Everything about Emma Lazarus totally explained
» This article is about the poet named Lazarus. For other uses of the name Lazarus, see Lazarus (disambiguation).
Emma Lazarus (
July 22,
1849 –
November 19,
1887) was an
American poet born in
New York City.
She is best known for writing "
The New Colossus", a
sonnet written in 1883, that's now engraved on a
bronze plaque on a wall in the base of the
Statue of Liberty. The sonnet was solicited by
William Maxwell Evarts as a donation to an auction, conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" to raise funds to build the pedestal.
Background
Lazarus was the fourth of seven children of
Moses Lazarus and
Esther Nathan,
Portuguese Sephardic Jews whose families were long settled in
New York, and was related through her mother to
Benjamin N. Cardozo. From an early age, she studied
American and
European
literature, as well as several languages, including
German,
French, and
Italian. Her writings attracted the attention of
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who corresponded with her up until his death.
Lazarus is buried in
Beth-Olom Cemetery in
Brooklyn.
Literary career
She wrote her own original poems and edited many adaptations of German and Italian poems, notably those of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
Heinrich Heine. She also wrote a novel and two plays.
Lazarus' latent
Judaism was awakened after reading the
George Eliot novel,
Daniel Deronda, and this was further strengthened by the
Russian
pogroms in the early 1880s. This led Lazarus to write articles on the subject and to begin translating the works of
Jewish poets into English. When Eastern European
Ashkenazi Jews, expelled in great numbers from the Russian
Pale of Settlement began to appear in destitute multitudes in New York in the winter of 1882, Lazarus interested herself actively in providing technical education to make them self-supporting.
She traveled twice to Europe, first in
May 1885 after the death of her father in March and again in
September 1887. She returned to New York City seriously ill after her second trip and died two months later on
19 November 1887, most likely from
Hodgkin's disease.
She is known as an important forerunner of the
Zionist movement. In fact, she argued for the creation of a
Jewish homeland thirteen years before
Herzl began to use the term
Zionism.
Further Information
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