Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,759

This is the grave of Emma Lazarus.

Born in 1849 in New York City, Lazarus grew up in a wealthy Jewish family. Her father Moses was a big merchant in the sugar trade (which yes, of course meant involvement in slavery, as did most northern wealth). A generation younger than Emma would be her cousin of some sort Benjamin Cardozo, the Supreme Court justice. From the time she was a young girl, Lazarus loved poetry and by the early 1860s, she started publishing it, even though she was still a girl. It was reasonably well-received, including by William Cullen Bryant, perhaps the most important American poet of that time. She appeared frequently in Scribner’s and Lippincott’s, two of the early literary magazines. Interest appeared in Europe as well. She also did a lot of translations, as she spoke several European languages. Her 1867 book Poems and Translations included not only original work but translations of Schiller, Heine, Dumas, and Hugo.

Lazarus spent the 1870s and 1880s as a fairly major figure in American letters. Her translations continued to get her a lot of attention. Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine, from 1881, also provided an important early biography for American writers. She started writing prose as well, beginning in 1876 with Alide: An Episode of Goethe’s Life, an adaptation of a real story about a passionate affair between Goethe and a teenage girl. Over time, she became more interested in her Jewish roots as well. That was not something that every Jewish person was going to emphasize in this heavily anti-Semitic time of the Gilded Age, especially as new classes of Jewish immigrants began to arrive on American shores that tended to embarrass or outrage the wealthy German Jews already established in the United States.

But then Lazarus always was more favorable to immigrants than many Americans, which is of course the only reason we remember her today (unless you are a big fan of her Heine translations, which are still respected). In 1883, she wrote “The New Colossus,” which has perhaps the most famous lines of any poem in American history. It reads:

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!”

Yeah, if only that was true. She did not live to see her poem become that famous. It was added to the Statue of Liberty in 1903. But in fact, Lazarus did write it to auction it for the raising of the money for the Statue, so it made a lot of sense. The poem moved a lot of people. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was so inspired by it that she founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, which today takes care of terminal cancer patients.

Lazarus was involved in a variety of reform movement. She was a big follower of Henry George and his Single Tax idea and in fact has a poem called “Progress and Poverty” that she published in the New York Times. She did a lot of work for poor Jewish immigrants coming from Russia, outraged at the pogroms after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Unlike many wealthy German Jews who looked down on these eastern European Jews, Lazarus got involved in providing them the means for life when they arrived in the United States. She was one of the people to establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in 1884, designed to provide Jewish immigrants craft skills so they could make a good living. It stayed active until 1939.

Lazarus was also a big person in the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, founded in 1881. This was a less successful venture, often criticized for its tendency of German Jews scolding Russian Jews for their habits and traditions, but I don’t think this has anything to with Lazarus, who mostly just volunteered there. In fact, Lazarus came to turn on the HEAS with very sharp words, She later wrote of its shelter on Wards Island:

“Not a drop of running water is to be found in the dormitories or refectories, or in any of the other buildings, except the kitchen. In all weathers, those who wish to wash their hands or to fetch or to fetch a cup of water, have to walk over several hundred feet of irregular, dirty ground, strewn with rubble and refuse, and filled, after a rainfall, with stagnant pools of muddy water in which throngs of idle children are allowed to dabble at will… Not a single practical step has been taken to provide tuition…”

A lot of Lazarus’ late-era poems revolved around the Jewish experience, both in terms of identity and her work with immigrants. She also started translating medieval Jewish poets from Spain. She came to believe that Jews in America should embrace their religion and educated their fellow people in a Jewish fashion, often writing to major Jewish publications (where she was often published anyway) to promote these ideas.

Lazarus was pretty well off and started taking trips to Europe. After she returned from her second trip, in 1887, she got sick. It was probably Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It killed her within two months. She was 38 years old. Shortly after her death, her admirers put together a two volume collection of her poetry, published in 1889.

In a time of great sickness and evil in this nation, where we as a nation have turned against immigrants and are about to commit what might be one of the worst human rights violations in this nation’s history with Trump’s mass deportations coming, it is worth remembering that Americans don’t have to be racist scumbags scared of new languages and foods and traditions. It can be a nation that embraces the best of the world and welcomes in immigrants. Most certainly, there were horrible racist Americans in the 1880s too, lord knows. But in this hour of darkness, remembering someone as great as Emma Lazarus can do us some good.

Emma Lazarus is buried in Beth Olom Cemetery, Queens, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other 19th century poets, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lazarus has 10 poems printed in the Library of America 19th century poetry volumes, which is quite a lot. Others near her in that volume include Sarah Orne Jewett, who is in South Berwick, Maine, and James Whitcomb Riley, buried in Indianapolis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.