SYMHC Classics: Emma Lazarus

This 2018 episode covers one of the United States' first successful Jewish American writers, moving in the New York literary scene of the late 1800s. She also wrote one of the most famous poems of all time, and even if you don't know her name, odds are you know at least some of that work.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Today is the twentieth anniversary of
the nine eleven terrorist attacks, So we actually had a
really hard time figuring out which episode to release today.
As a classic, the attack itself is far more recent
than what we cover on the show, and everything that
we considered that seemed tangentially related just felt kind of off.

(00:22):
But it also felt wrong not to mention the anniversary
at all. So we've decided to just go in another direction,
and today's episode is on Emma Lazarus. This originally came
out July, and along with the other work that we
discussed in the episode, she wrote the New Colossus to
raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.

(00:45):
There is a bronze plaque with the text of that
poem inside the pedestal. Today, Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm

(01:06):
Tracy V. Wilson. UH, And today we're going to talk
about Emma Lazarus, who became one of the United States
first successful Jewish American writers moving in the New York
literary scene in the late eighteen hundreds, and she also
wrote one of the most famous poems of all time.
Even if you don't know her name or the title
of that poem, odds are that at least you know

(01:27):
some lines of that work. Heads up for our listeners
who are maybe sharing this episode with younger history buffs,
we are going to have a discussion at the end
about one of her poems that is definitely erotic and
calls into questions some theories about her sexuality. The poem
in particular is adult content. I would say, yeah, I
read it this morning and then I needed to take

(01:48):
a walk. So we're gonna jump right in to the
life of Emma Lazarus. She was born on July to
second of eighteen forty nine, and her parents, Moses and
Esther Lazarus, had seven children. She was born right in
the middle. She was their fourth. They lived in New

(02:09):
York City, and Emma's family, which had Portuguese Jewish roots,
was pretty wealthy. The family business was a sugar refinery
and they had done extremely well for themselves. The family
had been in New York since before the Revolutionary War,
so that money that had been passed down through the
family was rooted originally in a sugar trade that was
directly tied to slavery, and the success that Moses acquired

(02:32):
through the family business put him in high society circles
that consisted primarily of white Christians, and he made something
of a conscious effort to play down the family's Sephardic
Jewish background as part of their assimilation into that social circle.
He was moving towards more of a secular Judaism himself.
But this whole situation really always gave Emma a sense

(02:56):
of otherness. Even though she had friends, she just always
felt apart kind of everyone. Her early life was split
between homes in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island.
She studied with private tutors and received a really wide
ranging education. She learned to speak French, Italian, and German,
and these multi lingual skills really served her well in

(03:16):
her career. Her translations were as popular as the poetry
and prose that she was writing, and she was translating
uh poetry from foreign languages from a very early age.
In in eighteen sixty six, her poetry was published for
the first time in a volume titled Poems and Translations,
written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and this

(03:38):
book was financed not by a publishing house but by
her father, Moses, who was incredibly supportive of her work
as a writer. But in eighteen sixty seven a publishing
house printed a second edition of the book, which gave
it a much wider distribution. Soon, Emma Lazarus was a
name that was circulating in literary circles, and her poetry
was getting the attention of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson.

(04:01):
He became her mentor after the two of them were
introduced by mutual friends. When Emma published a book of
poetry called Ad Medicine Other Poems in eighteen seventy one,
the title poem was dedicated to Emerson. That relationship between Emerson,
who was sixty five when he met eighteen year old Lazarus,
wasn't always a smooth one. Initially, Emerson had seemed even

(04:24):
a little flirtatious in his letters with the young poet,
and while he praised her work generally, he gave very
few specific notes. And then he also cooled in his
affinity for her and kind of withdrew. This is something
that if you look at Emerson's life, this was a
pattern of him with younger poets that he chose to
mentor he would kind of lavish praise on them and
then kind of back off of it. And then when

(04:46):
she asked him to recommend a poem of hers to
his editor I believe it was at the Atlantic for publication,
he instead leveled some pretty harsh criticism at the work
and told her that she had a tendency to indulge
in quote feeble word words. The two of them had
a deeper falling out when Emerson edited the anthology Parnassis.
This is a collection of his favorite poems, and he

(05:08):
left Emma's work out of it entirely. She wrote him
a really angry letter about this light and he never
wrote her back about it. Eventually the two of them
did see each other again. Was a couple of years later,
after Emerson had retired. Lazarus visited him and conquered Massachusetts
in eighteen seventy six at his invitation. YEA, so they

(05:29):
seem to have smoothed it over at least a little,
but we don't really know that they ever got to
the point of friendship they had once shared. Lazarus published
more than fifty original poems in her lifetime, as well
as volumes of translations. In eighteen seventy one, she published
her second book of poetry that Tracy mentioned earlier, which
was Admetus and Other Poems and in it our translations

(05:50):
of poems by Gerta and Heinrich Heine as well as
original works by Lazarus, and her poem how Long, conveys
the sense that Lazarus longs for literary tradition that makes
sense of her own life as an American writer, and
not one that's defined by the European tradition. The final
stanza of that work reads, the echo faints and fails.

(06:11):
It suiteth not upon this Western plane our voice or spirit.
We should stir again the wilderness and make the plane
resound unto a yet unheard of strain. Another poem in
Admetus is in the Jewish Synagogue at Newport, which is
a take on Longfellows the Jewish Cemetery at Newport. This
poem touches on the many moments that take place and

(06:34):
a synagogue, so there's worship and weddings and funerals, and
it's her first poetic effort at really trying to capture
Jewish life. In eighteen seventy four, she published a novel,
A Lead, An Episode in Gerta's Life. This is the
only novel that she ever wrote, and it is based
on Guerta's own autobiographical accounts of his life experiences. It

(06:55):
tells the story of a young Gerta falling in love
with a woman in the country, an ultimate lead leaving
her for his work. In eighteen seventy six, she wrote
a play in verse called The Spagnoletto. In This work,
which is a five act tragedy, was published privately. She
published a number of poems in the second half of
the eighteen seventies in the early eighteen eighties, mostly in

(07:16):
the periodicals Lippincott's Century and The New York Times. In
eighteen eighty one, she published a full book of translations
of Heinrich Kinna's works, titled Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heina.
That same year, she published an essay titled American Literature
in defense of the work of writers in the United
States as just as valid as the writing of their

(07:38):
European predecessors and counterparts. Having studied literature, I think that
was an argument people were still making and are still making.
A hundred years later, certainly, Yeah, it was something that
it was another part of that sense of otherness that
she kind of always felt that. She was like, I
feel like we're doing great work over here, but everyone

(07:58):
is like, oh no, really, the seat of culture and
literature is clearly still Europe, which I imagine is really
frustrating for writers that are are doing really good work.
Um Emma Lazarus was increasingly devoted to activism against anti
Semitism in her twenties and thirties. She became a vocal

(08:20):
advocate for New York's Jewish refugee population, and she spoke
out against the anti Semitism that was rampant in Eastern Europe,
writing both essays and poetry on the subject. In two
she published a collection titled Songs of a Semite that
Danced to Death and Other Poems. And publishing this work,
Lazarus became a really controversial figure. There was the obvious

(08:41):
issue of anti Semitism to deal with, but in proclaiming
her Jewishness so clearly it ran really counter to the
ideology of people like her father, who wanted to retain
their cultural identity in a more private way to try
to avoid causing conflict. In addition to Songs of a Semi,
Lazarus became a regular contributor to the Journal's American Hebrew

(09:04):
uh and the Century, in which she published several essays
from April eighteen eighty two to February eight three. The
essays was the Earl of Beaconsfield, a Representative Jew, Russian
Christianity versus Modern Judaism, and the Jewish Problem all examined
the issue of Jews in society, who she wrote, were

(09:24):
faded to forever be antagonized by those around them, and
it was in reaction to the prejudice against Jews that
she witnessed that she started to promote the pre Zionist
idea that a Jewish state needed to be established in Palestine.
This was before Zionism was really coined and pushed by
other people. In a moment, we'll talk about some of
the other advocacy that Emma Lazarus engaged in, but we're

(09:46):
going to pause first for a brief sponsor break. Emma's
activism was confined just to her writing, though, as a
way to help Jewish refugees build a better life in
the US, she helped found the Hebrew Technical Institute of

(10:08):
New York, and there immigrants could receive vocational training to
help ensure some sort of financial stability in their new lives.
In eighteen eighty two, she worked hands on at the
Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, teaching English and assisting with lessons
that would help immigrants merge with American society. That year
and estimated two thousand Russian Jewish immigrants were arriving in

(10:30):
New York. Every month, she visited the homes of immigrants
on Wards Island, and she was somewhat horrified at the
conditions there. The island had been made into an overflow
camp for refugees, as other facilities in Brooklyn could just
no longer take any more people they were completely full.
On March eight two, a piece that appears to have

(10:51):
been written by Lazarus appeared in the New York Times,
although it ran uncredited, and the article casts a sympathetic
eye on the people at Ward's Island. How many of
them were people of high esteem in their homeland who,
in seeking refuge, we're going to start their new lives
completely penniless. And it goes on to challenge and disassemble
a lot of the stereotypes that Russian Jewish immigrants endured

(11:14):
in New York, and it's stressed that they wished only
to breathe the air of freedom. Lazarus spent some time
in the mid eighteen eighties traveling abroad after she published
Songs of a Semite. She visited both England and France,
and it was during her first trip there in eighteen
eighty three that she met and befriended Robert Browning, William Morris,
and Henry James, among others. Yeah, because she was uh

(11:37):
already really well known in literary circles in the US,
and she was from a wealthy family, one she could
afford to travel, and too, she had pretty easy introductions
to a lot of society people throughout Europe, so she
made a lot of very high profile friends. And that
same year she also wrote a letter to her friend
and publisher Philip Cowan referencing an article that she had

(11:58):
recently read that had a decidedly anti Semitic tone. She
wrote quote to refer to the Sun article, it seems
to me so coarse and vulgar that it deserves no
reply from any self respecting Jew. It represents the habitual
light in which we are regarded as a race by
the Christians, but it happens to be couched in somewhat
more offensive terms than usual. I am perfectly conscious that

(12:22):
this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the
community towards us. And yet when I even remotely hint
at the fact that we are not a favorite people,
I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers
between the two sects. The particular article ought, in my opinion,
to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile

(12:43):
to touch. In late three she penned the poem that
would become her most famous, The New Colossus. The New
Colossus is a sonnet, and you might not know it
by name, but you almost certainly know at least a
couple of lines from it. We're going to get to
the poem itself and just the moment. The New Losses
was actually written for charity. Lazarus wrote it so it

(13:03):
can be auctioned off to raise money for the pedestal
for the Statue of Liberty. While France was giving the
US the statue as a gift, it was up to
the States to pay for a base that would support
the massive monument, and this was something of an issue
of contention. Coming up with the money to pay for
a pedestal was a challenge, and there was a very
real sentiment against the entire affair based on the idea

(13:26):
that the whole thing was making the US look bad.
I'm gonna say it's not completely unheard of for there
to be a gift like this that costs the recipient money,
especially when it's a giant statue. Despite the negative opinion
of a gift that also required significant expense on the
part of the recipient just to receive the gift, the

(13:48):
New York literary community rallied to try to raise funds
for the base. The Art Loan Fund, Exhibition and Aid
of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty
was mounted and this was an auction of art and
literature created especially for the occasion, and it was managed
by the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty. Emma

(14:08):
Lazarus had been asked to participate by William Maxwell Everts,
who was chairman of the American Committee for the Statue
of Liberty and the writer Constance Carrie Harrison, and Lazarus
was reluctant initially She was not accustomed to doing commissions,
and she didn't write if she didn't feel moved to
do so, so this idea of writing on command was
not really in her wheelhouse normally. As she approached this poem,

(14:32):
Lazarus imagined how the statue might regard the old World,
and her work and advocating for the immigrant community really
informed the voice that she gave the statue, who she
considered the Mother of Exiles. She wrote the New Colossus
on November two three, and it's pretty short, so we're
going to read it in its entirety. Not like the
brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from

(14:55):
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 worldwide. Welcome her mild eyes
command the air bridged harbor that twins cities frame keep

(15:16):
ancient lands. Your storied pomp, cries she with silent lips.
Give me You're tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning
to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
send these the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift
my lamp beside the golden door, so that brazen giant

(15:37):
that she mentions in the first line is a reference
to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, which was a statue
built somewhere between two ninety two and two a d. B. C. E.
To commemorate a military conquest, and Lazarus characterizes the new
monument in contrast as a welcoming presence rather than a
conquering one. The poem was read at the auction on

(15:58):
in December, but not at the dedication of the Statue
of Liberty in eighteen eighty six. Later, the New Colossus
was published in the New York Times and in Joseph
Pulitzer's New York World, but it quickly faded from public consciousness.
And we are actually about to talk about the end
of Emma Lazarus's short life, but we're going to take

(16:18):
a quick break before we do to hear from one
of the fantastic sponsors that keep our show going. In
March eighteen eighty five, Emma's father, Moses Lazarus, died, and
in April she set sail for Europe once again. This

(16:41):
trip was a very long one. She kept traveling right
into eighteen eighty seven. She started with visits to Yorkshire
and London before moving on to the Netherlands, France, and Italy,
but by the end of the year she was not
feeling well. She continued her travels in eighteen eighty six
despite feeling ill. First she went back to England and
then Holland in Paris, and she'd been planning another visit

(17:02):
to Italy, but ended up staying in Paris into seven
because she just couldn't travel anymore. She stayed in Paris
for six months before returning to New York in July,
and that time she had developed a facial paralysis. She
had lost her hearing in one year. Her eyesight had
declined to the point that she could barely see. Her

(17:22):
younger sister Annie had been with her in Europe and
took care of her as she convalesced and took dictations
so that Emma could keep up her correspondence. Lazarus never
got to witness her poems rise to fame. She died
on November nineteenth of eighteen eighty seven, and while her
illness was never properly diagnosed. It is likely, based on
the evidence UH and based on what people have gathered,

(17:46):
that she probably died from Hodgkin lymphoma. She was only
thirty eight. The funeral was held at her home in
New York, and then she was buried in Cypress Hills
in Brooklyn. The December issue of American Hebrew was a
memorial to M. L. Hazarus. It was more than twenty
pages longer than normal to accommodate all the poems and
other various tributes that writers had sent for inclusion. The

(18:08):
New Colossus went largely unmentioned in obituaries and writings about
her after her death, aside from a tribute written by
Constance Carrie Harrison. Yeah, that was the writer who had
asked her specifically to please write that poem. In the
year after Emma died, her cousins set up the Emma
Lazarus Club for Working Girls, and there young women immigrants

(18:29):
could learn marketable skills such as sewing or clerical practices,
but they could also study literature if they wanted to.
This charitable effort troubled her immediate family, though they had
never been entirely comfortable with Emma's activism. After her death,
they had shifted the narrative of her life a little bit,
playing down her controversial Zionist views. As you recalled from

(18:52):
the beginning of the episode, her father had consciously worked
to blend in with New York society and really played
down the family's Jewish heritage. The family refused to allow
any of Emma's pro Jewish poetry to be reprinted after
her death. When her sisters Josephine and Annie published the
two volumes that the Poems of Emma Lazarus in, Josephine

(19:12):
wrote a biographical sketch of Emma. Yeah, that sketch got
reprinted in a lot of places, and that's really kind
of where her life story got a little bit um
shifted around, where it wasn't quite an accurate portrayal of
her anymore, but more like a very niceified version that
left out any of her controversial views. In nineteen o one, though,

(19:35):
the New Colossus was rediscovered by Georgina Skyler, who was
a friend of Emma's, and Skylar had found the poem
in a book that she happened upon in a bookshop,
and she was inspired to resurrect her friend's work, and
through Skylar's efforts. In nineteen o three, the new colossus
was inscribed on a plaque, and that plaque was hung
inside the museum in the Statue of Liberty's Pedestal, where

(19:57):
it remains to this day. The Emma Lazarus Federation of
Jewish Women's Clubs was formed in nineteen forty four by
the Women's Division of the Jewish People's Paternal Order of
the International Workers Order for the i w O. It
was founded as a wartime relief group combating racism and
fostering positivity in Jewish identity. From its founding until its

(20:18):
dissolution in nine the group had at times been labeled
as subversive and radical, and it did have ties to communism.
It also went through various re ords, but it was
always focused on women's issues. The group didn't only advocate
for Jewish women's causes, though that was its primary focus.
The Emma Lazarus Federation joined forces with the Black Women's

(20:39):
Group SO Journals for Truth and Justice during the fifties
and sixties, and it also pressured the US government to
ratify the nineteen forty eight Genocide Convention. At its highest
level of activity, the Mma Lazarus Federation had one hundred
clubs within it, with membership totaling between four thousand and
five thousand women. In subways. Lazar Us has become more

(21:01):
enigmatic since her death. Questions related to her spinster lifestyle
arose in the second half of the twentieth century when
a signet that she wrote titled Assurance was published for
the first time. The signet begins, last night I slept,
and when I woke her kiss still floated on my lips.
The poem describes a dream of a romantic forest interlude.

(21:25):
I would go so far as to say an erotic
forest interlude that concludes with the woman referenced in the
first line whispering quote and didst thou dream this could
be buried, this could be asleep? And love bethrall to death? Nay,
WHAT'SO seem? Have faith, dear heart, this is the thing
that is. The sonnet has naturally fueled speculation about Emma

(21:50):
Lazarus's sexual identity. She had included it in an anthology
of her own work that she was preparing just before
she died. She understood that she was not going to survive,
and she was really focused on her poetry surviving. But
this poem was undated, which was unusual for her work.
She had to have known it would be a little
bit controversial, but this poem, like her activism, was omitted

(22:12):
from the work by her sister's author, Esther Shore, in
her two thousand six biography of Emma Lazarus, discussed this
poem and made a case that it can be interpreted
as much about and simply embracing one's own sexuality as
anything else. She said quote she wrote the poem as
a dream vision and left it undated, not to elude us,
but to redirect us. What the poem exposes is her

(22:34):
unconscious and it tells us that she met it, if
not a female lover face to face, and the sonnet
the lover's enigmatic assurance is that this is the thing
that is means in another ediom, this is the real thing,
but it's also a thing that is real beyond denial
or repression. Assurance. Is not a poem about choosing a lover.

(22:54):
It is about being chosen by desire. It is a
love poem, yes, but also a poem of vocation about
being called by eros to a vital sexual life. That is,
of course one interpretation. That's the thing about poetry. Other
people can interpret different ways. I had a definite interpretation
when I read it. That is not something we could

(23:15):
really repeat in the podcast. All right, then? Uh. There
has been plenty of speculation also about a possible romance
at one point between Emma Lazarus and Charles Decay, who
was the brother of her best friend, Helena Decay, and
the two Emma and Charles were very close for years,
but it appears that whatever their connection was, it fell

(23:36):
apart when Emma learned something scandalous about Charles, although what
that thing was is unknown, But what we do know
is that Charles, a poet in his own right, after
finding out that she had discovered something, wrote a rather
scathing kind of comedy poem to his brother in law,
mocking Emma over the whole thing. So whether there was

(23:57):
any true romantic affection between the two of them remains
a mystery. I read some accounts that suggested that Helena
always thought Emma had a thing for Charles, but that
Charles never really cared about her. But then other people
in their social circle mentioned that Charles was really quite
fond of her. We don't know. It's all hearsay at
this point, but if there had been any real romantic

(24:19):
affection between them, that incident put an end to it.
She definitely flirted with men in her life, and she
also seemed fascinated by the idea of the so called
Boston marriage of two women living together as a couple.
But we really don't know anything specific about her personal
inclinations or her relationships. It's all speculation. Yeah. Even her

(24:39):
letters between her and Charles Decay are nowhere to be found.
There's like one and it's pretty boring. So we just
don't know. But what is a parent is that while
she had a very wide circle of friends and may
have had romantic feelings for various people or not, her work,
both as a writer and an activist, was always the
thing that took precedent and was more important to her

(25:00):
than anything else. There's a coda to this, which is
I didn't want to say it at the top because
it kind of gives away some of the story. But
here's why I selected this topic for an episode. I
was on Twitter recently, you know where truth always lives.
But there was an argument going on about current events,
and someone referenced the New Colossus, and some other person

(25:22):
replied to them why should we care what some French
guy wrote on a statue they sent us, And I thought, well,
we gotta let people know that a woman actually wrote it,
she was from the United States, just to help pare
down the misinformation that may be floating in the world.
That is why we selected m. Lazaria. She's also just
an interesting figure. We have a lot of stories about
activists in various different ways. Hers was a unique style

(25:46):
in that she really did seem to want to use
her privilege to get the word out, but at the
same time she still maintained a very cushy life for herself.
So a lot of other poets that we have talked
about have been poets who today have had more of
a lasting fame in terms of how their work is regarded,

(26:06):
whereas I think a lot of people like she's She's
not as much of a household name and a lot
of circles as say Walt Whitman. No, not at all, um,
And you know that people are definitely familiar with at
least those few lines from the New Classes, but not
necessarily her other work, a lot of which is really lovely. Yeah,
I I will confess I was reading some various criticism

(26:27):
of it, and she does not get treated terribly, uh
delightfully by modern critics. I think even in her own time,
some of her word choices were a little stilted and
kind of like people either found them dry or a
little bit removed. It was like, one critic that I
wrote was talking about how she wanted to talk about

(26:48):
a lot of different parts of the human experience, but
because she really didn't have that wide of a personal experience.
You know, she traveled twice, but even so, she spent
like six months of those travels in a room basically
and on her balcony because she was ill. So she
kind of is talking about all of this stuff almost
from a remove, and she was like, you can feel

(27:08):
the distance between what she's trying to talk about and
what it actually is. And also when she talks about
other cultures that she never really experienced, there's always that
weird kind of distance. But it's worth checking out. Yeah,
people made a similar criticism about Phyllis Sweetly, feeling like
she was too removed from the work that she was
talking about. Yeah, so it's fascating stuff. I uh, I

(27:32):
always love a little bit of history involving lady writers.
Especially people that don't maybe get their due. Yeah, pay
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
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(27:52):
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(28:13):
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