George Soros’s more permanent visa.
On his way to becoming one of the world’s richest men, Soros was for a time actively committed to the Esperanto movement. According to the minutes of the Ipswich conference, he wanted to organize a bicycle trip through Europe, spreading the word. He also extolled the virtues of Esperanto at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, where anyone with an opinion and the bravery to mount a soapbox can compete for an audience. But he has long since stopped having anything to do with it. A Belgian woman I spoke to at the Havana congress told me bitterly, “He could do so much to help now, but he is a traitor. He hates Esperanto.”
I asked Humphrey Tonkin, who did the English translation of Tivadar Soros’s memoir of survival during World War II, for which George wrote the foreword, why Soros had changed his mind. “He doesn’t hate Esperanto,” Tonkin said. “He hasn’t given up on its ideals, but his position is that it had its chance and it blew it. Which is a perfectly respectable view.”
Born in Britain and educated at Cambridge and Harvard, Tonkin is an Esperantist but definitely not a kook. He’s a professor of English specializing in Spenser and Shakespeare, a former Guggenheim fellow, and president emeritus at the University of Hartford. “Staying sane while dealing with something that is so low in the popular esteem is problematic,” he told me. “It’s a distressingly marginal community. Sometimes when I’m at Esperanto meetings, I say to myself—and this sounds terrible—I say, ‘Am I really like that?’ But then I sit in a faculty meeting, and I think to myself, ‘This is not terribly different from an Esperanto congress,’ because it’s true. The fact is that overall, people are wackier than one imagines. So perhaps Esperanto is not that far-out.”
Tonkin knew about the fringe quality of Esperantoland from the moment of his first contact with it. On a trip to Paris when he was barely a teenager, he went to a meeting of the Paris Esperanto Society. When the meeting was over, Tonkin said, he was followed out by “your sort of typical 1950s Paris Marxist, and he bent my ear at enormous length about Marxism. The awful thing about it was that I discovered that Esperanto really works. I understood every word he said.”
He was in it for better or worse. When he was not yet sixteen years old, Tonkin traveled, by himself, from England to an Esperanto congress in Denmark and fell into a world full of interesting things. “Not that I found Esperanto was a comfort exactly, but it provided me with opportunities that I couldn’t find in the rest of my life,” he said. “Everything I know about Latvian culture, for example, I know about as a result of Esperanto.”
In 1959 he went to Poland. “Nobody went to Poland in ?59 except crazy Esperanto people,” he said, “and I traveled all over the place. I was in Iran right before the revolution with Esperantists, and what I heard the Esperantists saying about Iran was nowhere to be found in the newspapers. Here I was in direct contact with a collection of people who were not beholden to the United States or Britain or whatever, and were not going to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. So I was able in a sense to get a particular notion of the truth that other people didn’t have.”
I mentioned a man I had met at the Havana congress, an Icelandic fisherman who couldn’t be more gaunt, or more silent, or farther from home. He first learned about Esperanto from a radio broadcast, studied it from a book, and had been to every universal congress since—Berlin, Tel Aviv, Zagreb, Fortaleza, Gothenburg. That July, he was headed for Beijing. “You know,” Tonkin said, “there are a lot of Esperantists out there who just haven’t yet found their way to Esperanto.”
Back where it all started for me, at that MIT conference, I never did gain an understanding of the role of rock music in Esperanto culture. But I did get to hear Kimo play. On a stage set up on the lawn in front of the student center on the main quad, he brought out his accordion while his friend Jean-Marc LeClerq, formerly of the group La Rozmariaj Beboj (the Rosemary’s Babies), tuned his guitar. They began with the mellow strains of “Besame mucho”: “Kisu min / Kisu min multe.”
Two gray-haired women in matching green dresses twirled to the music, their feet bare in the grass. A large-bellied man with a big green star on both his cap and his belt buckle stood with his hands in his pockets, swaying awkwardly. Others joined the ladies, or perched on benches and sang along. Outsiders wandered by. The curious ones stopped to listen or to take a leaflet from a friendly college student in an Esperanto T-shirt. Others sniggered or rolled their eyes as they refused the leaflet and continued on. I sat at a careful distance from the stage, hoping it wasn’t too obvious that I was part of this group but feeling guilty for thinking so. While Esperantoland has its share of people you don’t want to meet—insufferable bores, sanctimonious radicals, proselytizers for Christ, communism, or a new kind of vegetarian healing—for the most part, the Esperantists I encountered were genuine, friendly, interested in the world, and respectful of others. Though I may not have fully crossed over myself, I did develop a protective defensiveness about them.
Is it crazy to believe that Esperanto has a chance in the age of English? It’s insane. Ask any businessman in Asia, any hotel operator in Europe. Is it ridiculous to believe that a universal common language will bring peace to the world? Of course it is. We have all the brutal evidence we need: the fact that Serbians and Croatians speak the same language did not prevent the bloodshed in Yugoslavia; the shared language of the Hutus and Tutsis did nothing to stop the massacres in Rwanda. Do Esperantists really believe either of these propositions? Whether they do or they don’t, as far as they are concerned, they’re doing their part. It can’t hurt.
The world may not need Esperanto, but it does need people who, like Zamenhof, are moved to act against the “enmity of nations.” Knowing Zamenhof’s fate makes it difficult to dismiss his life’s work with a chuckle. During the bloody peak of World War I, Zamenhof’s brother Aleksander killed himself upon being ordered into the Russian army because he couldn’t bear to face once again the horrors he had witnessed while serving as an army doctor during the Russo-Japanese War. Not long after that, in the midst of death and destruction on a scale he never could have imagined, Zamenhof’s heart gave out. He was lucky. He would not have to know that his lineage would end in yet another world war with the murder of his children at Treblinka.
Kimo and Jean-Marc began another song whose tune was unfamiliar to me. An original Esperanto song. Normando, a slight man with a hint of gray in his beard, came and sat on the grass across from me, his legs folded under him, facing me with his back to the stage. He proved to be a sweet-natured Esperanto ambassador who had been kindly introducing me to people and explaining special phrases and vocabulary to me in a modest, non- pedantic way. He leaned forward and in French-Canadian-accented Esperanto explained that the song we were hearing was called “Sola.” People closer to the stage began to sing along, and he said it is often played at youth congresses, where it is a sort of anthem. The lyrics tell the story of a young person who feels completely alone, but then goes to an Esperanto congress and feels such friendship and connection to the world that his loneliness leaves him … until he is back in his own nation in his own little room. “This song,” he almost whispered, “is so meaningful for Esperantists. Sometimes, when it’s played at the congresses, you see people crying.”
Charles Bliss and the Language of Symbols
Word Magic
Though Esperanto has survived into the present day, the era of the international language has not. In the years between 1880 and the beginning of World War II, over two hundred languages were published, most of them variations on the same theme: European roots, a set of grammatical endings, no irregularities. The number of
