[lg policy] Book Review: The Jewish Roots of Esperanto

[Harold Schiffman]

The Jewish Roots of Esperanto

By MICHAEL WEXNOV. 11, 2016
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“A tongue intelligible to all.” Credit Swim Ink 2, LLC/Corbis,via Getty
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*BRIDGE OF WORDS*
*Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language*
By Esther Schor
364 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $32.

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, *“A mekhaye shoyn,
redn a yidish vort”* — “It’s such a pleasure to be able to speak Yiddish
already.”

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.”

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*,* 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 *kheyder**,* the
traditional Jewish elementary school, to a language that Schor
characterizes as “invented not to transcend translation but to transact it.”

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.

Michael Wex is the author, most recently, of “Rhapsody in Schmaltz.”

NYTimes, 11/12/16


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