Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Henry Holt and Company ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your
personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available
in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you
believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the
author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
al samideanoj pasintaj kaj nuntempaj,
KORAN, VERDAN DANKON
to Esperantists past and present,
GREEN AND HEARTFELT THANKS
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Author’s Note
Because I have used pseudonyms for most of the Esperantists
mentioned, I have reversed the usual practice of using asterisks to
indicate pseudonyms. Thus pseudonyms appear without asterisks,
and asterisks are reserved for actual names (at first mention).
Historical figures and cited authors are referred to by their actual
names, without asterisks.
All translations from Esperanto are my own, except where otherwise
indicated in the notes.
Introduction
On the muggy July afternoon when I visited the Okopowa Street
Cemetery, the dead Jews who’d slept on while the Nazis packed their
descendants into cattle cars bound for Treblinka were still asleep.
After hours tracking the contours of the Ghetto behind a detachment
of Israeli soldiers, I was relieved to be among the lush ferns, rusted
grilles, and mossy stones. Here and there, tipped and broken
monuments had settled where they’d fallen among yellow
wallflowers. In other sections, weeded, swept, and immaculately
tended, huge monuments incised with Hebrew characters bore a
heavy load of sculpted fruits, animals, priestly hands, and the tools
of trades. The stones were cool to the touch, amid a musky odor of
rotting leaves.
Among the largest monuments in the cemetery—the baroque
monument to the actor Ester Rachel Kamińska; the porphyry stone
of writer I. L. Peretz; the ponderous granite tomb of Adam
Czerniaków, who after pleading in vain for the lives of the Ghetto’s
orphans took his own—was a large sarcophagus. On top rested a
stone sphere the size of a bowling ball. Below a ledge of marble
chips planted with plastic begonias was a large mosaic, a sea-green
star with a white letter E at the center. Rays of blue, red, and white
flared out in all directions. It was gaudy and amateurish, awkward
in execution. The inscription read:
DOKTORO LAZARO LVDOVIKO ZAMENHOF KREINTO DE
ESPERANTO
NASKITA 15. XII. 1859. MORTIS 14. IV. 1917
Esperanto: I recalled one glancing encounter with it when I was
twenty-three, an American in self-imposed exile, living in a chilly
flat in London. The reign of Sid Vicious was about to be usurped by
Margaret Thatcher, and the pittance I earned in publishing was just
enough to buy standing room at Friday matinees and an occasional
splurge on mascara. My boyfriend, Leo, and I found a rock-bottom
price for a week in the Soviet Union; the only catch was that
January, the cheapest time of the year to go, was also the coldest: in
Moscow, 28 degrees Fahrenheit below; in Leningrad, a balmy zero.
Leo took his parka out of storage; I borrowed warm boots, a fake-fur
coat, and a real fur hat, and off we went. (In fact, I found it much
warmer in the Soviet Union than in London, at least inside—chalk
that up to central heating, which I could not afford.)
At the Hermitage, I wandered over to a large, amber-hued
painting labeled Рембрандт. Pembrandt?—no, Rembrandt. A
prodigal myself, I recognized it as a painting of the Prodigal Son, a
young man kneeling in the embrace of a red-caped patriarch. As I
drew closer to the supplicant, I noticed he had an admirer besides
me: a tall, slender woman about my age with wispy bangs, stylish
boots, and a brown wool coat. The previous day, a well-coiffed
Intourist guide had explained to me that there were three kinds of
women in Russia: women with fur hats, women with fur collars, and
—she paused for effect—women with no fur at all. Here was one of
the latter, and while I noted her furlessness, she greeted me in
Russian. “Привет.”
“Preevyet. Hello,” I said.
She smiled. “My name is Ekaterina, I am from Alma Ata. Where
are you from?” She seemed to be rummaging for more English
words, but after “Do you speak Esperanto?” the pantry was bare.
Laughing, I asked, “Français?” but she wasn’t joking.
“Ne, ne,” she said deliberately, her gray eyes narrowing, “Es-per-
AN-to.” One of us, I was sure, was ridiculous, but who? She,
speaking to me in a pretend language? I, ignorant of Russian,
Kazakh, and Esperanto, in my red Wellingtons, got up as
Paddington Bear? Even as we shook hands and parted ways, the
conversation was swiftly becoming an anecdote, a story to tell next
week at the Swan over a pint of bitter.
Twenty-five years later, with prodigal sons of my own, I stood at
what might have been, for all I knew, the grave of Esperanto itself,
and thought of Ekaterina. She’d be in her late forties now, her
forehead lined, her hair graying or, more likely, rinsed flame-red.
Still furless, she’d be stuck in a concrete high-rise in Alma Ata (now
Almaty), where years pass slowly, heaving their burdens of debt and
illness and worry. I wondered how Esperanto had journeyed from
Poland to Kazakhstan, how long it had endured, and who had
erected this monument. Who laid out this mosaic, chip by tiny chip—
men? women? both? Jews? Poles? Kazakhs? Where had they come
from, and when? And why such devotion to a failed cause, to the
quixotic dream of a universal language?
I didn’t know it then, but I would spend most of a decade trying
to find out.
* * *
The man who called himself Doktoro Esperanto (Doctor Hopeful)
was a modern Jew, a child of emancipation adrift between the
Scylla of anti-Semitism and the Charybdis of assimilation. Ludovik
Lazarus Zamenhof was born in 1859 in multiethnic Białystok under
the Russian Empire, the son and grandson of Russian-speaking
language teachers. For a time, as a medical student in Moscow in
the 1870s, he had dreamed among Zionists, but dreams are fickle
things. His did not lead him to found a Jewish settlement in the
malarial swamps and rocky fields of Palestine. In fact, they led him
to dream of a Judaism purged of chosenness and nationalism; a
modern Judaism in which Jews would embrace—and, in turn, be
embraced by—like-minded others bent on forging a new
monotheistic ethical cult. He believed that a shared past was not