Emma Lazarus: National Jewish Book Award

ESTHER SCHOR, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems, My Last JDate, and Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and The Forward.

Winner of the National Jewish Book AwardEmma Lazarus's most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable story has remained a mystery until now. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980s, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity-as a feminist, a Zionist, and a trailblazing Jewish-American writer. Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus's place in history as an activist and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today. As a stunning rebuke to fear, xenophobia, and isolationism, Lazarus's life and work are more relevant now than ever before.

Prologue: Emma Lazarus and the Three Anne Franks ix   I · 1849–1876Generations 3 The Shadow of Victory 11 Footsteps in Newport 15 Your Professor, My Poet 20 Admetus 34 Oldport 36 A Place in Parnassus 43 Thoreau’s Compass 51   I I · 1876–1881 In the Studio 57 The Woman as She Really Was 65 Conundrums 72Awakening 79 An Ancient, Well-Remembered Pain 86 The Critic’s Only Duty 90 The Devil Discovered 95 Fresh Vitality in Every Direction 106 Progress and Poverty 114   I I I · 1882–1883 Russian Jewish Horrors 119 Shylocks and Spinozas 128 The List of Singers 133 A Single Thought & a Single Work 136 An Army of Jewish Paupers 142 The Semite and the Hebrews 150 The Poet of the Podolian Ghetto 166 Seeds Sown 169   I V · 1883–1887 The Other Half (as It Were) of Our Little World-Ball 175 Mother of Exiles 185 Revolution as the Only Hope 198 The Inward Dissonance 209 The Vacant Chair 213 Passing Phantoms 216 December Roses 223 The Mattress-Grave 234 Sibyl Judaica 239 But If She Herself Were Here Today... 245   Appendix: Texts of the Poems 261 Chronology 299 Notes 309 Sources 323 Acknowledgments 329 Index 333