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Esperanto and Cinema Part Two (Jean Forge)

© David Poulson

Jan Fethke was born in Opole, Poland, on the 26th of February 1903 and he died on the 16th of December, 1980. It did not take long for him to demonstrate both his talent for languages and his creative writing ability. His first novel, The Stuffed Parrot, appeared (in German) in 1920 when he was only 17. While still studying at a polytechnic college, he was employed by a daily newspaper published in Gdansk, and later he edited national-language journals in Paris, Warsaw and Berlin.

He was also a professional film-maker and I will have quite a bit to say about that aspect of his career in my next article.

In the world of Esperanto, however, Jan Fethke is much better known by his pseudonym, Jean Forge, so I'll call him by that name as I review his achievements and ensure that his important contribution to the history and development of Esperanto is properly acknowledged in this series of articles.

In 1919, when he was 16 years old, Jean Forge heard about Esperanto and quickly learned it, as did his brothers Edmund and Stefan. In fact, Forge became so proficient in the language so quickly that only three years later, in 1922, he began to assist in the production of a weekly journal called Esperanto Triumfonta.

This journal, which was published from Horrem, in Germany, was the fore-runner of the outstandingly successful newspaper, La Heroldo de Esperanto. Despite sincere efforts to keep my wife happy by keeping my personal library down to absolute essentials, I still have a bundle of back issues of La Heroldo de Esperanto which I just can't bring myself to discard. Of more interest to my readers will be the information that I receive every week, by e-mail, a summary of news from the world of Esperanto courtesy of, yes, La Heroldo . This very useful service is offered free of charge and you can get more information by writing to: heroldo@tin.it

Also, I have reproduced a sample issue of Heroldo Komunikas here: http://www.suite101.com/topic_page.cfm/1...

Before the Second World War, Forge and his brothers were very active participants in the Polish Esperanto movement. For example, in 1931 they organized a lecture tour in Poland and several other countries for the Nigerian Esperantist, Kola Ajayi. An account of this event, under the title "Nia Nigra Filo", ("Our Black Son"), is included in Forge's collection of short pieces, La Verda Rakedo ("The Green Racquet") which was published in 1961. The following year, Forge conducted Esperanto classes in Sweden, Hungary and Poland, using a new teaching method developed by Andreo Cseh, a Hungarian Catholic priest from Transylvania.

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