Esther schor emma lazarus biography
Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor
The Lady & the Poet
Emma Lazarus
by Esther Schor
Nextbook/Schocken. 368 pp. $21.95
In a Hebrew poem published in 1913, the poet Shimon Ginzburg described his fearful state of mind as a young immigrant arriving in America. To Ginzburg, the Statue of Liberty seemed a foreboding Fortuna, raising not a torch but “a clenched fist,” promising anything and nothing to the arriving refugees:
Come to me, all who are
hungry, for bread, or
for justice,
or who yearn to breathe the
air of freedom. Die here
of hunger
like a stray dog, or rise up
and rule overnight!
Ginzburg plays here on the Passover invocation (“Let all who are hungry, come and eat”), turning Jewish hospitality into New York City indifference. Notable, however, is that he does not refer to Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, “The New Colossus,” though his reference to “the air of freedom” inevitably puts one in mind of Lazarus’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” His confusion about what the statue is holding—much like Kafka, who in the novel Amerika (1927) has it lifting a sword—suggests that he was not familiar with that most famous of poems on the “mighty woman with a torch.”
In this, Ginzburg was like most other Americans prior to the 1940’s. When Lazarus died in 1897 after a prolonged battle with Hodgkin’s disease, not one of her many obituaries so much as cited a phrase from “The New Colossus.” Commissioned to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal, the poem had not been included in the 1886 dedication ceremony, nor was it affixed to the pedestal until 1903, six years after Lazarus’s death at the age of thirty-eight. It would take another four decades for the poem to attain its place as one of the central articulations of American identity: of our nation’s willingness, in contrast to the “ancient lands” o
Emma Lazarus
With the words of the title of this review, Esther Schor introduces the reader to Emma Lazarus (1849 -1887)in her newly-published biography of this late-nineteenth Century American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and social activist for newly-arrived immigrants. Schor is Professor of English at Princeton University, a poet in her own right, and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her biography of Emma Lazarus is part of a series of books called "Jewish Encounters" edited by Jonathan Rosen and "devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas."
Emma Lazarus is known to most readers only as the author of the sonnet "The New Colossus" which ultimately achieved iconic status with its inscription on the Statue of Liberty. But there is much more to Emma Lazarus than this great poem, as Schor convincingly demonstrates.Schor writes in an accessible, colloquial style that shows great affection and understanding for Lazarus. Although Schor's book includes a substantial amount of analysis of Lazarus's literary work, the focus of the book lies in bringing Emma Lazarus herself to life. Schor's biography, while not constituting the last word on Emma Lazarus, fulfills its goal of showing why Lazarus is worth knowing. Even with this book, and other studies of Emma Lazarus, she remains a complex and elusive figure.
Lazarus was born to an assimilated family of wealthy New York Jews who had lived in the United States for at least four generations. Lazarus received an outstanding private education and became known as a prodigy when her first volume of poems, written between the ages of 14 and 16 was published by her father. As a young woman, Emma Lazarus attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson and had a complicated relationship with him, as Schor discusses at length. Lazarus visited Emerson in Concord twice near the end of his life and became friends with his daughter Ellen.
Emma Lazarus
Part of the Jewish Encounter series
Emma Lazarus's most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her–a feminist, a Zionist, and an internationally famous Jewish American writer before thse categories even existed.
Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity. Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in 1849, Lazarus published her first volume of verse at seventeen and gained entrée into New York's elite literary circles. Although she once referred to her family as “outlaw” Jews, she felt a deep attachment to Jewish history and peoplehood. Her compassion for the downtrodden Jews of Eastern Europe–refugees whose lives had little in common with her own–helped redefine the meaning of America itself.
In this groundbreaking biography, Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus's place in history as a poet, an activist, and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today–a world that she helped to invent.
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