Raymond Schwartz

Raymond Schwartz (April 8, 1894 – May 14, 1973), was a French banker and Esperanto author who wrote many poems and novels in Esperanto, as well as skits which he directed for Parisian Esperanto cabarets.

Born in Metz, a city in Alsace-Lorraine (German: Elsass-Lothringen) that from 1871 to 1918 was part of Germany, his family was French-speaking. He received a good education in Metz and spoke not only French and German often but also Latin and Greek.

Very early he became an Esperantist and dreamt of a better future through the diffusion of Esperanto. World War I, when he was conscripted into the German army and had to fight on the Eastern Front, was a disaster for him as a pacifist and for the Esperanto movement in general. After the war he did not remain at Metz, now again a French city, but moved to Paris, where he worked in a large banking firm until his retirement.

Between the wars he published in different periodicals, particularly in Literatura Mondo, and wrote two volumes of poetry. His poetic works Verdkata testamento ("The will of the green cat") (1926) and Stranga butiko ("The strange boutique") (1931) are imaginative and humorous fantasies involving word games, characteristics also found in Prozo ridetanta (1928) ("Smiling prose").

His short novel Anni kaj Montmartre ("Annie and Montmartre", 1930) recounts the adventures of a young naîve German woman in Paris; it departs from the conventions of original Esperanto literature, in particular because of its style of writing.

From 1933 to 1935 he published the monthly satirical magazine La Pirato ("The Pirate"), which made him a sort of enfant terrible of the Esperanto movement, one for whom there were no secrets and for whom everything was an occasion for humour.

His masterwork, published after World War II, is Kiel akvo de l' rivero ("Like the water of the river"), considered as his most significant and most moving book. This is a partly autobiographical novel of a young Frenchman from the Franco-German frontier who comes to Berlin after graduation but must flee at the outbreak of war in 1914. During the occupation of France by Nazi Germany he joins the French Resistance. After the war he once more meets in Paris the woman he loved as a young man in Berlin. This classic novel about a family torn apart by two world wars is both serious and amusing.

He collaborated on Sennacieca Revuo, an annual cultural review published by Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda (World Non-National Association), writing a column titled "Laŭ mia ridpunkto." The name was a portmanteau word formed from vidpunkto, (Esperanto for "viewpoint") and ridi (a word meaning "to laugh"). The column itself was written in a humorous style that included kalemburoj (puns) and antistrofoj (spoonerisms).

Serious and competent in his profession, he showed an altogether different face in the Esperanto cabarets, where he created many skits, creating for Esperantists the character of a merry drunkard. Since 1881 there had been in Paris a famous cabaret known as Le Chat Noir ("The Black Cat"). At Montmartre, on the outskirts of Paris, he founded in December 1920 an Esperanto cabaret called La Verda Kato ("The Green Cat"), which he directed from 1920 to 1926, as well as La Bolanta Kaldrono ("The Boiling Cauldron"), which ran from 1936 to 1939. In 1949 he was joint founder of Tri Koboldoj ("Three Imps"), which continued in existence until 1956. His skits and books were amusing, spiritual and sometime risqué. "If people cannot laugh at themselves, they have not grown up" was a favourite saying of his.