Emma Lazarus

      Most of us have personal passions, and one of mine is books. I love books. You could say, it's a very reasonable passion for a Jew: after all, are we not called "people of the book"?

      In any case, three weeks ago, on a trip to Pennsylvania, I discovered a fantastic bookstore--it is on highway 100 north of Wilmington, Delaware, in a big brick barn dating (I believe) to 1830. The insides of that barn hold four cramped floors, full of little twisty passages and filled with second-hand books, on shelves, on crates, in nooks and crannies.

      Audrey remained waiting downstairs, and by the time we left, I had spent more money and much more time than expected. But all she said was "You owe me big time for this."

      However, if you love books, time and money don't count. What counts are the treasures you discover--a Hebrew concordance to the bible, John Hersey's novel on the Warsaw Ghetto ("The Wall")--and a slim book, the poems and writings of Emma Lazarus. The poem "Gifts" read here earlier (reproduced at the end of this web page) was in that book. Unfortunately, her writings are no longer easy to find, it takes luck to find them anywhere, especially in a barn in Pennsylvania.

      Who was Emma Lazarus? She was born in New York, to a wealthy Jewish sugar manufacturer--born in 1849, which meant, she grew up in the era of the Civil War. That was before the great wave of Jewish immigrants arrived here, at a time when Jews counted for no more than perhaps 2 per 1000 of the American population. They felt free, were fairly prosperous, were not pressed to assert their Jewish identity and some were already drifting away from their traditions. Sounds familiar?

      Emma Lazarus was educated at home, and her tutors made her aware of what now might be called the diversity of cultures, including her own. She learned other languages and translated their poetry, and she wrote her own poems as well.

      Later in life she translated from German the poems of Heinrich Heine, who may have been her favorite--Heine the baptized Jew, who all his life remembered his Jewish heritage and wrote about it; she might have felt like that too, caught between great cultures. She became a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who helped her develop her own style, and she was known to other poets and writers.

      In 1879 persecutions of Jews in Russia began, getting worse in 1881. Refugees began arriving, the first of the great migration of Russian Jews, and these events greatly sharpened Emma's Jewish consciousness. From there to her early death in 1887--of cancer--she was very much concerned with Jewish culture and tradition, and wrote many essays and poems--about the Macabees, Bar Kochva, Rashi and so on, also translated from Hebrew the works of Spanish poets such as Ibn Gvirol.

      For us, it is easy to speak of "Judaism as an emerging civilization." In the time of Emma Lazarus, in America, this civilization was barely in evidence. Religion--yes, holidays and ancient prayers: but it took a poet to translate those old traditions into a living language.

      From the slim book I selected one poem, written at age 18, about the old Touro synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest synagogue on the North American continent, the synagogue which George Washington once visited. By the time of Emma Lazarus, the Jewish community of Newport had dwindled away, and the building was empty and dark: her poem writes about memories, in an old temple which has fallen silent:

      But there is a second reason for selecting this poem. Emma Lazarus corresponded with old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had written a very similar poem, titled "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport." Longfellow only briefly mentions the synagogue, but it is a similar scene--of old memories in a place now abandoned and silent.

      It makes it interesting to listen to the two poems side by side. They almost say the same thing, but not quite. Longfellow is the outsider--to him the Jews are a peculiar nation, a phenomenon of history: they came, they lived here, they are gone, a nation that will be no more (listen to his last stanza, in particular).

      To Emma Lazarus, they are still her own people. Their memory remains alive even when they are gone, the synagogue remains holy even when it is empty. Let us then listen--first to Longfellow:

    Longfellow died on March 24, 1882, and Emma Lazarus wrote an appreciation of him for the Longfellow Memorial Meeting of the Young Men's Hebrew Association. It appeared in The American Hebrew of April 14, 1882, and it also commented on his Newport poem, as follows:

      One cannot end a discussion of Emma Lazarus without mentioning her most famous lines, the sonnet of which part is engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty. She wrote it in 1883 as part of the drive to raise funds for the pedestal of the statue--the statue itself was the gift of France, but the pedestal was provided by the American people. What is often overlooked is that although the statue went up in 1886, it was only in 1903, long after Emma Lazarus had passed away, that the words were inscribed next to the statue. Here is the entire poem--titled, "The New Colossus":

Postscript

    "Emma Lazarus Selected Poems," edited by John Hollander, was published in April 2005 by Penguin Press, USA ( xiii + 148 pp, $20.00).
    Robert Pinsky, reviewing it in "Poet's Choice" in the "Book World" supplement of the Washington Post (5.22.05), cites "The New Collossus" and also a sonnet titled simply "1492", the year which marked both the exile of Spain's Jews and the discovery of a continent where many of their descendants found refuge: