Big Apple History . Coming to America . Emma Lazarus


	Emma Lazarus

Of the millions of New York stories, poet Emma Lazarus' is one of the saddest, though it began happily enough. She was born in 1849, the daughter of a wealthy sugar manufacturer and a member of New York's German-speaking Jewish elite.

After 1880, New York was flooded with poor, Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Many were fleeing pogroms, or government-led attacks on Jewish people, in Russia.

But despite their shared faith, New York's elite Jews turned up their noses at the newcomers. Emma was different. After reading an article that blamed the Jews for the pogroms, she wrote a strong reply. The Statue of Liberty committee read it and in 1883 hired her to write a poem to help raise funds to build the statue.

Her "New Colossus" declared that America should be a safe haven for Jews and other immigrants escaping persecution or seeking a better life. It was to be reprinted everywhere and written on the base of the statue itself. "Give me your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . " is one of it's most famous lines. The great wave of immigration at the turn of the century made Lazarus' fateful words a reality for millions of new Americans.

Even as she welcomed immigrants to a new life in America, Emma was dying in Europe. Diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease during a vacation, she returned to New York in 1887, the year after the Statue of Liberty went up. As her ship entered the harbor, she was too ill to come out on deck to view the statue. Emma Lazarus never saw the monument to freedom her famous poem helped build.

Illustration: Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society, Waltham, Massachusetts and New York, New York