Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (7)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

I finally pulled this book off the shelf and read the novel (10-15 February). I found two additional references to Esperanto, quoted in my previous post. Feathers (published in the original Hebrew in 1979), like several contemporary Jewish novels, uses Esperanto as nostalgia for lost utopian possibilities. But what about the novel itself?

My initial reaction was: why the National Yiddish Book Center named this one of the 100 greatest works of modern Jewish Literature eludes me. This is deemed a classic of Israeli literature, but it just could not hold my interest or attention most of the way through. Perhaps my inattention is my own fault, but I was just not motivated to care. Stylistically, the novel is marvelous, but still . . . You might think I would be more interested in a collection of eccentrics and crackpots, but I just couldn't care about this Jewish cohort in Jerusalem. Note, however,  . . .

There are two outstanding features I should point out, the second of which is more compelling to me. In all of the scenarios covered, from the war of independence to the Yom Kippur war, not limited to actual wars, there is the constant presence of death and funerals. The title itself suggests the fragility of Jewish life and dreams.

The second feature is the Jewish gift for scorn and sarcasm. Here is one characteristic passage that also pertains to philosophy, autodidacts, utopians, and cranks:

"Now that you are a father yourself, how can you rationally explain such craziness?" How a boy who lacked nothing, whose teachers were men of such stature that some eventually became university lecturers, whose friends came from the very best of houses--how such a boy could have fallen for a shiftless low-life Leder was more than she could comprehend.

Since the conversation annoyed me, I replied that no one, not even I could know what had gone on in my mind and soul as a child. Nevertheless, I added, I believed that Leder was in his own fashion a philosopher, though an autodidact of course, and that my imagination had been fired by the world of utopian thought he had opened up to me.

My mother sarcastically repeated my big words and declared that even though she had no schooling and had never even been able to attend the Saturday night lectures at the community center, she knew enough to understand the difference between Leder and a philosopher.

"We're both adults now," she went on as we crossed the busy Jerusalem-Jericho road, "and it won't hurt you to hear the truth for once." She blamed Leder for my having dropped out of school. "You went to college thinking that a philosophy department was a lot of wise men sitting around with laurel wreathes on their heads and discussing Kant and Spinoza while solving the problems of the universe with hot air." [p. 42]

Various ideological factions in the Jewish community of the historical periods covered are mentioned: Zionists, anti-Zionists, Bolsheviks, rightists, Europe-oriented monarchists. The key figure is Mordecai Leder, disciple of Karl Popper-Lynkeus and leader of the Nutrition Army, dedicated to bringing the utopian project of minimal consumption into being.

This might be a fluke of my attentiveness, but I finally got absorbed in the novel with the death of Joseph Stalin. The anti-communist insults hurled at the Jewish Bolshies in Jerusalem are hilarious.

Leder becomes disillusioned with peaceful persuasion when Albert Schweitzer declines his invitation to become titular head of the movement, picks up a gun at the moment when Israeli right-wingers riot in protest of Israel's reparations deal with Germany, gets arrested, and goes downhill from there. The narrator's life with Leder ends in the 1950s, but the connection comes back to him in the final chapter when burying the dead from the Yom Kippur war.

So, despite my initial indifference, there appears to be something to be gleaned from this tale, the generalities if not the specifics: the craziness of dreamers, or perhaps the futility of all dreams, the discrepancy between people's self-conception and their lives, the interweaving of humor and tragedy, the evanescence of Jewish and all human life, the absorption and disappearance of the world one once lived, disorientation and memory, feathers scattered from living beings and blown all about, signalling the disruption of a fleeting existence.

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (6)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

I finally read the novel (10-15 February). I will report on it further, but here are two additional references to Esperanto I found:

Leder often reminisced to me about his years in the imperial capital. On one such occasion, we had walked as far as the train station at the beginning of the Valley of Refaim when he interrupted a formal lecture on the importance of Esperanto in the future Lynkean state to announce that he wished to rest for awhile beneath one of the shaded branches in the square outside the station. [p.36]

And:

The heavy winter rains had ruined them. [Leder's books] Their fancy cloth and leather bindings were waterlogged and cracked, and strips of Viennese newspapers from the turn of the century had peeled loose from their backings. The pages were stuck together in clumps as hard as bricks. I poked around in the pile like a hyena scavenging a dead lion. A brown manila envelope lay buried beneath the books. Its bottom had decayed into the soft, damp, verminous earth, but the black-bound notebooks inside were unharmed, apart from a pinkening at their edges from the moisture. The "Constitution of Lynkeania" announced the title page of the topmost notebook in Leder's handwriting. Yet apart from Popper-Lynkeus' minimum social program copied out from one of his books, some attempted translations from Esperanto, and a few sketches of the Lynkean state seal, the notebooks had nothing in them. [p. 218]

Amos Oz: Esperanto among the Kibbutzim

Famous Israeli author Amos Oz, who lived on a kibbutz for decades, has written a book of connected stories about kibbutzim, Between Friends. The publication release date for the English translation is September 24.  One of the stories in the book is titled "Esperanto." Here are excerpts from two reviews.

Amos Oz explores the daily lives behind utopian dreams in 'Between Friends' by Michael Walsh, Daily News, September 18, 2013

 The collection concludes with a masterfully rendered story called “Esperanto,” which has an atmosphere so rich it can almost be considered a character itself. It focuses on Martin Vandenburg, an anarchist who teaches Esperanto, the easy-to-learn constructed language that was crafted to transcend nationality and promote peace.

Between Friends by Amos Oz – review by Alberto Manguel, The Guardian, Wednesday 8 May 2013

The Esperanto teacher declares that "imprecise words poison relations between people everywhere, and that's why clear, accurate words can heal those relationships, but only if they are the right words spoken in a language that all people can understand". One of the students observes that Cain and Abel "probably spoke the same language too"; another says nothing but thinks that "the sorrow in the world was born long before words".

Vandenberg believes humans are essentially generous and kind-hearted but corrupted by their environments. He wants states to be abolished and replaced with an international, pacifist brotherhood of Esperanto speakers.

“When all human beings speak the same language,” he tells his class, “there will be no more wars because their common language will prevent misunderstanding among individuals and peoples.”

This claim reveals an ideological rift. Students question his belief with instances of violence between people who spoke the same language: Cain and Abel, German Jews and Nazis.

One student sat quietly, thinking “the sorrow in the world was born long before words.”

If that young man is correct, then the feeling of sadness, miscommunication and pain existed long before anyone uttered those nouns, which are essentially metaphors for something intangible.

On this web page are two videos and links to the story "Esperanto" in Italian and Hebrew:

Video. Amos Oz, Esperanto (Festival Internazionale delle Letterature 2012 – Basilica di Massenzio, Roma )

In the second of these videos, Oz recites the story in Hebrew, accompanied by music and Italian subtitles.  The first is an interview in which Oz summarizes the story "Esperanto," which you can view right here:

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (5)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

Final excerpts / Jen la du finaj cerpaĵoj pri Esperanto, el la anglalingva traduko (p. 139, 167):

From Enthusiasm to Disillusionment

(De Entuziasmo al Seniluziiĝo)

---

On the face of things, his relations with Lev-Tamim were good. Both men agreed that in preparing a new edition of The Necessity for General Nutrition, Popper-Lynkeus’ views should be brought into line with contemporary social and economic conditions, and both busied themselves with its double translation into Hebrew and Esperanto, which would be published simultaneously by Greenberg’s vegetarian press.

---

Once more he buzzed with activity and surrounded himself with books, the millenarian glow back in his eyes. “Neither vegetarianism, nor Esperanto, nor celebrities,” crowed Leder, rejoicing in his newly found freedom. “Enough of such childishness!” At last he realized, he said, that his program until now had been so much empty prattle, and that his fatal weakness for ceremony had no place in today’s cruel, dog-eat-dog world.

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (4)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

Another excerpt / Jen plua cerpaĵo el la anglalingva traduko (p. 135-6):

Esperanto in a Lynkean State?
(Ĉu Esperanto Kiel Oficiala Lingvo de Lynkea Ŝtato?)

Leder heard the old man out with uncharacteristic patience, then casually inquired whether he had ever heard of Popper-Lynkeus’ inventions in the field of aeronautics. With a smile Havkin answered that not only was he familiar with the biography of that unhappy and disappointment-fraught Jewish-Viennese genius, he was also well versed in his social and economic views. Indeed, there had been a time when The Necessity for General Nutrition had never left his side.

“Don’t you think it should be translated into Esperanto?” queried Leder, who had never dreamed of such luck.

“It’s a book of the highest importance,” Havkin agreed, “a must for any Esperanto library.” Unfortunately, however, the Esperantists had been unable to find the right man for the job.

“Ecce homo!” Leder cried, pointing to himself with childish glee. Waving the green primer, he declared that he was now engaged in studying Esperanto from morning till night and was sure that he could finish a sample chapter from Popper-Lynkeus’ great work in several weeks’ time.

Havkin threw his arms around his guest in a comradely embrace. Did Leder’s decision, he wondered, have anything to do with his own appearance at Greenberg’s bookbindery earlier that week?

Afterward, while we sat on the concrete patio in front of Havkin’s house looking at the mountain ridges falling away in waves to the coastal plain and cracking almonds from the old man’s trees, Leder explained his proposal for a united front of Esperantists, vegetarians, and Lynkeans. The forces of good, he declared, should band together in the struggle for their goals, which were complementary rather than opposed.

“In the Lynkean state,” Leder announced, Esperanto will be the official language of the government, as well as of all schools and universities. The eating of meat and fish will be illegal. All slaughterhouses and butcher shops will be expropriated for the public good, and the slaughterers, butchers, and fishermen will be sent to special schools to be re-educated. Eggs and milk products will be sold only by special permit and will have to be eaten in private.”

The old man listened intently, making a sour face when Leder enthusiastically proclaimed that the portraits of Josef Popper-Lynkeus and Esperanto’s inventor Dr. Ludwig Zamenhoff, the two official state philosophers, would be hung in all public places.

“That reminds me too much of the pictures of Marx and Engels in the streets of Moscow,” Havkin said. In any case, he remarked, he was too old by now for such things. Leder, he added after a moment’s thought, could do worse than listen to someone like himself who had seen so many lofty ideals besmirched through their contact with politics. “Don't forget the story of Icarus, my young man. If they come too close to the glowing sun of political passion, both Lynkeanism and Esperantism will smash themselves to bits on the hard ground of reality.”

“Politics have nothing to do with it,” objected Leder, trying to point out Havkin’s error. But our elderly host only replied that he did not wish to spoil his Sabbath rest by losing his temper unnecessarily. If we were not in any hurry, he went on, he would be happy to welcome us inside his house and show us the one pastime of his otherwise Spartan existence.

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (3)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

Another excerpt / Jen plua cerpaĵo el la anglalingva traduko (p. 133-5):

Leder Enthused about Esperanto & Vegetarianism
(Leder entuziasmas pri Esperanto & Vegetarismo)

The meeting with Havkin marked a turning point in the annals of the Lynkean movement.

When we left the vegetarian discussion club, Leder was back in fighting spirits. Though our movement, he confessed, had fallen on hard times, indeed had sunk into lethargy, we were about to make a fresh start.

“Esperanto opens undreamed-of horizons for us," he nearly shouted, affirming that we must translate into it at once The Necessity for General Nutrition.

“We'll break through the narrow barriers of national boundaries,” he went on, “and comb the civilized world for those chosen few who would rather make do with a kerosene burner and an ice chest than have the luxury of a gas stove and a frigidaire.”

As usual, he became engrossed at once in the fine points of his plan; the first thing in the morning, he announced, he was going to Ludwig Maier’s bookstore to buy some Esperanto texts. Within a few weeks he would be ready to begin translating Popper-Lynkeus’ great work into the international language of the future.

That Saturday afternoon we set out on foot for Havkin’s farm in Giv’at Sha’ul.

Leder lost no time on the way and occupied himself with memorizing Esperanto sentences from a primer on whose cover was a white, six-sided star of David with a green, five-sided star inside it.

“Mi lernas Esperanton, vi lernas Esperanton, li lernas Esperanton,” he recited as we left the city behind. “Esperanto, Esperanto, Esperanto,” echoed the hills rising above us. On the terrace of the mental hospital overlooking the road in which he was soon to be locked up himself, the inmates ceased their antics for a moment, grasped the bars like monkeys, and stared at the odd pedestrian shouting meaningless phrases at the brutal sun while a hypnotized child strode beside him.

Havkin was sitting in the shade of a grape vine on his front porch, his face in an open book. So absorbed was he in his reading that he failed to notice the two strangers disturbing the Sabbath peace of the sleepy dirt path leading up to his house. Leder scrutinized the jacket of the book, his lips slowly spelling out its title. Our vegetarian acquaintance, he whispered to me, was presently in the bedroom of an incurably ill Ivan Ilyitch, helping the dying man’s faithful servant to prop up his swollen feet against the pain.

“Bonan Sabaton!” called Leder, leaning against the fence. “But it still isn’t your death, sinjoro Havkin," he added, quoting Tolstoy’s unforgettable line.

“What, what?” cried out Havkin, the book slipping front his shaking hands, amazed to find the printed words take flight from the page and double back to him from the street.

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (2)

Mi jam blogis pri la hebrea romano Feathers (Plumoj), kiu ricevis anglalingvan tradukon:

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

La originala estis eldonita en 1979 kaj fariĝis klasikaĵo de israela literaturo. Troviĝas ene strangaj revantoj kun utopiismaj revoj. Do jen enkonduko de Esperanto en la rakonto (p. 132-133):

Havkin Expounds on Esperanto & Vegetarianism
(Excerpt from Feathers)

by Haim Be’er

Over his shoulder I spied a short, elderly man making his way almost noiselessly through the empty lot between Greenberg’s yard and Jaffa Road. The closer he came, the clearer grew the features of his ascetic, white-goateed face with its deep-socketed, visionary eyes.

"Saluton, sinjoro Greenberg!" he greeted the bookbinder when he reached the front gate.

Greenberg spun around and quickly returned the greeting. "Saluton, sinjoro Havkin, kiel vi fartas?"

He fondly laid a mud-caked hand on his visitor’s shoulder and informed me that it was our pleasure today to play host to a great pioneer of Jewish vegetarianism, the distinguished Mr. Havkin, who for years had been putting utopian theory into practice on the farm he had built with his own two hands in the hills outside Jerusalem.

"Kiu estas, tiu bela knabo?" Mr. Havkin asked, pinching my check.

“I don't know Spanish,” I replied.

“It’s not Spanish, it’s Esperanto,” said the old man, asking whether I had learned in school about Dr. Ludwig Zamenhoff and the international tongue he had invented. After inquiring again of Greenberg, this time in Hebrew, who the handsome young boy was, he assured me that it would be well worth my while to acquire a language that was certain to be the world’s most widely spoken before long. And it would be best for me to do so immediately, while I was still young and quick to absorb.

For once the club discussion, which, needless to say, concerned Esperanto, was conducted in an atmosphere of calm.

Greenberg ceded his place at the head of the table to Mr. Havkin, in, while he himself sat on Havkin’s right, ready to do the old man’s bidding. Lev-Tamim, unnaturally preoccupied, whittled flowers on his walking stick, while Leder busily jotted down notes.

Havkin began by remarking that, since the day of its groundbreaking, the unfinished Tower of Babel had loomed at humanity’s back and cast its menacing shadow. “Once and for all,” he said, “we must overcome this ancient catastrophe by taking the line of ‘One humanity, one language’—not in order to rebel against the gods, but on the contrary, to fructify the earth.”

In great detail the venerable old man listed the advantages of the language of the future. Though it was easy to learn, its writing being phonetic and its grammar so simple that it could be mastered in a matter of hours, it was rich enough to express all human thoughts, and, last but not least, it was the only neutral tongue in the world, whose rival power blocs were engaged in a cold war that might flare up at any moment.

Havkin ended his address by quoting forty members of the French Academy, who concluded in a report published as far back as 1924 that Esperanto was a model of logical clarity. Once the vegetarian movement adopted it as its official language, he hoped, the day would be near when the rest of the human race would follow in its footsteps.

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto

The Art of Tempting Memory To Speak
By Benjamin Balint
The Jewish Daily Forward, April 23, 2004,
[review of Feathers by Haim Be’er]

In the foreground, “Feathers” tells of the friendship between the young narrator and the much older Mordecai Leder — a necrophiliac, a collector of alms for a school for the blind and an Esperanto enthusiast (“Bonan Sabaton!” is his Sabbath greeting).

Jen la kompleta referenco:

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

Kompilenda estas bibliografio pri Zamenhof kaj Esperanto en fikciaj verkoj. Fikcia esperantisto Mordecai Leder estas ĉefrolulo en ĉi tiu romano el la hebrea, Plumoj.