2017-03-15

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]

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