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Reviewed by:
  • Emma Lazarus
  • Dianne Ashton
Emma Lazarus. By Esther Schor. New York: Nextbook Schocken. 2006.

This elegant and graceful biography offers greater depth than previous analyses of the famed writer. Based upon a cache of Lazarus' letters uncovered in 1980 along with hitherto known sources, Schor reveals the talented young woman in the context of her complex family, her bustling New York, and the antisemitism of her era. The subtleties of Lazarus' relationship with Emerson are finally clarified. The appendix offers the full text of poems discussed in the narrative.

Excerpts from Lazarus' poems and letters are scattered throughout the text as Schor probes them to examine Lazarus' literary talent and her interior world. Earliest poems engage the poignant nature of victory at the close of the Civil War and the capture of Lincoln's assassin. By the time Lazarus reached eighteen, her collection, Poems and Translations Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen, which ran [End Page 114] to more than two hundred pages, had been brought out in a second, enlarged edition. Its thirty original pieces and translations of works by Heine, Schiller, Dumas, and Hugo impressed the reviewer for the New York Times, who called it "remarkable" (21). The next year she met the sixty-five-year old Emerson who served, to a point, as "sage instructor and a powerful mentor." Yet his "inveterate habit of . . . inviting closeness, and then refusing to reciprocate" (25) ultimately frustrated Lazarus' attempts to obtain more significant guidance from him. Her relationship with Emerson led Lazarus to a surprisingly close friendship with his daughter, Ellen. Lazarus also conducted an extensive correspondence with others whom she admired and "nurtured acquaintances into friends" (65).

Schor explains Lazarus' unusual sympathy for Jews very much unlike her own family. Her extensive clan traced itself to colonial times and her immediate family ignored most of Jewish law. Its wealth and sense of propriety common to upper-class Americans created an enormous gulf between her own background and that of the Jewish immigrants she came to care for. Yet, significant Jewish holidays did not go unobserved by her family, and their Jewish identity remained unchallenged. Lazarus' own Jewish perspective fills many poems. When the New York Times ran an article on Russia's "rapine, murder, and outrage" (161) against its Jews in 1882, Lazarus responded. Her poem, "The Crowing of the Red Cock," named for a peasant term for the deliberate burning of towns, announced the seriousness with which she turned her attention to the needs of those Jews.

Schor deftly depicts how Lazarus' came to conclusions that only would be embraced long after her early death at age thirty eight from Hotchkins disease. Lazarus "spoke of the need for a Jewish homeland when that was lunacy" and sensed a coming "apocalypse" for Europe's Jews. When asked to write the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, Lazarus saw "a mother's face" in the "cold, haughty visage of Gilded Age America" (260).

A poet herself, Schor's biography of a gifted poet truly does justice to its subject.

Dianne Ashton
Rowan University
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