Intent on more professional security, he went to Vienna for training
in ophthalmology. Returning to Warsaw in 1885, he finally opened
an ophthalmology practice and in 1887 married Klara Silbernick.
Within two years, he would be the father of a son and a daughter,
Adam and Zofia. But it was as the father of Esperanto, which saw
the light in 1887, that he would be better known. And because of
Esperanto, his most demanding child, he would continue to wander,
young family in tow.
Zamenhof family: (left to right) Lidia, Klara, Adam, Ludovik
2. Ten Million Promises
In 1887, when he published Esperanto’s inaugural Russian-language
pamphlet, Zamenhof was nearing thirty. He was a slight,
bespectacled man given to chain-smoking, with piercing, faintly
Asian-looking eyes that seemed out of place in his implausibly
bulbous head. His boxy beard still black, he could have passed for a
younger, less self-important brother of Sigmund Freud. After months
of fruitlessly shopping around his new “international language,”
Zamenhof self-published the pamphlet with a Jewish printer in
Warsaw under a pseudonym: “Doktoro Esperanto.” He referred to it
as the lingvo internacia, or simply as internacia, but within two years,
as an Esperanto-German dictionary of 1889 reveals, it would
become known by the name of its pseudonymous author: Esperanto.
The pamphlet, known today as the Unua Libro (First Book), wore
some of the trappings of other European language projects: a
lengthy foreword, a pronouncing alphabet, a dictionary, a list of
sixteen grammatical rules, and, as a specimen translation, the
requisite Lord’s Prayer. But it contained other, more idiosyncratic
items: an excerpt from the Hebrew Bible (Gen 1:1–10); a translation
of a poem by the baptized German-Jewish poet Heine; and a jocular
letter to a friend (“I’m picturing … the face you’ll make after
receiving my letter!”). Even more unusual was an exhibition of two
original poems in the lingvo internacia, both melancholic effusions
written in rhymed stanzas. One would call them conventional, were
they not the sole poems in the language.
Lingvo Internacia (Unua Libro)
Making no reference to his high-minded ambition to break down
barriers of ethnicity and nation, Zamenhof pitched the language as
“an official and commercial dialect” that would yield economies of
time and money. He was writing not for heirs to an ancient
community of believers, but for secular moderns. To acquire “this
rich, mellifluous, universally comprehensible language,” he boasted,
“is not a matter of years of laborious study, but the mere light
amusement of a few days.” 25 Hence, inspired by “the so-called secret
alphabets,” he proposed the language simply as a gamelike code,
complete with a key, slender enough to “carry in one’s note-book, or
the waistcoat-pocket.” Beyond the air of progress, functionality, and
efficiency, there was another signal difference from earlier
constructed languages. The lingvo internacia was presented as
provisional and unfinished, and the reader was entreated to help
bring it to completion. It was as if God had stopped the Creation on
the fifth day, trusting the animals to make the people.
Toward the end of the brochure appeared eight coupons, printed
on a single page:
Promise
I, the undersigned, promise to learn the proposed international language of Doctor
Esperanto, if it wil be shown that 10 mil ion people publicly give the same
promise.
Signed:
Name:
Address:
The scheme was in equal measure canny and grandiose. Zamenhof
knew that people would be more likely to commit to learning a new
language if they could be assured of a community; but ten million
promises? The combined populations of Warsaw and Paris
numbered under four million. While waiting for the phantasmal ten
million promises to materialize, Zamenhof invited criticism, vowing
to maintain a one-year comment period, at the end of which he
would tally the “votes” and publish “an abstract of the proposed
changes.” Only then would the language receive its “final form”
from an unspecified “academy of the tongue.”
Fortuitously, the emergence of Esperanto coincided with the fall
of Volapük to ferocious infighting over linguistic issues. By 1887,
many Volapükist circles had lost faith in the cause; some, like the
Nuremberg circle, were only too glad to defect to Esperanto, a far
easier language to learn, and one that seemed to promise more in
the way of real-world applications, especially commerce. In the
wake of Volapük’s definitive collapse, Esperanto swiftly gained
ground and within two years, the Unua Libro had been published
throughout Europe in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Latvian,
Danish, Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, French, and Czech. There were
two English editions, the first so faulty—and so much in demand—
that it had to be redone a year later. 26
Perhaps because he had received only a thousand coupons, mostly
from Russia and Germany 27 (about 20 percent of them from Jews),
Zamenhof decided to stimulate interest in Esperanto with a new
publication. In 1888, he published the Dua Libro (Second Book), not
in Russian but in the lingvo internacia itself, suggesting that there was
now a substantial readership conversant with the language. Above
all, Zamenhof wrote, readers should use the language in
correspondence, coining new words as necessary, and he promised
to supply them with a directory, which he did in 1889. But he did not
want to retain the privileged role of “author” of the language, as he
avowed in the Dua Libro:
This brochure is the last word that I will utter in the role of
author. From this day the future of the international
language is no longer more in my hands than in the hands
of any other friend of this sacred idea. We must now work
together in equality, each, according to one’s own
strength.… Let us work and hope! 28
It was the first of many inventions of farewell, most of them
forgotten as soon as Zamenhof perceived Esperanto to be under
threat, from within or without. It was well and good to cede the
language to its users, but as a practical matter, the disappointing
influx of coupons rankled. News that the American Philosophical
Society in Philadelphia was debating the question of an
international language tempted Zamenhof with the hope that
Esperanto might be adopted by a prestigious body, its well-being
taken into their hands. But Zamenhof’s dream was also his worst
nightmare: that “experts” would “improve” a language meant to
belong to its users.
When the proposed APS congress was scrapped, there was not a
sufficient infrastructure for Esperanto to gain momentum. Still stung
by his disappointment over the coupons, Zamenhof focused on
building a community, proposing a new “League of Esperantists”
comprising clubs rather than individual members. After twenty-five
clubs had joined, the league would elect a ten-member Language