up nearly twenty million visits to the site, and the Esperanto
Duolingo website, launched in 2015, boasted 333,000 members after
only ten months. How many Esperanto learners actually learn it
well enough to participate in the community, online or off, is
impossible to say; no doubt many take it up for the sheer fun of it,
with no thought to the community at all.
My favorite answer to the question “How many?” was offered by
Adél, a wry Hungarian teenager: “Sufiĉe!” she joked, meaning
enough to comprise a vibrant worldwide community—and enough
asking how many.
Esperantists may be hard to count, but they’re not hard to find.
On a recent bus tour of Central Asia, I had a free day in Samarkand.
It was late at night when a minute or two of web surfing revealed
an Esperantist within range: *Anatoly Ionesov, Director of the
International Museum of Peace and Solidarity, whom I had never
met. At 11:00 p.m., I emailed him; at 11:05 he invited me to meet
him the following morning. That day I spent sitting in the parlor
beside Anatoly and his wife, Irina, drinking tea at a table laden with
enough cakes, cookies, dried apricots, sweets, rolls, and marmalade
to feed a multitude. Anatoly oriented me to the museum: here were
forty years of disarmament posters; there, autographed photos with
peace greetings from Whoopi Goldberg, John Travolta, and Phil
Collins. He told me about learning Esperanto in the Russian army,
in Siberia; I told him about my travels in Cuba and Brazil. We
admired photos of each other’s children, and all the while, he was
fashioning tiny origami swans, which he gave me when we parted.
Strangers hours earlier, we embraced warmly, bona fide members of
what Zamenhof called la granda rondo familia—the great family circle
—of Esperantists.
When I returned to the group that evening, my companions all
asked the same question: “Did you speak in Esperanto?”
“If we hadn’t,” I said, “it would have been a very quiet
afternoon.”
“Then … it works?”
It works.
To convince them further, I could share a long email I just
received from a friend, tenderly announcing his new grandchild. He
wrote, in Esperanto, about how eager he was for his son to finish his
tour in the army; a spiritual crisis that happened while he was
reading the Book of Numbers; his ninety-five-year-old father,
shuttled back and forth from nursing home to hospital to rehab; a
nasty gust of wind that slammed a screen door on his finger; the X-
ray results (not definitive); the chances of receiving workers’ comp
(not good); and the prospect of missing days of work (a mixed
blessing). Only a vibrant, living language could be equal to
rendering the nitty-gritty of a life, replete with aging parents,
children, and grandchildren; jobs and sick days; everyday fear and
everyday hope.
To make a census of Esperantists, even in the days when one had
to enroll or subscribe rather than simply click a mouse, was always a
fool’s errand. Today’s Esperantists are eastern and western;
northern and southern; men and women; students and retirees;
moderates and leftists; activists and homemakers; gay, straight, and
transgender. They come in more colors than the children on the
UNICEF box—who, if memory serves, are only peach, brown, gold,
and red.
Adél is right; enough asking “how many.” I spent seven years
among Esperantists not to count them but to listen to them. I
wanted to get beyond the pieties and the utopianism and find out
why real people choose this language, over others, to say what they
have to say. What I heard sometimes sounded like a cacophony of
voices, talking about ordinary, everyday things; universal harmony
is not the first idea that comes to mind. But listening over time, and
in so many places, I became convinced that these voices speak to
our moment.
Multiculturalism, which is the lifeblood of Esperanto, has acquired
prestige in our day as the last, best challenge to militaristic
nationalism and violent sectarianism. We live, as never before, in
the interstices between cultures, plying among a repertoire of
people and places. What do we know when we are multicultural?
That we may have different words for things; that there are ways
and ways of life; but that we all have bodies. We were all born; we
all will die. We make love, and some of us make children. How
difficult should it be, then, to remember we are all human? In many
parts of the world, it is very difficult, and since we live amid global
networks, with access to images and sounds occurring at the ends of
the earth, we live in those places, too. As I write these words,
schoolgirls in sub-Saharan Africa are being kidnapped and enslaved;
in the Middle East, the children of Abraham are lobbing rockets at
one another; ISIS is breaking the heart of Syria by cracking its
breastbone. Esperanto was invented not to teach us humanity, but to
allow us to practice it freely, as, where, and when we choose. And
where humanity is concerned it is hard to imagine a world more in
need of practice than ours.
“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.
* * *
The monument in Warsaw, commissioned in 1921, is the work of
many hands. The winning design was submitted by Mieczysław 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