Emma Lazarus

"Emma Lazarus" is a new book by Elizabeth Shor about, you guessed it, Emma Lazarus. It is part of the Nextbook/Schocken series.

What did I know about Emma Lazarus before I read the book (or more accurately before I heard Elizabeth Shor lecture recently)? I knew that she wrote the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free......". That's it. That is all I knew.

What did I assume? I think I assume that she was a radical Jewish New Yorker, sort of an Emma Goldman. You know, you see one Emma, you've seen them all?

I did not know that she was a member of a very old and distinguished Sephardic Jewish family who could trace American roots to the 17th century, that she had plenty of money, and that she was educated and worldly and sophisticated. I did not know that she was close to Ralph Waldo Emerson and a friend her his daughter's, as well as of Nathaniel Hawthorne's, or that she knew William and Henry James, and even William Morris. That she was a very well published poet, and playwright and essayist.

I did not know that she never married (and that when she died, I am not sure that any of her five sisters had married), and that she died of Hodgkins Disease at a young age (nor that her physician was Dr. Hodgkins himself).

I did not know that she was a secular Jew, who became very interested in the rights of refugees, and in the possibility of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Before Herzl. And that she was very controversial. And that she did not seem to mind at all.

I did not know that, although her poem was selected for the Statue of Liberty (the poem perhaps being less controversial at the time that the statue itself), that she did not live long enough to see it in place.

I did not know that she was an absolutely fascinating and brilliant individual who, as Shor suggests, was way ahead of her time.