Lidia

'In the Polish churches there sounded the music of the organ under brilliantly coloured paintings. Eloquent priests who preached there spoke of the eternal glory of the martyrs, crucified both for fatherland and Christ. Why not become a Pole and a Christian?

'Yet at school the Christians tumed their backs on the little Hebrew girls. Some of the chauvinistic parents told them to. Simple hearted friendships were broken. Words of mockery were heard. Was there anywhere any love and nobility? Zamenhof s little daughter threw her arms in silence around his neck. The child had begun to understand the deep pain at his heart. . .'

At the same time as Lidia was beginning to experience the cruel reality of racial and religious hatred, her father was refining his own theories about religion. In a new book about Homaranismo published in 1913, when Lidia was nine, it was clear that he had changed some of

4■ Nutnberg Dzika Street, in theJeivish quarter ofWarsaw, Russian Poland

 

 

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1887.

 

5. Title pages of the 'First Book' in Esperanto and Russian: 'Dr Esperanto / International Language / Introduction /and / Complete Textbook/for Russians / In order that a language may be worldwide, it is not / enough to call it so. / Price 15 kopeks. / Warsaw. / Printing House of Ch. Kelter, Nowolipje Street No. 11. /

1887'

 

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The first international Espcranto congress in Boulognc-sur-Mer, August 1905. Ludwik Zamenhoĵ is numher 1, Klara

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Zamenhof is number 2

 

7. Lidia,aged3 8. Lidia aged 5, in 1909. From an

Esperantist magazine of the time

9. Adam and Zofia Zamenhof, taken around 1908

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his ideas. Previously he had accepted the fact that people belonged to a religion not because they believed in it but because they were born into it. Now, however, he asserted that 'religion should only be a matter of sincere belief, and not play the part of a hereditary tool of racial disunity'.

The Homaranist, he wrote, should be able to say, 'I call my religion only that religion. . . in which I actually believe. . . IfI believe in none of the existing revealed religions, I must not remain in one of them only for racial motives and by so doing mislead people about my beliefs and contribute to endless generations of racial disunity, but I must - if the laws of my country permit - openly and officially call myself a "free-thinker", not, however, identifying free-thought especially with atheism, but reserving for my belief full freedom.'

Yet to have no religion at all was not satisfactory either. Zamenhof recognized that belonging to a religious community filled a social, if not a spiritual need; sharing customs, traditions and festivals gave richness to life. A person without religion lived a pale and prosaic existence. This could especially be seen among those secularized Jews of Poland who had completely withdrawn from Jewish tradition. In On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two Wars, sociologist Celia S. Heller has noted that the lives of these people, who were neither practicing Jews nor Christians, cften had a 'spiritual emptiness' which 'seems to have resulted in a mystic yearning in some of their young'.