“Emma Lazarus’s ‘passionate, ardent life’ is laid out sumptuously in Esther Schor’s evocative biography. It is unlikely that, for a general audience, it will be surpassed any time in the near future.”
—Commentary
“A sympathetic and balanced life of Emma Lazarus.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“How welcome Lazarus would be in the company of today’s poets. How fine to have a writer of Schor’s quality restore this courageous and important poet to her rightful place.”
—The New York Sun
“Schor brings to life the complicated, passionate woman who left us our proudest national image. A work of great empathy an meticulous historical research.”
–Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley
“In this luminous, enthralling biography, Schor recovers one of the outstanding women of nineteenth-century letters, who while inventing her life as an American Jewish writer discovered a larger poetic mission for the entire nation.”
-Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
“Schor, herself a poet of authentic distinction, has composed a very moving and highly useful biographical critique of Emma Lazarus, a permanent poet in American and in Jewish tradition.”
–Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon
“It is a rare book indeed that so skillfully melds biography, literary analysis, and cultural history. In describing Emma Lazarus and her circle, Schor tells the story of American Jewry in the nineteenth century, paints a portrait of literary New York in one of its heydays, explicates many beautiful and long-neglected poems, and instills in us a canny affection for a subject who is forceful and sometimes overbearing but also brilliant and compassionate. Schor’s prose is as lyrical and rich in images as the poetry she describes in this intimate, often touching volume.”
–Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
Prologue: Emma Lazarus and the Three Anne Franks ix
I · 1849–1876
Generations 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 72
Awakening 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
