Emma Lazarus | |
|---|---|
 Lazarus,c. 1872 | |
| Born | (1849-07-22)July 22, 1849 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | November 19, 1887(1887-11-19) (aged 38) New York City |
| Resting place | Beth Olam Cemetery inBrooklyn, New York City |
| Occupation | Author, activist |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry, prose, translations, novels, plays |
| Subject | Georgism |
| Notable works | "The New Colossus" |
| Notable awards | National Women's Hall of Fame |
| Relatives | Josephine Lazarus,Benjamin N. Cardozo |
| Signature | |
 | |
Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author ofpoetry,prose, and translations, as well as an activist forJewish andGeorgist causes. She is remembered for writing thesonnet "The New Colossus", which was inspired by theStatue of Liberty, in 1883.[1] Its lines appear inscribed on abronze 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 fledantisemitic 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 byIrving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musicalMiss 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 byLee 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 ofPoems 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 asJewish Poems and Translations.[5]
Emma Lazarus was born inNew York City, July 22, 1849,[6] into a large Jewish family. She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy merchant[7] and sugar refiner,[8] and Esther Nathan (of a long-established German-Jewish New York family).[9] One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany;[10] the rest of her Lazarus ancestors were originally fromPortugal and they were among theoriginal twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam after they fledRecife, Brazil, in an attempt to flee from theInquisition.[11][8] Lazarus's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side,Grace Seixas Nathan (born inStratford, Connecticut, in 1752) was also a poet.[12] Lazarus was related through her mother toBenjamin N. Cardozo,Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her siblings included sistersJosephine, Sarah, Mary, Agnes and Annie, and a brother, Frank.[13][14][15]
Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, includingGerman,French, andItalian.[16] She was attracted in youth to poetry, writing her first lyrics when she was eleven years old.[17]
The first stimulus for Lazarus's writing was offered by theAmerican Civil War. A collection of herPoems and Translations, verses written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, appeared in 1867 (New York), and was commended byWilliam Cullen Bryant.[9] It included translations fromFriedrich Schiller,Heinrich Heine,Alexandre Dumas, andVictor Hugo.[7][6]Admetus and Other Poems followed in 1871. The title poem was dedicated "To my friendRalph Waldo Emerson", whose works and personality were exercising an abiding influence upon the poet's intellectual growth.[7] During the next decade, in which "Phantasies" and "Epochs" were written, her poems appeared chiefly inLippincott's Monthly Magazine andScribner's Monthly.[9]
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 theFriederike Brion incident, was published in 1874 (Philadelphia), and was followed byThe 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.[18] In the same year, 1881, she became friends withRose Hawthorne Lathrop.[19] In April 1882, Lazarus published inThe Century Magazine the article "Was theEarl 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.[20]
Lazarus also wroteThe Crowing of the Red Cock,[6] and the sixteen-part cycle poem "Epochs".[21] In addition to writing her own poems, Lazarus edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those ofJohann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine.[22] She also wrote a novel and two plays in five acts,The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama aboutthe titular figure andThe Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews inNordhausen during theBlack Death.[23] 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.[24]
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!" (1883)
Lines from her sonnet "The New Colossus" appear on a bronze plaque which was placed in the pedestal of theStatue 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 theBartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" in order to raise funds to build the pedestal.[a][b] Lazarus's close friendRose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired by "The New Colossus" to found theDominican Sisters of Hawthorne.[26]
She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887.[27] On one of those trips,Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of thePre-Raphaelite painterEdward Burne-Jones, introduced her toWilliam Morris at her home.[28] She also met withHenry James,Robert Browning andThomas Huxley during her European travels.[16] A collection ofPoems in Prose (1887) was her last book. HerComplete Poems with a Memoir appeared in 1888, at Boston.[6]
Lazarus was a friend and admirer of the American political economistHenry George. She believed deeply inGeorgist economic reforms and became active in the "single tax" movement forland value tax. Lazarus published a poem in theNew York Times named after George's book,Progress and Poverty.[29]
Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry as she heard of the Russianpogroms that followed theassassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of thisantisemitic violence, and the poor standard of living in Russia in general, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the RussianPale of Settlement to New York. Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish immigrants. She helped establish theHebrew Technical Institute in New York to providevocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. Lazarus volunteered as well in theHebrew Emigrant Aid Society employment bureau, although she eventually criticized its organization.[30] In 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews.[8]
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 ofMichael Sachs andAbraham 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.[20] 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. Some scholars consider her to be one of theforerunners of Zionism.[31][32][33] The only collection of poems issued during this period wasSongs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems (New York, 1882), dedicated to the memory ofGeorge Eliot.[24]
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 fromHodgkin's lymphoma. She never married.[34][35] Lazarus was buried inBeth Olam Cemetery inCypress Hills, Brooklyn.The Poems of Emma Lazarus (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1889) waspublished 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.[24] Her papers are kept by the American Jewish Historical Society,Center for Jewish History,[36] and her letters are collected atColumbia University.[37]
TheEmma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, founded in 1951, was named after Lazarus.[38]
A stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus's poem "The New Colossus" was issued byAntigua and Barbuda in 1985.[39] In 1992, she was named as a Women's History Month Honoree by theNational Women's History Project.[40] Lazarus was honored by the Office of theManhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West10th Street was included on a map ofWomen's Rights Historic Sites.[41] In 2009, she was inducted into theNational Women's Hall of Fame.[42] TheMuseum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition about Lazarus in 2012. The Emma Lazarus Art and Music Venue, as well as a park are named in her honor inCarrick, a neighborhood on the South Side ofPittsburgh.
.png)
Lazarus contributed toward shaping the self-image of the United States as well as how the country understands the needs of those who immigrated to the United States. Her themes produced sensitivity and enduring lessons regarding immigrants and their need for dignity.[43] What was needed to make her a poet of the people as well as one of literary merit was a great theme, the establishment of instant communication between some stirring reality and her still hidden and irresolute subjectivity. Such a theme was provided by the immigration of Russian Jews to America, consequent upon the proscriptiveMay Laws of 1882. She rose to the defense of her ethnic compatriots in powerful articles, as contributions toThe Century (May 1882 and February 1883). Hitherto, her life had held no Jewish inspiration. Though of Sephardic ancestry, and ostensibly Orthodox in belief, her family had till then not participated in the activities of thesynagogue or of the Jewish community. Contact with the unfortunates from Russia led her to study the Torah, the Hebrew language, Judaism, and Jewish history.[20] While her early poetry demonstrated no Jewish themes, herSongs of a Semite (1882) is considered to be the earliest volume of Jewish American poetry.[44]
A review ofAlide byLippincott's Monthly Magazine was critical of Lazarus's style and elements of technique.[45]
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:D. Appleton & Company (1887).Appletons' Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events (Public domain ed.). D. Appleton & Company. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Gilman, Daniel Coit; Peck, Harry Thurston; Colby, Frank Moore (1907).The new international encyclopædia (Public domain ed.). Dodd, Mead and company. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Singer, Isidore; Adler, Cyrus (1906).The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. Vol. 7 (Public domain ed.). Funk & Wagnalls Company. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton; Roberts, Goodridge Bliss (1891).Younger American Poets, 1830–1890 (Public domain ed.). Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh. p. 434. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Wheeler, Edward Jewitt (1889).Current Opinion. Vol. 2 (Public domain ed.). Current Literature Publishing Company. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:World's Congress of Religions (1893).The Addresses and Papers Delivered Before the Parliament, and an Abstract of the Congresses: Held in the Art Institute, Chicago, Ill., Aug. 25 to Oct. 15, 1893 (Public domain ed.). Conkey.
.svg)
