Emma Lazarus as a young woman.
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Note—As we gather on Friday evening at hundreds of Lights for Liberty rallies and vigils
for immigrants being held in detention/concentration camps and terrorized by
Trump and his ICE raiders, it is good to remember the young woman who’s words
became enshrined on the Statue of Liberty and represented a real welcome to the
“huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
The Cheeto-in-Charge and his minions want to declare that welcome null
and void. If you are in McHenry County
join at 7:30 at the McHenry County Jail/Immigrant Detainment facility in
Woodstock. Emma would thank you.
Emma Lazarus was just 34
years old when she penned the lines of
poetry that might be the most
familiar verse to millions of
Americans. Odds were stacked against
her ever achieving that kind of recognition.
She a woman at a time when
most distaff poetry was confined to
the pages of women’s magazines and
the columns of newspapers desperate
to fill inches at next to no expense. Only a handful of women, almost unanimously
WASP gentlewomen like Julia Ward
Howe were taken seriously by the cultural
guardians of the literary elite.
If
that was not enough to overcome, she was also proud to be openly
Jewish, which is to say a virtual automatic pariah.
Yet
she was no product of the shtetel, one of the impoverished
Eastern European refugees from pogroms
who were just beginning to flood American
cities in 1883. Indeed, she had deeper roots in the New World than most Colonial
Dames. On her mother’s side she was a Nathan,
a Sephardic family with roots in Portugal via the Netherlands and Brazil who
had settled in Manhattan when it was
still Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam in the mid-1600s. That side of
he family was well established, prosperous, and produced a distinguished line that included an 18th Century poetess, Grace Seixas
Nathan and
her distant cousin, Benjamin N. Cardozo,
later a Justice of the Supreme Court.
The
family of Emma father, Moses Lazarus, was
among the German Jews who immigrated
in the early 19th Century. Like many of the others they did not come
over in steerage. They were middle class, well educated, highly cultured, and well assimilated in Germany. They
spoke German, not Yiddish. In New York these Jews quickly
established themselves as merchants,
shopkeepers, and professionals. These Ashkenazi
assumed leadership of the still small
Jewish community over the sometimes resentful long time Sephardic residents.
That
Emma, the fourth of seven children, was the product of both of the great lines
of European Jewry was somewhat
unusual.
The Lazarus comfortable summer home in Newport, Rhode Island.
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She
was born on July 22, 1849 in New York
City, the year after a wave of European
revolutions that would send another surge of Jewish immigrants to the
city. The family was upper-middle
class, not terribly religious,
and deeply interested in high
culture. They were comfortable
enough to have a summer home at Newport, Rhode Island, home of the
famous Sephardic Jewish Synagogue,
the oldest in America which later inspired
one of Emma’s best known poems.
At
home they spoke English, which had
been her mother’s family language for generations but she also became fluent in
her father’s German. He was eager to
share with her all of the classics of German literature and of the Romantic movement. Tutored
privately, she also learned French and
Italian and intently studied British and American literature.
Lazarus
was writing poetry in her teens and published translations of German poets including the Romantics Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine in the early
1860’s. Her proud father arranged to
have her first collection of original
poems privately published in 1866
and the next year Poems and Translations had successful commercial publication. That
volume drew the approving attention of
no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson for
whom the German Romantics were an important early influence.
Over
the next decade, Lazarus published a second volume of poetry, Admetus
and Other Poems in 1871; the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Life
in 1874, and a play in verse, The Spagnoletto in 1876. If not a literary celebrity she earned the
attention and approval in cultivated
circles. But most of her readers
were not aware that the youthful female poet
was Jewish. In fact the name Lazarus,
familiar from the Jesus miracle story in
the New Testament, probably gave
many the impression she was Christian.
Henry George's work and her dedication to the movement they inspired changed the direction of Emma's life.
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Like
many of the Ashkenazi elite in New York, her father was a political liberal, ardent abolitionist
and Union supporter during the Civil War, and open to new and radical ideas. His daughter was an apple that fell close
to the tree. When Henry George published his hugely
influential Progress and Poverty: An
Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with
Increase of Wealth: The Remedy in 1879 Lazarus became an early disciple and soon a close
personal friend of the visionary
author. She plunged into spreading
the word about George’s vision of a communal society supported by a single tax on land which rivaled Marxist socialism as a model for a new society among American radicals
of that era.
In
addition to a laudatory poem published
in the New York Times she wrote, “Progress
and Poverty is not so much a book as an event. The life and thought of no
one capable of understanding it can be quite the same after reading it,” and
even that reading it would prevent such a person, who also “prized justice or
common honesty” from being able to ever again “dine or sleep or work in peace.”
Yet
in all of this literary and political activity, Lazarus did not seem much
interested in her Jewish identity or advancing Jewish causes. She was occasionally stung by anti-Semitism but like many others
believed that assimilation would eventually overcome prejudice. That changed when she got her hands on George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel
Deronda which was not well known in America. This social
satire contained a moving description of the plight of European Jews and painted an idealistic picture of a young
man out to right historic oppression
and save his people. Although it was the final work of an important
Victorian novelist and therefore a somewhat unlikely source, the book inspired
a generation on both sides of the Atlantic to become what is now recognized as proto-Zionists, that term having not
yet been invented for a formal movement launched
by Theodor Herzl in 1897.
This
interest was further stirred by the news of Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar
Alexander II in 1881. That set off
the first wave of massive Eastern European
immigration of largely destitute refugees to the city. While many of the established Ashkenazi elite
were horrified by the crude peasants and laborers who they feared would evoke a
harsh backlash from latent American nativism, Lazarus plunged
into organizing aid and loudly
advocating for the truly wretched refuse that were filling the tenements and slums. It became the work of the rest of her
life.
She
wrote The Dance to Death, a dramatization
of a German short story about
the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death. In addition to articles published where ever
she could place them Lazarus published Songs of a Semite in 1882.
On
a practical level Lazarus helped to found the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist
destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting
and raised funds for other charities
and relief programs.
The manuscript for the poem The New Colossus was offered in this auction catalog to raise money for the Statue of Liberty pedestal.
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In
that spirit she somewhat casually donated
a new poem inspired by the French gift
to an auction, conducted by the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the
Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty in order to raise funds
to build the pedestal in New York Harbor. It was not until 1903 that the first
verse of that poem, The New Colossus was installed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal it modestly helped finance. The words subsequently reprinted in school text
books and recited at patriotic gatherings became some of
the most familiar and beloved lines of American poetry.
The memorial plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was affixed there in 1903.
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She
traveled to Europe twice in in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887 to learn more of conditions there and
to contact Jewish intellectuals and leaders as well as leading radicals like William Morris.
She
returned from the second trip deathly
ill. Two months after she sailed
passed Lady Liberty which had
finally been dedicated while she was abroad, Emma Lazarus died of what is now
believed to have been Hodgkin’s lymphoma
on November 19, 1887. She was only 38
years old.
At
the time of her death she was still not well known to most of the American public. She was eulogized
most often in the Jewish and radical press, although due note was made in the New
York Times which had published several of her essays over the years.
Indeed many of her earlier
admirers distanced themselves from her as she identified more urgently as a
Jew.
Mostly
on the strength of The New Colossus she
is widely honored today. She was honored
by the Office of the Manhattan Borough
President in March, 2008, and her home
on West 10th Street was included in
a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites.
In 2009, she was inducted into the National
Women’s Hall of Fame and The Museum
of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition on her in 2012.
Emma never got her own stamp, but her portrait adorned the First Day Cover for a Statue of Liberty stamp.
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The
Postal Service has never seen fit to
issue an Emma Lazarus stamp, but it did feature her portrait
on the first day cover card of a
1978 16¢ First Class Statue of Liberty
stamp that quoted a line from her poem.
Here
is that famous poem and two more samples of her work that deserve to be
remembered as well.
Refugees and exiles, the very "wretched of the earth" in the old socialist hymn.
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The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Emma Lazarus
The Touro Synagogue in Newport--the nation's oldest dating to pre-Revolutionary times.
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In The Jewish Synagogue at Newport
Here, where the noises of the busy town,
The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,
We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
And muse upon the consecrated spot.
No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent
That an undying radiance was to shed.
What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on
earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them
birth!
How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
Upon this relic of the days of old,
The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
And Eastern towns and temples we behold.
Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,
The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—
Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.
A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,
‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
Unto a people prone with reverent awe.
The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,
In the rich court of royal Solomon—
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.
Our softened voices send us back again
But mournful echoes through the empty
hall:
Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
And with unwonted gentleness they fall.
The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
All found their comfort in the holy place,
And children’s gladness and men's gratitude
‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of
praise.
The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
We know not which is sadder to recall;
For youth and happiness have followed age,
And green grass lieth gently over all.
Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
With its lone floors where reverent feet
once trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
Before the mystery of death and God.
—Emma Lazarus
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 on the very same day that Christopher Columbus sailed his famed voyage.
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1492
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”
—Emma Lazarus
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