Bridge of Words by Esther Schor

Author:Esther Schor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

Lidia Zamenhof, 1925

[Österreichische Nationalbibliothek]

And she urged them to bring into their children’s lives children of other ethnicities, nationalities, and races. This, they could—indeed, should—do through Esperanto, which was far more than an affair of “postage stamps and picture post cards.” Esperanto would empower children to “recognize the true face of their neighbor and see that that face is the face of a brother.”160 Above all, she said, unity among women was the key to bringing the world back from the brink of disaster.

* * *

Lidia Zamenhof’s Bahá’í friends were now imploring her to get out of Poland—out of Europe altogether. Though Shoghi Effendi had been counseling Lidia to work on her Farsi and sojourn in what had recently become Iran, he now wrote to urge her to visit the Bahá’ís of the United States since they “are so eager to meet you and accord you a hearty welcome.”161 When the official invitation from the American Assembly of the Bahá’í Faith finally came (the Guardian had written to them himself), it stipulated that the Bahá’ís would pay for her round-trip passage from Poland, but the Esperanto Association of North American (EANA) would have to take responsibility for setting up the Esperanto classes by which she hoped to pay her way.

When she arrived in New York on the ship Batory in late September 1937, she felt much as her father had on his arrival in 1910. She, too, was thrilled by the skyscrapers, traffic, and bustle of New York; she, too, felt small, overwhelmed, and agitated, though her letters home would wax ecstatic about ice cream, which was happily ubiquitous. Like her father, she was mobbed by journalists, whom she addressed through an interpreter. But unlike her father, she was asked how tall she was (barely five feet) and how much she weighed. Diana Klotts, a reporter for the Jewish Sentinel, questioned “the Modern Minerva” about what Esperanto might mean to American Jews. In reply, Lidia Zamenhof quoted her father’s Esperanto translation of the following lines from Zephaniah 3:9: “For then will I turn to the peoples/ A pure language/ That they may all call upon the name of the Lord/ To serve Him with one consent.” It was Klotts, remarking on Lidia’s “strange inner light,” who dubbed her “the High Priestess of Esperanto.”162

From the outset, the American journey was mired in complications. Among the Bahá’í, there was official respect for Esperanto, but beneath it neither warmth nor urgency. The American Esperantists, on the other hand, saw in Lidia a lit match that could ignite interest in Esperanto. Tensions mounted within the joint Bahá’í-Esperanto sponsoring committee. The Esperantist Samuel Eby, declaring his reservations about Lidia Zamenhof’s skills as a lecturer, eventually resigned from the committee, but not before lodging a formal complaint with EANA about his two Bahá’í colleagues, Della Quinlan and Josephine Kruka.

As she trudged from city to city, Lidia Zamenhof could not count on enough interest even to enroll a course in Esperanto. She abhorred the dingy Bronx house with terrible food in which Eby had installed her.

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