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.