Dr. One-Who-Hopes

Sam Fink’s Studio.Michael Datikash

by Suzanne Snider

On Wednesday evenings, Tom Eccardt pulls his bike up to the curb at Park Avenue and 21st Street, takes off his helmet and enters a small deli called Emma’s Dilemma. Inside, he peels off his jacket like Clark Kent, exposing a bright green T-shirt emblazoned with one word, one mission: ESPERANTO. A substitute high school teacher by day, Eccardt has been offering free classes in Esperanto — a 120-year-old language devised to do nothing less than unite everyone in the world — for 17 years. Eccardt first began studying Esperanto in 1987. That year marked the 100th anniversary of Esperanto and he thought it was time to learn the language. On this particular evening, Eccardt works with two students at a table overlooking a pizza

counter and the deli’s long hot-food buffet.
When people think of Esperanto — if they think of it at all — they most likely place the language with other short-lived “democratizing” movements, like Hands Across America: another failed and fleeting utopian vision. Esperanto last made some semblance of a public appearance — if you can call it that — in “Incubus,” a 1968 sci-fi movie starring William Shatner, filmed entirely in Esperanto and spawning another group of fans who prize the language purely for its cult status as, basically, a joke (a common complaint among Esperantists: Shatner’s pronunciation was entirely incorrect).
But as Eccardt and the language’s other adherents will tell you, Esperanto is more than a joke. Or at least it started out that way 118 years ago, when Ludovic Zahmenhof first conceived of it. Born in 1859 to a middle-class Bialystock family, Zahmenhof created his earliest version of Esperanto while still in high school. Though the Zahmenhof family moved to Warsaw in 1873, the political and cultural conflicts of Bialystock inspired Zahmenhof’s pursuit of an international language.
In 1878 Zahmenhof completed his first version of what would become Esperanto, though he hardly needed the language in order to speak to his countrymen. In addition to studying Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish and English, Zahmenhof spoke Polish, German, and French. His goal? To connect people in his region of Russia, who spoke four different languages — German, Polish, Yiddish and Russian — and by extension to create regional, and eventually worldwide, communication and peace. Zahmenhof’s father promptly burned his son’s Esperanto papers, out of fears both large (that Zahmenhof would anger czarist authorities, who counted on a divided nation) and small (that Esperanto would distract Zahmenhof from his medical studies and, if published, characterize him as a flake.
There’s something a bit ironic about the last concern considering Zahmenhof inherited his interest in linguistics from his father — who taught languages at state schools and was (unusually for a Jew) a favorite of Russian authorities.
Father and son’s religious views differed, however. While his father was firmly rooted in the Haskalah, a movement likened to a sort of Jewish Enlightenment, with bits of Positivism thrown in the mix, and which stressed secularism, especially in the realm of education, Zahmenhof, from a young age, believed unwaveringly in the importance of God, a conviction that eventually led him to Zionism. But while his religious feelings never changed, he ultimately grew skeptical of nationalism in general — in 1914, he wrote and published a statement against it — and Jewish nationalism in particular. In the battle of interests — Zionism versus Esperanto, nationalism versus universalism — Esperanto and universalism won.
Nine years after his father destroyed the draft, Zahmenhof, by this point a doctor with a busy practice in a prosperous Warsaw neighborhood, reconstituted a second, more evolved version of the language, a curious amalgamation of the romance languages, spoken entirely in troches, without exceptions and with a grammar contained almost entirely in 16 rules.
Shortly thereafter, he met his future wife, Klara Zilbernik, and found supporters in her and her father, who helped finance the publication of an Esperanto primer, “Unua Libra” (“first book”). Zahmenhof published the text under the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto, which translates roughly into “Dr. One-Who-Hopes.” Zamenhof’s father, meanwhile, had come round to his son’s way of thinking, or at least decided the project was harmless. He did his part to push the publication past the censors.
In July 1905, almost 700 people showed up for the inaugural 1905 Esperanto Congress in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. There, Zahmenhof made clear that he was pushing more than a language:
I have met men from the most varied countries and nations, and they meet each other not as deaf-mutes, but they understand one another and speak to one another as brothers, as members of one nation.
The language has always had its share of champions, including a great number of writers. Leo Tolstoy supposedly learned the language in 1888, in as little as a month. Scottish poet William Auld — nominated for a Nobel Prize in literature seven years in a row — took up writing verse in Esperanto. The photographer Sebastian Salgado knows Esperanto, and so does the author Umberto Eco. Jules Verne is often quoted as having said, “The key for a common language, lost in the Tower of Babel, can only be found in the use of Esperanto.”
No one knows the exact number of people who speak Esperanto today, but estimates range from 100,000 to three million. Sidney Culbert, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, did what some consider the most comprehensive survey and came up with 1.6 million — and it’s estimated that there exist 1,000 native Esperanto speakers whose parents taught them Esperanto as a first language. Esperanto societies and classes abound throughout the United States and numerous other countries. Eccardt is the former president of the New York Esperanto club, and now serves as vice president.
If its following is small, Esperanto endures nonetheless, with a green-and-white flag, several Internet chat rooms, international conferences, a dictionary and an Esperanto translation of the King James Bible. There is even an Esperanto rock band, Esperanto Desperado, fronted by Phillip Usher, a native Esperanto speaker. (It sounds like a cross between klezmer and Balkan music.) Eccardt claims that Esperanto is so easy to learn because its inventor gave it such a rigorous workout: he translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Esperanto. In his youth, Zahmenhof had been frustrated with his father’s secularized vision — his distilled vision of Judaism. He believed there was a place for God in his life and would ultimately test both his faith and his language with this translation.
Though Zamenhof devoted his life to universalism, nationalism would cause his greatest loss. In Poland, the Zahmenhof family was singled out by Nazis on two counts: they were Jewish and Esperantists. The family was sent to Treblinka. Zamenhof’s son was shot at Palmira Prison and two daughters died at the camp. His daughter-in-law and grandson managed to escape from a train, and survived.
When asked if the Wednesday night class is really doing anything more than honoring a romantic effort, a soon-to-be-lost art, Eccardt insists the group is doing more than studying folklore. “I am sort of optimistic about Esperanto because of the European Union. It seems to me that they could make very good use of Esperanto, adopting that as their official language because it wouldn’t give any country any advantage,” Eccardt says. As it turns out, the United Nations sees the potential as well. The UN and UNESCO, its educational, scientific and cultural arm, both maintain what is called a “consultative relationship” with Esperanto: a vague acknowledgment of shared goals and ideals.
Still, Eccardt considers himself a realist. “I am practical, and the problem with Esperanto is that it is a language and languages are hard to learn. So my hope for Esperanto is that people will see that there isn’t any advantage in having one language, one culture being the dominant culture and that they’ll want to have Esperanto as the international language.”

Suzanne Snider is currently at work on a book about two rival communes on adjacent land. Reprinted from Nextbook.org, a new read on Jewish culture.