The Pen Friend

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Your postcard came like a bolt from the blue, and it was the spur that drove me to begin writing again. After my father died in 1998 — did you know he was dead? — I took early retirement from my position in the Municipal Gallery, partly to devote myself to writing a book about his involvement with Esperanto, the international auxiliary language devised by Ludwig Zamenhof. I had long been familiar with the salient details of Zamenhof’s life. He was born in 1859 in Bialystok, in the Polish district of Podlasia, once part of the Duchy of Lithuania, and then of the Russian Empire. I began studying the history of the region, hoping to gain a better understanding of what made Zamenhof Zamenhof, without which it was impossible to imagine my father. I began to discover that Poland, and hence Polish Lithuania, had been partitioned and repartitioned by a series of treaties between Prussia and Russia, behind which lay such a series of insurrections, strikes, pogroms, feuds, plots, wars, commercial enterprises and business transactions, that I realised it would take me years to unravel the particular circumstances of the town which had brought Zamenhof into being, let alone how my father had come to learn Zamenhof’s invented language.

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