23
*LIBERTY'S PROMISE*
O
dragging out their lives in the horrors
of Siberia. Emma Lazarus sat gazing at
all this.''
A few months later, Emma was at a
soiree at the home of The Century's
publisher when the first copies of the
April issue arrived from the printer. It
included not only an article. by Emma
about Benjamin Disraeli, but a
defense of Russia's anti-Semitic
pogroms written by a Russian gentile,
Madame Rogozin.
Rogozin's article was full of the
coarsest bigotry. She called Jews "a
parasitical race." They are "despised,"
wrote Rogozin, because "they will
take any amount of abuse if they can
thereby turn a penny. They "smirk
and cringe." They are "cruel,"
"ruthless" and "underhanded." They
harbor "deadly grudges."
Emma complained to The Century's
publisher about Madame Rogozin's
article and he urged her to answer it.
Emma's response, which appeared in
the May, 1882 issue of The Century,
drew upon her visit to the Russian
refugees on Ward's Island. "No
American," she wrote, "who has seen
them and heard from their own
lips . . . of their sufferings will have
compassion to spare for the [anti-
Semitic] whiskey-ruined peasants
described by Madame Rogozin. Of
these horrors, no one in whose veins
flows a drop of Jewish blood can
speak with becoming composure."
Emma began to see a link between
the vicious anti-Semitism of the Euro-
pean pogroms and the genteel anti-
Semitism that was infecting American
high society. For her, there was only
one solution: Zionism.
Emma attended protest meetings
and wrote about Jews and Judaism for
• important magazines. She learned
Hebrew and published Songs of a
Semite, a volume of poems.
In November, 1882, Emma decided
to write for a fledgling New York
newspaper, The American Hebrew,
what turned out to be a 16-part essay,
"Epistle to the Jews." She knew that
the paper's readers — 100,000
Sephardic and German Jews — feared
that the strangely dressed, ill-
mannered, Yiddish-speaking Russian
immigrants would give all Jews a bad
reputation. She also knew that her
readers, wounded by overt anti-
Semitism in the New Land, wanted to
heal their wounds by blending into
America. Hoping to restore their
pride in being Jewish, Emma's essay
combined angry sarcasm with inspira-
tional rhetoric.
Lazarus criticized moves by some
Jews to conceal their Judaism and to
"Americanize" their names. She was
appalled at the "hostility between
Jews of varying descent." But she
saved her greatest passion for Jews'
solidarity. The "clannishness" which
Madame Rogozin had called a vice
was, said Emma, an indispensable
vice.
"We are not 'tribal' enough," she
wrote. Jews lack "sufficient solidarity
to say that when the life and proper-
ty of a Jew in . . . the Caucus are at-
tacked, the dignity of the Jew in
America is humiliated. Until we are
all free, we are none of us free."
With that, Emma's Protestant
friends — the intellectuals of her day
— understood the depths of her
Jewish feelings.
In 1883, the French government
had presented to the United States the
sculpture that would become the
Statue of Liberty. But the statue,
which was supposed to be a beacon
in New York harbor, had no pedestal.
It was America's task to fund and
build the fortress-like base, but most
politicians and citizens thought the
job would be preposterously expen-
sive. Emma's Southern-born friend,
Constance Harrison, was one of a
handful of people who disagreed. She
volunteered to ask writers like Walt
Whitman, Mark Twain, Brett Harte
and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to
provide manuscripts that could be
auctioned off to raise funds.
"I begged Miss Lazarus to give me
some verses appropriate to the occa-
sion," Harrison wrote. "She was at
first inclined to rebel against writing
anything to order. 'If I attempt
anything now,' Emma had responded,
`it will surely be flat.' "
Constance Harrison knew how to
reach Emma. "Think of that goddess
[the statue] standing on her pedestal
down yonder in the bay and holding
out her torch to those Russian
refugees of yours you were so fond of
visiting on Ward's Island. Emma's
dark eyes deepened. Her cheeks
flushed . . . She said not a word
more."
In a few days, the lines for which
Emma Lazarus would be remembered,
"The New Colossus," were ready:
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!
The poem attracted little attention,
although James Russell Lowell wrote
to Lazarus that he preferred "your
sonnet about the Statue much better
than I like the Statue itself. It gives its
subject a raison d' etre which it
wanted before quite as much as it
wanted a pedestal."
In 1884, Emma became desperately
sick. As she was beginning to recover,
the father she adored died. "The
blow was a crushing one for Emma,"
her sister Josephine wrote. "Life lost
its meaning and charm. Her father's
pride and sympathy in her work had
been her chief incentive."
In 1887, she tried to travel through
Europe again, but she was often too
weak to leave her room. In July,
1887, she returned to New York.
Emma died of Hodgkins disease on
November 19. She was 38 years old.
After Emma's death, the forces of
self-denigration that she had fought in
the outside world invaded her own
family. Her sister Josephine remained
close to the editors of The American
Hebrew. She helped found the Na-
tional Council of Jewish Women and
was proud of Emma's Jewish writing
until her death in 1910. But Anne,
who eventually became Emma's only
literary executer, explicitly prevented
the printing of Emma's Jewish
writing.
In 1890, Anne had married a
wealthy Protestant painter named
John Humphreys Johnston.. She
became an Anglican a few years later.
Johnston, a friend of Henry Adams
and Henry James, was part of the
American elite that divided its time
between Europe and Boston or New
New Verses
Poetry has been .associated with the Statue of Liberty since Emma Lazarus'
sonnet, "The New Colossus," was inscribed on its base 83 years ago.
To see how contemporary poets view the statue, The Jewish News asked
Enid Dame and Sherwood Kohn to write about Lady Liberty. Dame
is a widely published poet and a resident of New York.
Sherwood Kohn, associate editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times,
has studied poetry with poets John Berryman and Stephen Spender
and is a two-time winner of the R.E. Straus Poetry Prize.
The Statue Speaks
Sweet Liberty
BY ENID DAME
BY SHERWOOD D. KOHN
11 refugees are the same people:
the ones we know well
.from old photographs
with bundles, babies, and beards;
the ones in leaky boats,
the ones who floated in backward,
the others who turned into birds
and flew over the border.
- owe you, lady
With the green copper skin
And the lamp raised
Above the harbor
Greeting
Me
And my mother,
Mother's mother,
Father's mother,
Father's father,
As you brought the tears
To eyes
Of millions and to mine
Aboard a British ship
Returning
From a land my mother
And my father's father
Left.
I owe you, lady,
For a life
In freedom, free
Of Nazi ovens,
Inquisitors' racks,
Raiding cossacks,
Ghettos
Bitter herbs and kicks.
The spittle of the bigot
Has not touched my cheek.
Instead, the ocean spray
Invests my beard
With salt
That meets the salt
My body drops across my cheek.
A
Whatever their reasons,
whatever they know:
the man with twelve languages,
the woman who fixes machines,
the girl with utopian pamphlets,
the boy with seeds in his pocket.
refugees are the same people:
the man with silken fingers,
the man with leather knuckles,
the girl with the wind-chime voice,
the woman whose voice cracks logs,
the man who speaks mostly to God,
the man who speaks only to cats.
The man with bandanna'd face,
afraid of all cameras,
the woman who hides in basements
of churches and synagogues
and dreams of a green ticket.
Some are delighted.
Some are confused.
Some pound the door with their fists.
I've known them all.
Officials make rules.
I'm no official.
I'm more like a parent.
Like any mother,
I know when to look closely,
I know when to look away.
I
-
I owe you, lady.
Coming home
Is like escaping
From the ghosts
That haunt us.
Sweet liberty
Of thee I sing.