Words and Worlds

Unlike Virginia Woolf who proclaimed that as a woman she had no country and wanted no country,1 Emma Lazarus believed passionately in her rightful place within the Jewish and American nations; even more passion? ately, she wanted to be counted among the citizens of the American literary nation. Despite her beliefs and wishes, however, Lazarus was an alien in the nations she fervently defended. As a woman in Victorian America, for example, she could not vote. As a Jew, she was vulnerable to anti-Semitism. And as a Jewish woman, she was not entitled to the privileges of men, according to Orthodox Jewish law. In spite of these actual and potential limitations on her freedom, Lazarus wrote poetry, essays, and fiction in which she strongly articulated her belief that she could and would be an American Jewish citizen.2 It is appropriate to reexamine Emma Lazarus's work this year, for 1987 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the author's death and follows by a year America's celebration of the Statue of Liberty, which has been em? powered by Lazarus's poem, New Colossus. Through this poem, the Statue has been glorified to articulate symbolically the ideals that America believes it represents. The poem itself transforms the outsider, the homeless newcomer, into an insider who brings new vitality to her/his adopted nation. And, in retrospect, the poet ironically became the insider she wanted to be by valorizing the outsider. Lazarus deserves our attention for at least three reasons: she is an author whose work has been largely ignored at least in part because of her gender and religion; she provides us with an alternative model of women's lives because she used her words, rather than her assigned female roles, to affirm her American and Jewish citizenships; and she provides us with a vivid example of how women, Jews, and other outsiders have had to struggle to belong to the American nation, and, more particularly, the American literary nation.3 As numerous critics have pointed out, this struggle to belong to literary America was not unique to Jews or women. As Alfred Kazin has explained, modern American writers felt alienated on their own native ground, experi

Art · Epistemology · Possible world · Sociology · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy

• Emma Lazarus, Jewish American Poetics, and the Challenge of Modernity

  Ranen Omer–Sherman, Ranen Omer-Sherman•Legacy•2002

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