Remembering Klara Zamenhof (1863–1924)

Today marks 100 years since the death of Klara Zamenhof, wife of Ludoviko Lazaro Zamenhof. She died on December 6, 1924, at the age of 61.

She was one of nine children born to Aleksander (a soap manufacturer) and Goda Silbernik in Kaunas, Lithuania on October 5, 1863. She is crucial to the history of Esperanto: the first booklets in the language were financed from part of her dowry.

The house in Kaunas in which Klara Silbernik was born.

Ludoviko Zamenhof moved to Veiseije, a town in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire) not far from his birthplace in modern-day Poland in early 1885 at the invitation of his sister, Fania. Having recently qualified as a doctor he was in search of work. He didn't stay long: by May he was in Warsaw, studying opthalmology.

It seems that he met Klara in late 1884, when she was staying with her sister in Warsaw; the sister's husband, Jozef Levite, was a friend of Zamenhof's. During his short time in Veiseije Zamenhof met his future father-in-law, who had intended to marry off Klara. After a confession that Zamenhof had decided to give up medicine because the death of a child whom he (and others before him) had been unable to save was more than he could bear, Silbernik deemed him an unsuitable suitor. He did, however, approve of the dream of uniting mankind through an international language, which Zamenhof had been working on.

Aleksander Silbernik, who would become Esperanto's first benefactor.

Zamenhof started his own surgery in his father's house in summer 1886. He and Klara were engaged on March 30, 1887, and married on August 9 of the same year, after the arrival of the first book about Esperanto: Alexander Silbernik had granted permission to use part of the 10 000 rouble dowry prior to the wedding, and this funded the publication of several books, plus helped Zamenhof's father out of a career-ending predicament later on.

The wedding photo.

The couple wasted no time starting a family: son Adam was born on June 11, 1888, followed by daughter Zofia on December 13, 1889. Family life, however, was anything but easy: with next to no money (he later mentioned skipping meals), Zamenhof moved to Kherson and Grodny for work, leaving Klara behind with the children. (A second daughter, Lidja, was born in 1904.)

Klara bore the burdens which came with supporting her husband's dream. He later recalled: “My wife most loyally and generously joined in the suffering and unpleasantness, which Esperanto provided in the first years.”

Dr and Mrs Zamenhof during the World Esperanto Congress in 1910.

And that is as good a reason as any to mark the anniversary of her death: Esperanto has a known father ... but, as this summary attests, it needed a mother, too.