Committee. Though he had forfeited ownership of the language,
Zamenhof attempted single-handedly to draft rules of governance,
which led to a falling-out with his two German co-editors on La
Esperantisto (The Esperantist), a magazine based in Nuremberg. It
was Zamenhof’s fate, having renounced power over the movement,
to be always at the mercy of the most powerful forces within the
movement, whether this meant influential clubs, prestigious leaders
or, early in the new century, strong national Esperanto
organizations. With the magazine about to go under, Zamenhof
contemplated selling stock in the movement to raise cash, 29 but the
affair was saved by an infusion of cash from a well-to-do surveyor
named Wilhelm Heinrich Trompeter, who in 1891 assumed financial
responsibility for the movement. He even paid Zamenhof a one-
hundred-mark monthly salary (about $600 USD in today’s currency)
for editing the journal.
Despite Trompeter’s timely intervention, for Zamenhof the dozen
years after the publication of the Unua Libro were an ordeal of
poverty, professional stumbles, and dislocation fueled by a bitter
elixir of determination, shame, and despair. He found himself in a
bare-knuckle struggle to keep Esperanto alive, even as he struggled
to do the same for both his family and his career. The impact on
both family and career of his labor for Esperanto was disastrous. His
publications had been largely funded by Klara’s dowry, backed up
by emoluments from her indulgent but increasingly frustrated father.
In the late 1880s, Zamenhof sent his pregnant wife and young son,
Adam, born in 1888, to stay with Klara’s father in Kovno, and
scouted for a town that met his two requirements: a dearth of
oculists and a Jewish community. His 1889 attempt to establish a
practice in the Ukrainian town of Kherson (which was one-third
Jewish)30 was a fiasco. As he later wrote, “I simply and literally,
often, didn’t even have anything to eat … neither my wife, nor my
in-laws knew anything about this.” 31
During the hungry, lonely months in Kherson, Zamenhof
somehow found the time to write articles, translate a story by Hans
Christian Andersen, and edit La Esperantisto. As Korĵenkov notes,
Zamenhof wrote for the magazine “in his real name, under
pseudonyms, and anonymously,” 32 lest it seem that the entire issue
was the work of one person. His translation of “The Little Mermaid,”
for example, was written under the pseudonym “Anna R.” Perhaps
he chose the name to attract women to the language; perhaps he
identified with the trials of the mermaid, who paid for her desire to
enter a larger, wider world by surrendering her tongue.
When Zamenhof’s second child, Zofia, arrived in 1889, he
reluctantly accepted a bailout from his “miraculous father-in-law”
(as Esperantists refer to him) on the condition that he return to
Warsaw. But when pressure mounted on Zamenhof’s friable career,
he sought a less expensive place to live in Grodno, a predominantly
Jewish town not far from Białystok. As he later put it in a letter to
Alfred Michaux:
My income was larger than in Warsaw and life was less
expensive. Although in Grodno, my income still didn’t
entirely cover my expenses and I had to continue to take
support from my father-in law, nonetheless, I patiently
stayed in place there for a period of four years. 33
Fleeting glimpses of Zamenhof’s four “patient” years in Grodno
have recently been brought to light by Korĵenkov: Zamenhof sitting
as a juror, attending meetings of the medical society, collaborating
on public health research on the eyesight of schoolchildren, and
volunteering to become an army medical doctor (which unlike his
sister, he never became). 34 Surrounded by his wife and two children,
he became much better integrated into the community than he had
been in Kherson.
* * *
In January 1894, his hopes for both a league and a language
committee dashed, Zamenhof proposed a radical overhaul of the
Unua Libro and Dua Libro. After seven years of urging the users of the
language to complete his work, he was impatient. He’d both hoped
for and feared the embrace of Esperanto by a learned academy; now
he knew that Esperanto’s enthusiasts would be too weak to forestall
“expert” intervention. Hence, he proposed a raft of reforms to alter
pronunciation, numbers, and personal pronouns; the definite article
was sent packing and adjectival agreement was suspended. Not only
adjectives, but the “fundamental” endings of verbs and adverbs were
altered. The accusative, which had enabled speakers of different
languages to order words as they would in their own language, he
excised, recommending subject-verb-object word order (which has
historically predominated, according to the Dutch linguist Wim
Jansen). 35 Taking his lexical inversion of Yiddish to an extreme, he
now advised coiners of new words “to avoid German and Slavic
words, and take, whenever possible, only from Romance
languages”; he even recommended doing away with the tiny ĉapeloj
over letters, which had posed typographical difficulties and which,
he later learned, were an impediment to the visually impaired. Of
the sixteen fundamental rules, only four stood unchanged. 36 The
reforms were, in Korĵenkov’s phrase, “drastic,” 37 and the chief
casualty was the vaunted simplicity and transparency of the
language.
To adopt a raft of reforms would have returned Esperanto to
infancy; moreover, it would have required all of Esperanto’s
enthusiasts to retrain and retool, and this the rank and file of the
Esperantists (a body constituted by the subscribers to La Esperantisto)
were not prepared to do. The rejection of Zamenhof’s 1894 reforms
led to a crisis of confidence in him, his movement, and his journal.
Defections began, especially among former Volapükists in
Nuremberg. Meanwhile, the number of subscribers to La Esperantisto
plummeted, from 889 in 1893, to 596 in 1894, to 425 in 1895. 38
When even his patron, Trompeter, withdrew support, Zamenhof
briefly collaborated with Tolstoy’s publisher, Posrednik, publishing
an Esperanto translation of an excerpt from Tolstoy’s essay “Reason
or Faith.” But Tolstoy’s essay and others condoning civil
disobedience provoked the banning of La Esperantisto in Russia, and
with two-thirds of its subscribers gone, the journal soon collapsed. In
May 1895, an appeal to the censor from Tolstoy himself, describing
Zamenhof as a man “passionately dedicated to his invention and
having already lost by his enterprise,” 39 reversed the ban, but for La
Esperantisto, it was too late.
Zamenhof must have known the reforms would be defeated, for
even as he was developing them, he was translating Hamlet into the
original 1887 version of Esperanto. With Hamleto, Reĝido de Danujo,
Zamenhof launched a new international Library of Esperanto, which
had been envisioned in the inaugural pamphlet of 1887: “Were there
but an international language, all translations would be made into it
alone, as into a tongue intelligible to all.” 40 As Tonkin has observed,