer to
themselves as samideanoj (from the English “same idea”), Esperantujo
seems never to have lacked for either colorful characters or the
“dirtiness of fighting” that George Orwell, whose aunt Nellie was one of
those characters, ascribed to the so-called international languages:
Schor looks at Marxist Esperantists, Stalinist Esperantists, Nazi
Esperantists and anti-traditional Far Eastern Esperantists, along with
the samideanoj she encounters in her travels. Author of a biography of
Emma Lazarus, Schor is less assured as a memoirist than as a scholar,
and while these latter sections are not without some interest, they go
on at greater length than the material warrants. This is, however, a
minor quibble. In portraying a language condemned by both Hitler and
Stalin, then used by the American military as the language of the
pseudo-Communist “Aggressor” in a lengthy series of Cold War maneuvers,
“Bridge of Words” leaves us in no doubt that whatever Esperanto might be
doing, it seems to be doing it right.</p>
<div class="gmail-story-notes"><p>Michael Wex is the author, most recently, of “Rhapsody in Schmaltz.”</p><p>NYTimes, 11/12/16<br></p></div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">**************************************<br>N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its members<br>and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write directly to the original sender of any offensive message. A copy of this may be forwarded to this list as well. (H. Schiffman, Moderator)<br><br>For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to <a href="https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/" target="_blank">https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/</a><br>listinfo/lgpolicy-list<br>*******************************************</div>
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