Review by New York Times Review
THERE'S AN OLD YIDDISH JOKE about an Esperanto convention where participants were given license to "crocodile" - speak their native languages - during a break in the proceedings. After a long day of speaking Esperanto, listening to speeches in Esperanto, singing songs and reading signs in Esperanto, they were relieved to be able to stop reaching for words. As they streamed out of the hall, one Esperantist after the other turned to his or her fellows and exclaimed with a sigh, "A mekhaye shoyn, redn a yidish vort" - "It's such a pleasure to be able to speak Yiddish already." It's an exaggeration, to be sure. Esperan tujo, the unlocalizable community of Esperanto speakers, has never been particularly Jewish, but as Esther Schor points out at welcome length in "Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language," Esperanto arose in response to Jewish concerns. Although Ludovik Zamenhof, the language's sole begetter, developed a plan for a lingvo internacia while still a teenager, it took him until the ripe age of 28 to revise and refine it enough for public consumption. His "Unua Libro" ("First Book"), which introduced Esperanto to the world, was published in 1887 - roughly nine years after Zamenhof devised a plan for the renovation and standardization of Yiddish, a project with which he continued to tinker for at least 30 more years. Though Schor never says so in so many words, she makes it clear that Esperanto, in its origins at any rate, was intended as Yiddish for everybody; Yiddish, that is, for goyim. But where Yiddish is the national language of nowhere, Esperanto was meant to be the alternate language of everywhere, a universal second language, "neutral, nonethnic and nonimperial," that would "commit its users to transcend nationalism." Zamenhof's hope that "All translations would be made into it alone, as into a tongue intelligible to all" anchors the language even more deeply in Yiddish, which served for a thousand years as taytsh, the language into which students at every level of the Central and East European Jewish school system translated and explained the biblical and rabbinical texts that they were studying. There is a direct line from the kheyder, the traditional Jewish elementary school, to a language that Schor characterizes as "invented not to transcend translation but to transact it." But there's more to it than Yiddish. Schor's account of Zamenhof's dreams and disappointments, including the religious ideas that he - and he alone - saw as essential to Esperanto's mission, turns into an increasingly anecdotal survey of the language and its culture in the century since Zamenhof's death. Although Esperantists refer to themselves as samideanoj (from the English "same idea"), Esperantujo seems never to have lacked for either colorful characters or the "dirtiness of fighting" that George Orwell, whose aunt Nellie was one of those characters, ascribed to the so-called international languages: Schor looks at Marxist Esperantists, Stalinist Esperantists, Nazi Esperantists and anti-traditional Far Eastern Esperantists, along with the samideanoj she encounters in her travels. Author of a biography of Emma Lazarus, Schor is less assured as a memoirist than as a scholar, and while these latter sections are not without some interest, they go on at greater length than the material warrants. This is, however, a minor quibble. In portraying a language condemned by both Hitler and Stalin, then used by the American military as the language of the pseudo-Communist "Aggressor" in a lengthy series of Cold War maneuvers, "Bridge of Words" leaves us in no doubt that whatever Esperanto might be doing, it seems to be doing it right. MICHAEL WEX is the author, most recently, of "Rhapsody in Schmaltz."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
The artificial language, Esperanto, which literally means hopeful, was the quixotic invention of nineteenth-century ophthalmologist Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof, who grew tired of witnessing the many quarrels and misunderstandings between ethnic groups in his multicultural native city, Bialystok, Russia. In the first in-depth study of Esperanto and its colorful creator, Schor takes a broad approach to biography, expanding beyond Zamenhof's life to examine the philosophical and psychological elements at work in the language's continual evolution and current usage by several million people worldwide. From her personal sojourns on five continents where Esperanto is spoken and written, usually as a third or fourth language, Schor discovered that Zamenhof's idealism about using this cobbled together but easily learned communication tool to reduce international conflict and bloodshed is still shared by its supporters. But she urges caution, observing that past Esperanto promoters misused it to uphold various extreme political views. Must reading for those fascinated by linguistics and utopian endeavors and an essential volume for every library's language collection.--Hays, Carl Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Poet and author Schor (English, Princeton Univ.; Emma Lazarus) studied and traveled widely for seven years preparing this history and current account of Esperanto, the only successful constructed language. First detailed in a book published in 1887 by Polish physician and polyglot Ludwig Zamenhof (1859-1917), Esperanto means "one who hopes." Logical and consistent, used around the world, Esperanto meets tests of translation into and from other tongues. There are 16 rules-no exceptions. Example: "Mia filino legas la novan libron" means "My daughter reads the new book." The literature and poetry, original and translated, is impressive: the Library of Congress has a major collection. Schor's learning is deep and her style inviting. This is an insightful book about a unique invention that fosters communication and protects diversity. VERDICT This book integrates personal experience and objective scholarship and will appeal to general readers as well as adepts of linguistics.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The history of a new language that was invented to bring conversation to a world of misunderstanding.Combining biography, history, and a memoir of her own middle-aged anguish, Schor (English/Princeton Univ.; Emma Lazarus, 2006, etc.) offers an illuminating, well-researched chronicle of the development of Esperanto from its origins in 19th-century Bialystok to its present iterations on six continents and in 62 countries. Herself a speaker of the constructed language, she reveals her experiences in Esperanto classes and interactions with Esperanto enthusiastsearnest, quirky, and sometimes contentiousat conferences throughout the world. Central to her story is the father of the language, L.L. Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist who, ironically, was the son of a censor. As a Russian Jew, subject to virulent anti-Semitism, he sought a way to modernize the Jewish community and gradually include people of other faiths and nationalities. Communication was central to his vision: cobbling together grammar and word parts from German, English, Russian, Latin, and Greek, Zamenhof contrived a new language to enable conversation despite differences of nationality, creed, class, or race. Meant to be a bridge, Esperanto soon became a source of division, as followers of Zamenhof sought to seize power over the dissemination of the language and align it with their own widely dissonant political views, including imperialism, isolationism, socialism, anarchism, and communism. Multiculturalism, meant to be the lifeblood of Esperanto, was not easily achieved. The problem, said a former head of the Universal Esperanto Association, is that language is an institution of power. Intended, Zamenhof hoped, to counter nationalism, fascism, and xenophobia, Esperanto sometimes was undermined by those same forces. As George Orwell, the nephew of an Esperanto leader, noted, for sheer dirtiness of fighting, the feuds between the inventors of various of the international languages would take some beating. Schor is strongest in tracing Esperantos past and present, but she is less persuasive about its robust future in fostering transnational identity, durable international networks, and a strong sense of belonging to the world. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
