Lazarus Emma - Emma Lazarus

CONTENTS

For Walter

JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

Jonathan Rosen, General Editor

Jewish Encounters is a collaboration between Schocken and Nextbook, a project devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas.

JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

PUBLISHED

THE LIFE OF DAVID . Robert Pinsky

MAIMONIDES . Sherwin B. Nuland

BARNEY ROSS . Douglas Century

BETRAYING SPINOZA . Rebecca Goldstein

EMMA LAZARUS . Esther Schor

THE WICKED SON . David Mamet

FORTHCOMING

MOSES . Stephen J. Dubner

BIROBIJIAN . Masha Gessen

JUDAH MACCABE . Jeffrey Goldberg

YEHUDA HALEVI . Hillel Halkin

THE DAIRY RESTAURANT . Ben Katchor

DISRAELI . Adam Kirsch

THE JEWISH BODY . Melvin Konner

THE SONG OF SONGS . Elena Lappin

THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK . David Lehman

ABRAHAM CAHAN . Seth Lipsky

THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE . Jonathan Mahler

GLCKEL OF HAMELN . Daphne Merkin

THE ALTALENA . Michael B. Oren

THE HEBREW ALPHABET . Ilan Stavans

MARSHALL MEYER . Noga Tarnopolsky

MESSIANISM . Leon Wieseltier

MARC CHAGALL . Jonathan Wilson

JEWS AND POWER . Ruth R. Wisse

PROLOGUE

Emma Lazarus and the Three Anne Franks

N ot long ago, on a humid May morning, I visited my daughters fourth-grade class. We parents gathered on the blacktop behind the school, where, amid a mad, high buzz of cicadas, the children stood in stiff poses, hot in their costumes, for the Annual Wax Museum. Here was Jackie Robinson, played by a white boy with freckles, and there was Lady Diana Spencer, played by a tall black girl in a foil tiara; perched on the jungle gym, a recent arrival from Pakistan wore Eleanor Roosevelts unmistakable blue felt hat and wallflower dress. When I touched his handthe cue to begin his autobiographya stout black boy, as Malcolm X, told of marrying Betty X before being shot in Harlem; El Duque, played by the daughter of a Guatemalan gardener, recalled his passage through shark-infested waters. This years theme had been announced as Women and Minorities, though after an appeal from the mom of a would-be Babe Ruth, the teachers broadened it to People Who Made a Difference. At the edge of the blacktop, a pigtailed Leonardo da Vinci gossiped in her Sydney accent with a tiny George Washington, coiffed in a poof of baby powder.

As I wound my way among these sweaty monuments, Emma Lazaruss famous sonnet, The New Colossus, was on my mind: Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Among these poor, tired kids, huddling in their Wax Museum tableaus, was the breathing proof of her prophecymulticultural America, the Mother of Exiles, welcoming all in need of freedom. I had learned about the fortunes of this poem, how it had flared and faded from view in the 1880s, emerged fifteen years after Emmas death on a plaque inside the Statues pedestal, and been resurrected in the 1930s by pro-immigrationists during an era of restrictive quotas. The poem had shaped Americas selfimage, certainly, but not spontaneously, not continuously. Like many prophecies, it was well ahead of its time, and decades later it proved an exquisite tool for men and women trying to carve a new, inclusive destiny for America.

Finding no Emma Lazarus in the Wax Museum was not a surprise. But I was surprised to find that all the Jewish girls in the class (except my own pith-helmeted daughter, channeling Jane Goodall) had chosen to be Anne Frank. Each of the three Anne Franks had parted her hair on the right, clipped it on the left; each clutched a small book entitled Diary; each wore the white, Peter Pan collar of the girl who wouldnt grow up. There were small variationsone was blond and curly, the daughter of Israelis; another had feline, green eyes; the third, giggly and nervous, consulted her diary frequently for what looked like prompts. Each kept a respectful distance from the others, as though it were hard enough to be Anne Frank without competing for the title. Theyd clicked on the same website, each reciting solemnly, I died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, but after my death my dream came true: I became a published author. The eerie trio made me shudder, as much for Anne Franks death as for the grim Wax Museum heroine she had become.

I was not much older than my daughter when my parents gave me Anne Franks Diary of a Young Girl for Chanukah, inscribed, Here is a young girl we would like you to know. As I came to know her, she became a heroine of mine, too, but for all the wrong reasons. She was proud and bad and furtive; shed doted on her father, hated her mother, mocked the neighbors, and flirted, effectively, with a boy. Best of all, Anne was willing to tell me everything, and I adored her for it; I was her confidanteher Kitty. I loved Anne Frank neither for hoping nor dying but for being so shameless, so unlovable.

Emma Lazaruss diary does not survive, and of her childhood until the age of fourteen, there are no traces at all. We know that she was at least a fourth-generation American, the scion of a wealthy Sephardic family in New York, but little else. Whether she was mischievous or aimed to please, we cannot know; whether she went to school, played the piano, memorized Shakespeare, became her fathers favorite, or went to synagogue, we can only surmise. We live on the dark side of her moon. For nearly a century following her death in 1887, the only hints of the passionate, ardent life she lived were a scattering of letters sent to her famous correspondents, a small cache of letters she received, and a maudlin memoir by her sister Josephine.

All that changed on a Saturday afternoon in July 1980, when the retired theater critic Rosamond Gilder emptied the contents of a tall wooden cupboard into the arms of the scholar Bette Roth Young. It was a trove of one-hundred-odd letters sent by Emma Lazarus and her sisters to their friend Helena deKay Gilder, Rosamonds late mother. Sublimely trusting, Gilder handed over three hundred frail sheets of paper, directing her visitor to the nearby Lenox, Massachusetts, post office to photocopy them. Many nickels and fifteen years later, these letters and others appeared in Youngs landmark volume, Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters (1995).

In her letters to her own Kitty, Emma Lazarus comes alive as never before. Alert and witty, scandalously smart, she devours the heady pleasures of the Gilded Age: music, theater, art, poetry, novels, politics, history. She acquires powerful mentors in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and befriends the daughters of Emerson and Hawthorne. She engages blue bloods and mountain men; eccentricity brings out the best in her. She is a snob; she is a champion of the oppressed. With women, her attachments are ardent and sustained. With men, her friendships are more tenuous; she strives to balance friendship and intimacy, then impetuously tips the scales. She lives a vibrant writing life, taking up a myriad of genreslyric poetry, blank-verse narrative, drama, translation, novel, short story, essay, polemic, even muckraking exposand writing the first prose poem to appear in English. Traveling abroad for the first time at thirty-three, she takes London by storm. By the time she returns to Europe two years later, she has braved the ordeal of a lifetime, defying both enemies of the Jews and Jews who championed their people but without her visionary realism. Adrift, depressed, cut off from the very sources of her power, she tries out the role of a Henry James heroine in foreign capitals until a fatal illness breaks her stride.