The literal interpretation of religious concepts, which reason could not accept, was due not to the prophets but to their 'small-minded servants, who did not know how to understand the word ofGod other than literally', she said. 'According to Baha'u'llah, religion goes hand in hand with science. Religion and science are as two rails on which the wheels of human progress run. Those rails are parallel, and only upon them can the wheels of true civilization go forward.'
Her talk was, Professor Christaller pronounced, 'excellent'. But it, and the meeting, went ignored by all the Esperanto joumals that usually reported on the various gatherings at the congress.
Lidia went home to Warsaw. By the end of the summer, it seemed that her desire to go abroad to teach Esperanto — and Martha Root's, to get Lidia out of Poland - was about to come true. The Esperanto Society in Gavle, Sweden, had written to the Cseh Institute requesting a teacher for some beginning courses they wished to hold in the fall. Mr Cseh suggested they invite Lidia. Excited at the chance to have 'such a famous guest', the Gavle Esperantists wrote to her at once. She accepted and said she was ready to leave immediately. She finished the translation she was working on — the Kitab-i-Iqan — and sent it ofF quickly to Dr Grossmann. * * It was never published.
But then the difficulties began. Lidia had trouble getting her documents to go to Sweden. Twice she had to delay the trip, and the Gavle Esperantists despaired she would ever arrive. But at last she cabled them saying all was arranged. It wasjust the first of many times when trouble with passports and visas would plague Lidia. In September 1932 she set off from home, at the age of twenty-eight, to become a traveling Esperanto teacher- and an 'independent woman'.
As her ship sailed through the cold waters of the Baltic Sea toward Sweden, she found her thoughts going back to the warm Mediterranean. She 'thought much of Haifa on the ship', and the sea and the seagulls reminded her vividly of her trip to Palestine. Lidia hoped she might return to the Holy Land some day.
At the end of September Lidia arrived in Gavle and was ushered from the train station to a radio station, just in time to say a few words of greeting at the end of an Esperanto broadcast. To attract the public to sign up for the course, she gave demonstration lessons in four towns: Skutskar, Uplandsbodarne, Stromsbro and Gavle. In Gavle 250 people came to the school auditorium where she was to speak. After a musical presentation, Lidia stepped up to the podium and gave a short lecture about Esperanto which her aparato, or helper, translated into Swedish. Then she began her introductory lesson according to the Cseh method. It 'pleased the audience very much', reported one participant, and Lidia showed herself'an excellent teacher'. But only twenty-five people signed up for the course.
Lidia began to teach courses in Gavle, Stromsbro and Skutskar. The classes were small; none had more than thirty students. Apparently interest was not great enough in the fourth town to start a class. The effects of the Depression were evident: not everyone could afford to pay for Esperanto lessons, though workers' Esperanto groups provided scholarships for some unemployed students. Still Lidia must have been disappointed: the Romanian Cseh teacher Tiberiu Morariu had hundreds in his classes! And she was the daughter of Zamenhof
Winter had come, stretching 'its cold fingers over the Swedish land'. Sometimes, on a clear night, Lidia could see the Northern Lights, 'weaving shining curtains over the polar regions'. Perhaps somewhere in a distant desert, she mused, some thirsty wanderer was just as startled to see the shimmering mirage of a watery oasis. It was not going to be easy, this being an independent woman, earning her own bread. And it would be very, very lonely.
Before leaving Poland, Lidia had received from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs a set ofslides showing scenes of Poland and people in Polish folk costumes. Along with some gramophone records of Polish music, she put together a program about Poland which she presented at public meetings in a number of Swedish cities. But she was careful never to touch on politics.
On other occasions, when only Esperantists were present, she gave a talk reminiscing about her father, which always touched the audience deeply. On December 15, the anniversary of her father's birth, she spoke on an Esperanto radio broadcast, reminding the listeners how in 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War her parents had made an anguishedjourney through Sweden, trying to reach home. 'He did not get to know your lovely northern land,' she told them. 'He cĴid not see cheering crowds of Esperantists, did not hear the song of hope from a thousand voices . . . He heard only words of despair . . .'
How large the world was! Against it, one person seemed like a grain of sand. But just as there were in the universe natural forces which joined atoms into rocks, she told them, so there were also forces which could bring together the souls. 'Let us exert our efforts,' she said, 'so that thanks to the international language the human spirits may be united by mutual understanding. Then man will not be a powerless grain ofsand. Then something will come into being ofwhich today we can barely feel a presentiment. . . the powerful rock ofmankind. . .'
Her classes ended in mid-December and the Esperanto Society held a farewell party in her honor at a Gavle restaurant, where her pupils thanked her in Esperanto and gave her flowers and gifts. On the last day of 1932 Lidia left Gavle.
Toward the end of her stay in Sweden, Lidia had received an invitation from an Esperanto group in Lyon, France, asking her to come to their city to give a Cseh course. Lidia had accepted. Now a long trip across Europe lay ahead ofher, and she probably faced it with some anxiety. In Sweden attitudes had always been tolerant toward Esperanto, yet her classes in Sweden had been disappointingly small. France was another story. Though Esperanto had spread in France during Zamenhofs time, it had suffered there because of de Beaufront's activities and the war. It was the French delegate to the League of Nations who had led the opposition to Esperanto; for a time, in response to a rumor that Esperanto was to be taught officially in the Soviet Union, the language had been forbidden in French schools. What awaited the daughter of Zamenhof there?
FOURTEEN
Light and Shadoiv
The train journey through wintry northern Europe was, as Lidia described it, 'torture'. Outside it was freezing. Inside her railway compartment the heaters under the benches blazed 'like infernal fire', but whenever the windows were opened, a 'glacial blast' blew in. Lidia arrived in Lyon with 'a lovely grippe'.
Lyon was an ancient city, once the Roman town of Lugdunum. Since the fifteenth century, it had been famous for its silk industry. Families of silk weavers called canuts wove, at the rate of a few centimeters a day, ornate brocades and silk fabrics for the French court at Versailles. Although mechanization was putting an end to the traditional silk industry, in the 193os the characteristic clattering of the busy looms: bis-tan-clac, bis-tan-clac, could still be heard throughout the district of La Croix-Rousse.
Lidia had arrived in Lyon sooner than expected. The course was not to begin for some time, but this proved to be fortunate since she was ill. An Esperantist couple, Emile and Marie Borel, took Lidia into their home. Mrs Borel immediately set about curing her, applying various remedies and looking after her with such care that Lidia found that even being sick 'under the wing of Mrs Borel . . . was not disagreeable'.