Bridge of Words

Esperantists may be hard to count, but they're not hard to find. On a recent bus tour of Central Asia, I had a free day in Samarkand. It was late at night when a minute or two of web surfing revealed an Esperantist within range: *Anatoly Ionesov, Director of the International Museum of Peace and Solidarity, whom I had never met. At 11:00 p.m., I emailed him; at 11:05 he invited me to meet him the following morning. That day I spent sitting in the parlor beside Anatoly and his wife, Irina, drinking tea at a table laden with enough cakes, cookies, dried apricots, sweets, rolls, and marmalade to feed a multitude. Anatoly oriented me to the museum: here were forty years of disarmament posters; there, autographed photos with peace greetings from Whoopi Goldberg, John Travolta, and Phil Collins. He told me about learning Esperanto in the Russian army, in Siberia; I told him about my travels in Cuba and Brazil. We admired photos of each other's children, and all the while, he was fashioning tiny origami swans, which he gave me when we parted. Strangers hours earlier, we embraced warmly, bona fide members of what Zamenhof called la granda rondo familia—the great family circle —of Esperantists.

When I returned to the group that evening, my companions all asked the same question: "Did you speak in Esperanto?"

"If we hadn't," I said, "it would have been a very quiet afternoon."

"Then ... it works?"

It works.

To convince them further, I could share a long email I just received from a friend, tenderly announcing his new grandchild. He wrote, in Esperanto, about how eager he was for his son to finish his tour in the army; a spiritual crisis that happened while he was reading the Book of Numbers; his ninety-five-year-old father, shuttled back and forth from nursing home to hospital to rehab; a nasty gust of wind that slammed a screen door on his finger; the X- ray results (not definitive); the chances of receiving workers' comp (not good); and the prospect of missing days of work (a mixed blessing). Only a vibrant, living language could be equal to rendering the nitty-gritty of a life, replete with aging parents, children, and grandchildren; jobs and sick days; everyday fear and everyday hope.

To make a census of Esperantists, even in the days when one had to enroll or subscribe rather than simply click a mouse, was always a fool's errand. Today's Esperantists are eastern and western; northern and southern; men and women; students and retirees; moderates and leftists; activists and homemakers; gay, straight, and transgender. They come in more colors than the children on the UNICEF box—who, if memory serves, are only peach, brown, gold, and red.

Adel is right; enough asking "how many." I spent seven years among Esperantists not to count them but to listen to them. I wanted to get beyond the pieties and the utopianism and find out why real people choose this language, over others, to say what they have to say. What I heard sometimes sounded like a cacophony of voices, talking about ordinary, everyday things; universal harmony is not the first idea that comes to mind. But listening over time, and in so many places, I became convinced that these voices speak to our moment.

Multiculturalism, which is the lifeblood of Esperanto, has acquired prestige in our day as the last, best challenge to militaristic nationalism and violent sectarianism. We live, as never before, in the interstices between cultures, plying among a repertoire of people and places. What do we know when we are multicultural? That we may have different words for things; that there are ways and ways of life; but that we all have bodies. We were all born; we all will die. We make love, and some of us make children. How difficult should it be, then, to remember we are all human? In many parts of the world, it is very difficult, and since we live amid global networks, with access to images and sounds occurring at the ends of the earth, we live in those places, too. As I write these words, schoolgirls in sub-Saharan Africa are being kidnapped and enslaved; in the Middle East, the children of Abraham are lobbing rockets at one another; ISIS is breaking the heart of Syria by cracking its breastbone. Esperanto was invented not to teach us humanity, but to allow us to practice it freely, as, where, and when we choose. And where humanity is concerned it is hard to imagine a world more in need of practice than ours.