Alison Leigh Cowan/The New York TimesGeorge Soros holding his father’s memoir on Wednesday. The man in the poster is L. L. Zamenhof, Esperanto’s creator.
For a small group of linguists, scholars, and dreamers who have become accustomed to having their invitations overlooked, it was no small thing when George Soros, the billionaire, walked into the room to celebrate with them.
Yet there he was Wednesday night at their symposium, doling out savory morsels about the object of their fancy: Esperanto, a century-old language fashioned in the almost evangelical belief that giving the world a common, easy-to-learn second language would reduce conflict.
Though it never caught on as widely as its inventor, L. L. Zamenhof, hoped and did little to tamp down two world wars, Esperanto still has its followers and fans. A bit messianic themselves, they get a charge learning about the latest literary find or clever Esperanto-infused rap lyric and enjoy replaying for newcomers the scene in “Incubus,” the 1966 cult classic, in which William Shatner seduces a beautiful conquest, not in Klingon, but in Esperanto.
Transcending national boundaries and bridging cultures is the whole idea. “The Koran in Esperanto is one of our nicest works,” said Neil Blonstein, the retired teacher who runs the Universal Esperanto Association and organized Wednesday’s symposium.
Consider it no coincidence, then, that the symposium took place across the street from the United Nations, 151 years to the day that Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof of Bialystok in what is now Poland was born.
An attentive crowd of 75 participants had just finished screening a new documentary about Esperanto and hearing about a new English translation of the memoir that Mr. Soros’s father, Tivadar, had published in Esperanto in 1923 about the group escape he had led three years earlier from a prisoner of war camp in eastern Russia.
At the lectern, Mr. Soros filled in some details of the group’s escape and fitful trek through Siberia. “The plan was to build a barge — well, not exactly a barge, a raft — and drift down to the ocean, except his geography was not very good, and he did not realize all the rivers led to the Arctic Ocean,” Mr. Soros said. “So as it got colder, they all had to get off.”
He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet. “This story was very much part of my childhood,” he said, holding up the newly translated memoir.
His father picked up Esperanto in his 20s and helped start “Literatura Mondo,” a literary journal that published works in Esperanto, in Budapest when he returned from his Russia. Poets and other practitioners of the new language frequented his house, and when the 17-year-old George Soros left Budapest to seek his fortune in England in 1947, he said, “one of the first things I did was seek out the Esperanto Society in London” as a friendly refuge.
“It was a very useful language,” Mr. Soros said, “because wherever you went, you found someone to speak with.”
Courtesy of Mondial Books The literary magazine that George Soros’s father helped start in Budapest in 1922 to publish works in Esperanto.The memoir, whose original title was “Modernaj Robinzonoj,” evoking modern Robinson Crusoes, was published in installments in Tivadar Soros’s literary magazine in 1923. Reissued in English by Mondial, the work has been retitled “Crusoes in Siberia.” With the benefit of experience, the author actually counsels his readers in the introduction to “never dream of becoming Robinson Crusoe” lest they share his fate of wandering waywardly in Siberia.
Despite its age and habit of mentioning places that are hard to locate on maps, the memoir was not that difficult to translate, according to Humphrey Tonkin, the Esperanto scholar who accepted the challenge at the request of the Soros family.
A former president of the University of Hartford and teacher of humanities, he was rather fearless having already produced Esperanto versions of two of Shakespeare’s plays — “Henry V,” complete with its St. Crispin’s Day speech, and “The Winter’s Tale,” with its memorable stage direction involving a bear: “Eliras, sekvata de urso.”
Truth be told, he said, Soros and Shakespeare were both child’s play compared with Winnie the Pooh, whose style of wordplay was hard to capture.
Reciting the children’s classic, he said, “Winnie the Pooh tells Piglet, ‘I met a Heffalump today.’ Piglet says, ‘What was it doing?’ Pooh says, ‘Just lumping along.’ That’s a much bigger problem than Shakespeare.”
Greeted warmly by audience members after the presentations, Mr. Soros, 80, told one cluster of admirers, “I should have told the story of how my father became an Esperantist.”
Urged to put it on the record, he obliged. “The new camp commander in the prison camp arrived, and he was an Esperantist,” Mr. Soros said. “He asked thousands of prisoners if there were any Esperantists among them. There were three. So he invited them for the weekend and feasted them. After that, everyone started learning it.”
Gently, Professor Tonkin told Mr. Soros that he thought another theory was more likely to be accurate but understood how Mr. Soros’s version “makes a much better story.”
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