Bridge of Words

"Only connect," wrote E. M. Forster; ah, if it were just that easy. But even now, in the Internet age, Esperanto is about connection, not connectivity; about social life, not social networks. Esperanto has no passwords. It is a homemade, open-access affair invented by one man—an amateur in every sense of the word—and made available to all. The Internet may point Esperanto toward a future rather different from its past. But Esperanto reminds us why we strove to make communication easier, faster, cheaper, and ubiquitous. The Department of Defense may have wanted the Internet for security; what the rest of us wanted was one another.

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The monument in Warsaw, commissioned in 1921, is the work of many hands. The winning design was submitted by Mieczysiaw Jan Ireneusz Lubelski, a Polish sculptor, and the Scottish granite was donated by the Esperantists of Aberdeen. Transport of the monument from Scotland to Poland was paid for by the Warsaw Monument Committee, with help from the Polish government, the Jewish community of Warsaw, and the laborers, who worked for a nominal fee. It was erected and dedicated in 1926; the mosaic followed, but only after 97 percent of Warsaw's 350,000 Jews had been destroyed, Zamenhof's two daughters and son among them. The Esperantists returned to his tomb and did precisely what Jews do at graves: place stones.

This book, however, is not a memorial. I did not write it to elegize a bygone hope, to portray a quirky cult, or to roam a neglected byway of modernity. I wrote this book to discover why Esperanto has, unbelievably, beaten all the odds: competition from rival language projects, two world wars, totalitarian regimes, genocidal death factories, the nuclear arms race, and the emergence of fundamentalist sectarianism—not to mention the juggernaut of global English. The language-movement of Esperanto survives because it addresses a particularly modern predicament: to negotiate the competing claims of free individuals on the one hand, and on the other, communities bound by values and traditions. Esperantists reconcile liberalism and communitarianism by freely choosing a tradition of ideals.

But as much as I respect Esperantists for making this choice, and for the gorgeous language and culture they have made, they are also the victims of their own mythology. Specifically, they uphold the myth that Esperanto's vaunted political neutrality (which has its own unhandsome history) removes it from the arena of politics. On the contrary, Esperanto is essentially political, as I have argued to roomfuls of disconcerted Esperantists; it was created to enable diverse peoples to talk not only past their differences but also about them. Zamenhof envisioned multiethnic cities, states, and continents —indeed, a multiethnic world—using Esperanto for the sake of reconciliation and harmony. I want to honor the achievement and longevity of Esperanto, but even more to herald its untapped potential to bring us closer to political justice. Esperanto's greatest power of all is to be powerless and yet to compel us to move from bafflement to understanding, from conflict to resolution.

Bridge of Words began as a biography of Zamenhof, who, like the subject of my biography Emma Lazarus, was a modern Jew of the pogrom-ridden 1880s, trying to steer a course between universalism and particularism. But because Zamenhof gave his universal language to its users, Esperanto is their creation, too. Hence this book is a biography of Esperanto's collective creators, the Esperanto community, and a report from its trenches. And like the universal language, a hybrid of several tongues, this book is a hybrid of cultural history and memoir. Each of the four parts pairs a historical narrative with a memoir of my sojourns, visits, on five continents, among samideanoj—which is how Esperantists refer to one another, invoking the commonality of vague "same-idea-ness."