Emma Lazarus

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

Emma Lazarus’s most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable story has remained a mystery until now. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980s, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity—as a feminist, a Zionist, and a trailblazing Jewish-American writer. Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus’s place in history as an activist and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today. As a stunning rebuke to fear, xenophobia, and isolationism, Lazarus's life and work are more relevant now than ever before.

ESTHER SCHOR, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems, My Last JDate, and Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The Forward.

Prologue: Emma Lazarus and the Three Anne Franks ix
 
I · 1849–1876
Generations 3
The Shadow of Victory 11
Footsteps in Newport 15
Your Professor, My Poet 20
Admetus 34
Oldport 36
A Place in Parnassus 43
Thoreau’s Compass 51
 
I I · 1876–1881
In the Studio 57
The Woman as She Really Was 65
Conundrums 72
Awakening 79
An Ancient, Well-Remembered Pain 86
The Critic’s Only Duty 90
The Devil Discovered 95
Fresh Vitality in Every Direction 106
Progress and Poverty 114
 
I I I · 1882–1883
Russian Jewish Horrors 119
Shylocks and Spinozas 128
The List of Singers 133
A Single Thought & a Single Work 136
An Army of Jewish Paupers 142
The Semite and the Hebrews 150
The Poet of the Podolian Ghetto 166
Seeds Sown 169
 
I V · 1883–1887
The Other Half (as It Were) of Our Little World-Ball 175
Mother of Exiles 185
Revolution as the Only Hope 198
The Inward Dissonance 209
The Vacant Chair 213
Passing Phantoms 216
December Roses 223
The Mattress-Grave 234
Sibyl Judaica 239
But If She Herself Were Here Today... 245
 
Appendix: Texts of the Poems 261
Chronology 299
Notes 309
Sources 323
Acknowledgments 329
Index 333