Prison Officers Plan to Learn Esperanto

P.S. The enemy plans a surprise attack

Until after World War I, there was no established right for prisoners to correspond with their families (that wouldn’t come about until the Geneva Convention of 1929, and the Washington Internacia Klubo, one of the Washington, D.C. Esperanto clubs of that period[1] didn’t qualify as an international relief organization. Nevertheless, they did manage to get a letter from a Bulgarian Esperantist who had been captured by the Romanians.

It’s not clear, looking at the history of the region, how long the letter was delayed. The Washington Herald reported on this on January 4, 1914. On that date, Bulgaria and Romania weren’t a war with each other. Conflict between Bulgaria and Romania in the Second Balkan War had ended on July 25, 1913, and Romania didn’t enter World War I until August 27, 1916. When the Herald made its report, there hadn’t been any hostilities between the two countries for five months, and hostilities wouldn’t recur for more than two years (and WWI had yet to commence). Yet the described situation doesn’t fit the idea of a civilian prison.[2]

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Silbernick Defends German Use of Esperanto

Acquitted? Was it on trial?

The New York Sun published a lengthy letter about Esperanto on December 11, 1916. It’s long enough that I was inclined to quote it only in part, until I reached the bottom and saw who wrote it: Joseph Silbernik. The first time I wrote about Mr. Silbernik, it was quickly pointed out to me (thanks!) that Silbernik was the maiden name of Klara Zamenhof. Her father, Marcus Silbernik, funded the publication of the the Unua Libro. I have since learned that Joseph Silbernik was Klara Zamenhof’s brother.

Or so says a page on the Esperanto Wikipedia. There is no source for the assertion, but it seems to work out. Joseph Silbernik was about 21 years younger than Aleksandro Silbernik (Klara’s father). Another Silbernik relative, Joseph Levite (Klara’s brother-in-law) lived in Warsaw, and it was at his home that Ludovik met Klara.[1] But like Ludovik, Joseph was born in Bialystok, about seven years before Ludovik. It looks like there were a number of intersections between the Zamenhof and Silbernik families.

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Journalist Expected Esperanto to End War

Teach your army Esperanto, and
they will be happy with simple uniforms.

Zamenhof’s very dream for Esperanto was that by improving communication between people of different native languages, it could reduce conflict in the world. Zamenhof wasn’t alone in that dream, and many of the people who hoped, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to end war forever believed that an international language would be instrumental in achieving this.

One publication that advocated this idea was the Westminster Reivew, a liberal publication that ran from 1823 to 1914. It was founded by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham,[1] and the people listed on the Wikipedia page about it are a mini Who’s Who of nineteenth and early twentieth century British thought. Unfortunately, A. H. Weller, who is quoted in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser of September 23, 1907 is not one of the illustrious crowd who founded the Westminster Review, but a later, and more obscure individual. I have found little about him,[2] other than that he wrote other pieces on the danger of militarism for the Review.

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