Lazarus, E 2
Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet "The New Colossus", which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, in 1883.[1] Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903,[2] on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.[3] Lazarus was involved in aiding refugees to New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, and she saw a way to express her empathy for these refugees in terms of the statue.[4] The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The latter part of the sonnet was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women".
Lazarus was also the author of Poems and Translations (New York, 1867); Admetus, and other Poems (1871); Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (Philadelphia, 1874); Poems and Ballads of Heine (New York, 1881); Poems, 2 Vols.; Narrative, Lyric and Dramatic; as well as Jewish Poems and Translations.[5]
Early years and education[]
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, July 22, 1849,[6] into a large Sephardic Jewish family.[a] She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant[8] and sugar refiner,[9] and Esther Nathan.[10] One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany;[11] the rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and they were resident in New York long before the American Revolution, they were among the original twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam after they had fled from their settlement in Recife, Brazil in an attempt to flee from the Inquisition.[12][9] Lazarus's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side, Grace Seixas Nathan (born in Stratford in 1752) was also a poet.[13] Lazarus was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her siblings included sisters Josephine, Sarah, Mary, Agnes and Annie, and a brother, Frank.[14][15][16]
Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian.[17] She was attracted in youth to poetry, writing her first lyrics when eleven years old.[18]
Career[]
Writer[]
The first stimulus for Lazarus's writing was offered by the American Civil War. A collection of her Poems and Translations, verses written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, appeared in 1867 (New York), and was commended by William Cullen Bryant.[10] It included translations from Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo.[8][6] Admetus and Other Poems followed in 1871. The title poem was dedicated "To my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson", whose works and personality were exercising an abiding influence upon the poet's intellectual growth.[8] During the next decade, in which "Phantasies" and "Epochs" were written, her poems appeared chiefly in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and Scribner's Monthly.[10]
By this time, Lazarus's work had won recognition abroad. Her first prose production, Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life, a romance treating of the Friederike Brion incident, was published in 1874 (Philadelphia), and was followed by The Spagnoletto (1876), a tragedy. Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine (New York, 1881) followed, and was prefixed by a biographical sketch of Heine; Lazarus's renderings of some of Heine's verse are considered among the best in English.[19] In the same year, 1881, she became friends with Rose Hawthorne Lathrop.[20] In April 1882, Lazarus published in The Century Magazine the article "Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" Her statement of the reasons for answering this question in the affirmative may be taken to close what may be termed the Hellenic and journeyman period of Lazarus's life, during which her subjects were drawn from classic and romantic sources.[21]
Lazarus also wrote The Crowing of the Red Cock,[6] and the sixteen-part cycle poem "Epochs".[22] In addition to writing her own poems, Lazarus edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine.[23] She also wrote a novel and two plays in five acts, The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama about the titular figure and The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.[24] During the time Lazarus became interested in her Jewish roots, she continued her purely literary and critical work in magazines with such articles as "Tommaso Salvini", "Salvini's 'King Lear'", "Emerson's Personality", "Heine, the Poet", "A Day in Surrey with William Morris", and others.[25]
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!"
Lines from her sonnet "The New Colossus" appear on a bronze plaque which was placed in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903.[2] The sonnet was written in 1883 and donated 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.[b][c] Lazarus's close friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired by "The New Colossus" to found the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.[27]
She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887.[28] On one of those trips, Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, introduced her to William Morris at her home.[29] She also met with Henry James, Robert Browning and Thomas Huxley during her European travels.[17] A collection of Poems in Prose (1887) was her last book. Her Complete Poems with a Memoir appeared in 1888, at Boston.[6]
Activism[]
Lazarus was a friend and admirer of the American political economist Henry George. She believed deeply in Georgist economic reforms and became active in the "single tax" movement for land value tax. Lazarus published a poem in the New York Times named after George's book, Progress and Poverty.[30]
Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, and the poor standard of living in Russia in general, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York. Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish immigrants. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. Lazarus volunteered in the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society employment bureau; she eventually became a strong critic of the organization.[31] In 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews.[9]
The literary fruits of identification with her religion were poems like "The Crowing of the Red Cock", "The Banner of the Jew", "The Choice", "The New Ezekiel", "The Dance to Death" (a strong, though unequally executed drama), and her last published work (March 1887), "By the Waters of Babylon: Little Poems in Prose", which constituted her strongest claim to a foremost rank in American literature. During the same period (1882–87), Lazarus translated the Hebrew poets of medieval Spain with the aid of the German versions of Michael Sachs and Abraham Geiger, and wrote articles, signed and unsigned, upon Jewish subjects for the Jewish press, besides essays on "Bar Kochba", "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow", "M. Renan and the Jews", and others for Jewish literary associations.[21]
Several of her translations from medieval Hebrew writers found a place in the ritual of American synagogues.[6] Lazarus's most notable series of articles was that titled "An Epistle to the Hebrews" (The American Hebrew, November 10, 1882 – February 24, 1883), in which she discussed the Jewish problems of the day, urged a technical and a Jewish education for Jews, and ranged herself among the advocates of an independent Jewish nationality and of Jewish repatriation in Palestine. The only collection of poems issued during this period was Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems (New York, 1882), dedicated to the memory of George Eliot.[25]
Death and legacy[]
Lazarus Public School, Brooklyn
Lazarus returned to New York City seriously ill after she completed her second trip to Europe, and she died two months later, on November 19, 1887,[5] most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma. She never married.[32][33] Lazarus was buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. The Poems of Emma Lazarus (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1889) was published after her death, comprising most of her poetic work from previous collections, periodical publications, and some of the literary heritage which her executors deemed appropriate to preserve for posterity.[25] Her papers are kept by the American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History,[34] and her letters are collected at Columbia University.[35]
A stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus", was issued by Antigua and Barbuda in 1985.[36] In 1992, she was named as a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project.[37] Lazarus was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included on a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites.[38] In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[39] The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition about Lazarus in 2012.
Biographer Esther Schor praised Lazarus' lasting contribution:
The irony is that the statue goes on speaking, even when the tide turns against immigration — even against immigrants themselves, as they adjust to their American lives. You can’t think of the statue without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her.[40]...
Knowledge Web Content (see main node)
NAME: Lazarus, Emma
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Statue of Liberty poem
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: July 22, 1849, New York, NY
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: November 19, 1887, New York; NY. Aged 38
DISCIPLINE: Poet/Essayist
FIELD: Literature
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Moses Lazarus; Esther Nathan
SIBLINGS: Six, of whom: Josephine (writer and speaker)
SPOUSE: None
CHILDREN: None
EDUCATION: Private tutors
MAJOR WORK: "The New Colossus", dedicated to the Statue of Liberty
LIFE AND TIMES:
Encouraged in her poetry by her father, Lazarus's first volume of verse was privately printed in 1866, when she was 17, and commercially published a year later. In 1868, she met <corresponded with> Emerson* and sent him a copy of her book together with some recent poems. Emerson replied encouragingly and the two kept up a correspondence for many years. Lazarus regarded him as a mentor.
In 1871, Lazarus published a second volume of poetry, "Admetus, and Other Poems", which received critical praise in both the United States and England. In 1874, she published her only novel, "Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life", an adaptation of the German writer's autobiography. This book was also highly praised, in particular by the Russian novelist<a fan was> Turgenev*.
Throughout the 1870’s, still in her 20’s, Lazarus contributed poems to magazines such as "Scribner's", and by 1882, more than 50 of her poems and translations had appeared in mainstream periodicals. In 1876, she finished an intense poetic drama, "The Spagnoletto", which was privately published and never performed.
In the 1870’s, Lazarus began to develop an interest in Jewish traditions. She translated many works of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine and the medieval Jewish poets of Spain. She began to study Hebrew, and wrote some poems on Jewish subjects.
Her attitude underwent a dramatic transformation in the early 1880’s when the killing of Alexander II of Russia triggered an outburst of Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe and a mass exodus of Eastern European Jews to the United States.
After attending a New York protest rally where former Secretary of State William M. Evarts attacked the Russian pogroms, she began to passionately use her gifts as poet and political essayist to defend the Jewish cause.
Her polemical writing began in April, 1882, after the magazine "Century" published an article by a Russian journalist that attacked Jews and defended the pogroms. Lazarus's outraged response was "Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism", published in the next edition of "Century".
She wrote a second strong piece for "Century" in February, 1883, and a series of 14 essays, called "Epistle to the Hebrews", published in Philip Cowen's "American Hebrew". Anticipating by more than a decade the modern Zionist movement, she advocated a national Jewish homeland in Palestine and urged American Jews to support their Eastern European brethren who were migrating to the United States.
A year earlier, in 1882, the "American Hebrew" had published in serial form Lazarus's blank-verse drama, "The Dance to Death", which described the heroism of the condemned Thuringian Jews of 1349. (Later, Lazarus dedicated the play to English author <dedicated play to> George Eliot*) Cowen republished the play later that year in a book, "Songs of a Semite", which also included her translations of several ancient Hebrew poems. The book was a popular success.
Convinced it was now time "for actions rather than words", Lazarus visited Russian Jewish refugees on Ward's Island, and became an active member of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, helping new immigrants resettle.
Realizing that both agricultural opportunities and vocational training were needed for the Russian Jews pouring into New York, she played a central role in the founding of New York's Hebrew Technical Institute, and, in 1883, formed the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews, which disbanded after a year.
In the summer of 1883, Lazarus sailed to Europe to gather support for a Jewish national homeland. She met British politicians, including <lobbied> Balfour*, the leaders of the European Jewish community, as well as <met> Robert Browning*, <met> Henry James* and <met> William Morris*.
Also in 1883 Lazarus was asked to write a poem for a fundraising art auction in aid of the <wrote poem for> Statue of Liberty* Pedestal Fund. Unwillingly to write to order, Lazarus agreed only when she was reminded of "Russian refugees as recipients of the light of the torch", and the result was the famous sonnet, "The New Colossus", which was engraved on a bronze plaque and fixed to the statue's pedestal in 1903 in her memory. Its concluding lines have become familiar to generations:
"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!"
In 1885, Lazarus returned to Europe for an extended tour, but it soon became clear she was seriously ill. Returning to New York in July, 1887, she died in November, either of Hodgkin's disease or cancer, at 38.
ASSESSMENT: A decade before <anticipated> Hertzl* coined the word "Zionism", she was calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
She collaborated with <collaborated with> Oliphant*
ONELINER: Emma Lazarus, author of the Statue of Liberty poem
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
EB
American National Dictionary of Biography
Vogel, Daniel, Emma Lazarus, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1980