David Herman
The Immigrant Voices, Part 1: Emma Lazarus
David Herman - The Immigrant Voices, Part 1: Emma Lazarus
- Hello, my name is David Herman, and over the next few weeks, in fact, dare I say, this is going to be over the next few months, I’m going to be talking about Jewish American writing. And let me start sort of at the beginning and what is Jewish-American writing? Who are the great Jewish-American writers? Who makes up the great tradition, the canon? Well, you’ve got the novels and stories of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth of Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer. You’ve got the pre-war work of Henry Roth, Mike Gold and Nathanael West. And the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the song lyrics of Bob Dylan and Stephen Sondheim. You’ve got the plays and screenplays of Arthur Miller and David Mamet, the humorous writings of S. J. Perelman and Woody Allen. You’ve got the short stories of Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick and Delmore Schwartz. You’ve got the journalism of Norman Malin and the essays of the New York Intellectuals, the literary criticism, cultural criticism of Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling. And you’ve got screenplays from the Marx Brothers to “The Graduate” and “Annie Hall.” Musicals from Porgy and Bess to “Fiddler on the Roof.” It’s an extraordinary achievement stretching across over a century in every area of literary activity. There’s been nothing like it before or since. And a few things are immediately striking about this canon. First, the variety. As I’ve said, preeminently, the novel and short story, but also every form of literary production, cartoons, humour, memoirs and autobiography. You name it, it’s there.
Big names like Miller, Bellow, Mailer, Heller, Roth. Less familiar names, like Mike Gold, who wrote “Jews Without Money,” Delmore Schwartz, Henry Roth, who wrote, “Call It Sleep,” Nathanael West, who wrote “The Day of the Locust” to “Miss Lonelyhearts.” Some have been reclaimed and rediscovered, some have not. Why do they matter? There have been perhaps three groups that stand out over this 100 years and more of Jewish American writing. Immigration, the immigrants from 1867 to the 1920s. The extraordinary group of writers in the 1930s who were terribly underrated but really interesting. And then from the Second World War onwards, we have another group. So we’ve got three generations. The fathers, the sons, and the grandsons. I know this sounds somewhat patriarchal and sexist, but actually many of them were men and many of the male writers were very aware of this generational aspect of their lives and their work. Then there’s the social, historical, cultural questions and context. Immigration, obviously. Assimilation and antisemitism, obviously. The Holocaust and Israel. Religion and the movement towards the secular. Yiddish and its decline. Or is it precisely the movement away from these things, away from immigration, pre 1950s antisemitism, the Holocaust, religion and Israel that characterise this extraordinary literary achievement in this body of work. Both for moving away and in more recent years, but coming back to some of these issues. And once we’ve moved away, what is left? A voice. The distinctive voice of great Jewish American writing. Listen to these first lines.
This is Philip Roth’s, “The Anatomy Lesson.” “When he is sick, every man wants his mother. If she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.” Or the opening line of “Catch-22.” “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him.” Or the first line of Saul Bellow’s great novel “Herzog.” “If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” In 1975, a hot sunny spring day, I read this first sentence of “Herzog” for the first time. It was what we in England call an a-level set text. I’d been reading Jane Austen, Jane Eyre and all the other Janes in what Gentiles like to call the great tradition. And here was something very different. It was as Heller said about Yossarian love at first sight. Jewish, full of Yiddishisms. I had never read a novel so full of Yiddish words and phrases like my father used to use. This kind of character, the suffering joker. Moses Herzog is called a suffering joker by Bellow. What is a suffering joker? What is this combination of sadness, melancholy, and yet humour? Laugh out, loud humour. Then there’s the energy, the crackling energy of the prose and that voice. What is that voice? Where did it come from? That’s what I’d like to talk about through this series. When does Jewish American writing begin? Well, to give a flavour, let me read you, passage from the opening of Tony Kushner’s great play, “Angels in America.” He’s talking about, he’s writing about a woman or rather the rabbi is talking about a woman. “Well, in the Bronx Home of Aged Hebrews are many like this, the old, and to many I speak, but not to be frank with this one. She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. We’re all the same of this generation. We are the last of our kind. In her was not a person, but a whole kind of person. The ones who crossed the ocean.” This is the crucial phrase.
“The ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America, the villages of Russia and Lithuania and how we struggle and how we fought for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here in this strange place in the melting pot where nothing melted, descendants of this immigrant woman. You do not grow up in America. You and your children and their children with the Goyish names. You do not live in America. No such place exists your day. Your clay is the clay of some litvak shtetl, your air, the air of the steps because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean in a boat. She put it down on grand course avenue or in Flatbush, and she worked that Earth into your bones and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home. You can never make that crossing that she made for such Great Voyages in this world do not anymore exist, but every day of your lives, the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross every day. You understand me. In you, that journey is so. She was the last of the Mohicans, this one was pretty soon, all the old will be dead.” So that sense of a voyage of a culture on the mood is at the heart of Jewish American writing right from the beginning. So when does Jewish American writing begin? The obvious answer is 1654. Obvious, but wrong. Why obvious? Because that’s when the first Jews arrived in America. “They were Sephardic Jews, descended from the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. 23 refugees came to New Netherland from the Dutch colony of Lucifer in Brazil. Retaken by the Portuguese and the inquisition in 1654, Governor Peter Stuyvesant didn’t welcome the Jews, an urge that the deceitful race enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ be expelled. And these Sephardic Jews were joined by a handful of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland and Germany.” So you get the first wave of immigration from 1654 to 1830, Spanish and Portuguese, and then you get the second generation 1830 to 1880, approximately.
German, so why is that wrong to say that’s when Jewish American writing begins in 1654? Well, in “The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 1, 1590-1820,” there are only two references to 1590 to 1820. Only two references. “The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492” is mentioned on page 18. “And the two Jews who belonged to the circle of Archibald Horn, governor of New Jersey,” are mentioned on page 319. Leslie Fiedler, one of the great Jewish American literary critics, writes in “Waiting for the End,” a book published in 1964. “In the beginning, the Jewish author and the Jewish character, whether invented by Gentile or Jew, played only a slight and peripheral role in the literature of America and in the deep mind of the American people, which that literature at once reflects and makes. This is in part the result of the simple sociological fact that Jews were in the earliest years of our nation, few and insignificant. There are no Jews in leaves of grass, he goes on. No more are there Jews included in that, otherwise universally representative crew, the Manx, African, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Polynesian, and Middle Eastern human flotsam of the world who under a mad Yankee skipper sailor ship, called after a defunct Indian tribe in the pages of Melville’s ‘Moby-Dick.’ Nor does Huck Finn meet a Single Jew, either ashore or a float on the great river whose course he follows down the centre of civilised America.” So no Jews in Huckleberry Finn, no Jews in “Moby-Dick” of the way, no Jews in Walt Whitman leaves at once. “So what’s called the literature of arrival, first 200 years of Jewish American writing.”
And crucially, there aren’t many Jews in America. “In 1825, there are about 3,000 Jews in America. In 1848, there are about 50,000. In 1861 at the beginning of the American Civil War, there are 150,000 Jews in America, less than nought 0.5% of the population.” But not literature. So when does Jewish American literature as literature begin in 1867? Because that’s when Emma Lazarus wrote her first poem with a Jewish theme “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport.” And for the rest of this talk, I’m going to be talking about Emma Lazarus because she was the first great Jewish-American writer in the late 19th century. And two things happen in the next 20 to 30 years. First of all, we get the first Jewish-American writers, starting with Emma Lazarus. And secondly, we get the third wave of immigration from 1880 to 1924 from East Europe and Russia. By 1880, there were a quarter of a million Jews in America. By 1924, there were more than 4 million Jews in America, 3% of the total population. This is the third wave, 1880 to 1924. And that’s what I’m going to be talking about today and tomorrow and next week and then again, in the third lecture. So let me start with Emma Lazarus. “‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ proclaims the ‘Mother of Exiles’ in Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, ‘The New Colossus.’ Her best-known contribution to mainstream American literature and culture, the poem has contributed to the belief that America means opportunity and freedom for Jews, as well as for the other huddled masses. Through this celebration, Lazarus conveyed her deepest loyalty to the best of both America and Jewishness. Emma Lazarus was born in America in July the 22nd, 1849. She was the only major American born Jewish writer until the 1930s.” After Emma Lazarus until the 1930s, all the main Jewish-American writers are immigrants.
“She was born into a large Sephardic Jewish family.” This is also significant because she’s the only major Jewish-American writer from this first half-century who was Sephardic, not Ashkenazi. “She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant and sugar refiner. And his wife Esther Nathan. One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany. The rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and they were among the original 23 Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam after they fled Recife in Brazil in an attempt to flee from the inquisition. Emma Lazarus’s, great-great-grandmother on her mother’s side, born in Stratford, Connecticut in 1752, was also a poet. Emma was well educated, privately educated by tutors from an early age. She studied American and English literature as well as several languages in including German, French and Italian. She was part of a literary circle that later included Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1866, her father privately printed her first book of poems.” She was only 17. “In 1867, a collection of her poems and translations versus written between the ages of 14 and 17 appeared in New York. And it included translations from Schiller, Hyner, Duma and Victor Hugo. And in 1867, she publishes her first poem with a Jewish theme ‘In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport.’” Newport is a old town in Rhode Island.
“Here, where the noises of the busy town, the ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not, we stand and gaze around with tearful awe, and muse upon the consecrated spot. No signs of life are here. The very prayers inscribed around are inner language dead. The light of the perpetual lamp is spent that an undying radiance was to shed. What prayers were in this temple offered up, wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on Earth, by these lone exiles of a thousand years from the fair sunrise land that gave them birth. Now, as we gaze in then this new world of light, upon this relic of the days of old, the present vanishes, and tropics bloom and Eastern towns and temples we behold. Again, we see the patriarch with his flocks, the purple seas, the hot blue sky o'erhead, the slaves of Egypt, omens, mysteries, dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led. A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount, a man who reads Jehovah’s written law, ‘midst blinding glory and effulgence rare, unto a people prone with reverent awe. The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp, in the rich court of royal Solomon. Alas, we wake, once scene alone remains, the exiles by the streams of Babylon. Our softened voices send us back again, but mournful echoes through the empty hall. Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound, and with unwonted gentleness, they fall. The weary ones, the sad, the suffering, all found their comfort in the holy place, and children’s gladness and men’s gratitude took voice and mingled in the chant of praise. The funeral and the marriage, now, alas! We know not which is sadder to recall. For youth and happiness of followed age, and green grass life gently over all. And still the sacred shrine is holy yet, with its lone floors where reverend feet wants trod.
Take off your shoes as by the burning bush, before the mystery of death and God.” This poem was in part a reply to a Longfellow’s “Jewish Cemetery at Newport.” He writes, “Dead nations never rise again.” But she writes of a continued sacred presence. Still the sacred shrine is holy yet. The Synagogue at Newport, Rhode Island was built and founded in 1763, the oldest surviving Synagogue in America. The very first word of the poem is here. “Here, where the noises of the busy town, the ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not.” And it’s repeated in the fifth line. So that sense of place here, where we are now in America, on the East Coast of America in this Synagogue on the East Coast of America is very significant. Then we get the noises of the busy town, also in the first line. From here on Jewish American literature is largely urban, sat in the great cities of America, New York, of course, but not just New York, Saul Bellow’s, Chicago, Flip Roth’s, New York, New Jersey, and Emma Lazarus’s, Newport, Rhode Island. The ocean’s plunge in the second line. Begins the poem almost begins with the ocean, with immigration, with the eastern seaboard. And then no signs of life are here.
The word dead, the word spent. In line six, Hebrew is described as a language dead. There is something very dark about this poet. We’re talking about the past. On the one hand, we’re talking about something a new world of the noises of the busy town, the eastern seaboard that is bringing so many immigrants to this new land. But we’re also talking of something past lost. She keeps using the word we, who’s we? When she says in line three, “We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,” or again, “We see the patriarch with his flocks.” Who is we? Bear in mind that although she came from a large family, Emma Lazarus never married, she never had children of her own. She never had a husband. So who is this we that she talks about? Is this about we Jews, we immigrants? And everywhere through the poem, we have a refrain of melancholy, sadness, sad hearts, mournful echoes, the sad, the suffering, sadder to reach. And we have the world of the new, the busy town and the ocean’s plunge and roar. But against, the old, language dead, lone exiles. Love, a lone exiles of a thousand years, this relic of the days of old, the slaves of Egypt, Jehovah’s written law, the rich court of royal Solomon, the exiles by the streams of Babylon. This is a language full of echoes from the Hebrew Bible, full of the famous names from the Hebrew Bible. Like Jehovah, Solomon wrote the streams of Babylon.
It is an extraordinary and moving poem, but it took a while for Emma Lazarus to really find her voice as a writer. In 1874, she wrote “Alide,” an episode of Goethe’s life, her first prose work, and through much of her writing during the 1870s and early '80s, she’s very influenced by 19th-century German literature, Gerter and Heine in particular. In 1881, she translated the “Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine,” which was prefixed by a biographical sketch of Heine. Lazarus’s renderings of some of Heine’s verse are considered to be among the best in English. In 1882, she published in the Century Magazine. An article “Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?” The Earl of Beaconsfield. The first Earl of Beaconsfield was Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish, but converted Prime Minister in Britain. “Her statement of the reasons for answering this question in the affirmative that he was a representative Jew, may be taken to close what may be termed the Hellenic and journeyman period of her life, during which her subjects were drawn from classical and romantic sources. And for the next few years her poems were published in American magazines. But then in 1881, comes a turning point. Until 1881, her interest and sympathies she wrote were loyal to her race. But as she explained in 1877, my religious convictions and the circumstances of my life have led me somewhat apart from my people. And then came the turning point in 1881, Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in that year.
As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, and the poor standard of living in Russia in general, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York and to the East Coast.” Lazarus, but particularly to New York. “Lazarus began to advocate on behalf of poor Jewish immigrants. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to help poor Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting. She volunteered in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. In 1883, she founded the Society for the Improvement and Colonisation of East European Jews.” And this becomes reflected in her writing. “'Songs of a Semite’ was published by a magazine called the American Hebrew. The title, as well as many of the poems in the collection, publicly proclaimed Lazarus’s identity as a Jewish poet. In that role, she battled against both anti-Semitic non-Jews.” And what she might have considered complacent Jews. “In ‘The Banner of the Jew,’ she urged Israel to ‘Recall today / The glorious Maccabean rage,’ and she reminded readers that ‘With Moses’s law and David’s lyre,’ Israel’s ancient strength remains unbent. And in ‘The Dance to Death,’ a poetic dramatisation of a prose narrative by Richard Reinhard, "Der Tanz zum Tode,” Lazarus celebrated the courage and faith of the Jews who were condemned to die in Germany, in 1349 for allegedly causing the plague. ‘The Dance to Death’ was dedicated George Eliot, who did most among the artists of our day towards elevating and ennobling the spirit of Jewish nationality with her novel ‘Daniel Deronda.’ Lazarus published ‘Songs of a Semite’ in the same year that she adopted a more public Jewish identity in American magazines, particularly in the Century.
Three essays published in that magazine over 10 months, attest to her new concerns. In the first, ‘Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?’ She offered an ambivalent portrait of Israeli. She designed representative as embodying the best as well as the worst of Jewish traits. In the second essay, ‘Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism,’ Lazarus included a personal plea for informed understanding of Russian Jews and their situation. And in the third essay, ‘The Jewish Problem,’ she observed that Jews, who are always in the minority, seem fated to excite the antagonism of their fellow countrymen.“ Sadly resonant for today. "To this problem, she offered a solution, the founding of a state by Jews for Jews in Palestine. She promoted Zionism throughout the 1880s. Although Lazarus had published occasionally in the Jewish press, she became a regular contributor to the American Hebrew in the early 1880s. And this weekly printed, ‘Judaism the Connecting Link Between Science and Religion’ and ‘The Schiff Refuge’ in 1882, ‘An Epistle to the Hebrews’ in 1882, ‘83, 'Cruel Bigotry’ in 1883, and ‘The Last National Revolt of the Jews’ as well as ‘M. Renan and the Jews.’ An essay which, won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Young Men’s Hebrew Association in 1884. In ‘An Epistle to the Hebrews,’ a series of 15 open letters that appeared between November, 1882 and February, 1883, Lazarus suggested that assimilated American Jews should recognise their privileged status as well as their vulnerability in America, that all Jews should understand their history in order not to be misled by anti-Semitic generalisations, and that Eastern European Jews should emigrate to Palestine. During the same period in the earlier mid 1880s, Lazarus translated the Hebrew poets of mediaeval Spain and wrote articles, signed and unsigned, upon Jewish subjects for the Jewish press.
Several of her translations from mediaeval Hebrew writers found a place in the ritual of American synagogues.” And second major poem was called “1492,” significant year, of course, for all Jews, because that was the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Catholic Spain. It opens with a reference to the two-faced year, that Spain expelled the Jews. And of course, Columbus came to America. So right from the very beginning of the poem, you have the experience of immigration as two-faced as double. And in fact, this is not just in some of Lazarus’s poems, but this becomes perhaps the central theme of Jewish-American immigrant writing for the next half-century. All who weary enter here, she writes early in the poem, which anticipates a most famous poem of all, “The New Colossus” published in 1883. “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land. Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name, Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows worldwide welcome. Her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbour the twin cities frame. ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ Cries she with silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’” The poem opens with a man the brazen giant of Greek fame, and then moves to a mighty woman, the Mother of Exiles. There’s another fascinating opposition in this great bow that it begins in the very first line with the brazen giant of Greek fame with the theme of the Hellenic and then moves to imagery of Jewish immigrants and refugees.
You are tired, you are poor, you are huddled masses yearning to grieve free. And this opposition between the Hellenic, ancient Greek civilization and Judaism, Jewishness runs through a lot of the greatest writing of the 19th century. You can find in the criticism of Matthew Arnold, for example, in England. And it runs through this poem as well. The second thing that’s striking about the poem is how she feminises America, “A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles.” It’s worth recalling that in the early years of Jewish-American writing, many of the leading writers were women. We’re going to be looking at two of them next week. After that, there becomes a period where really the men take over, partly ‘cause many of the critics were American, partly 'cause many of the were men, partly 'cause many of the publishers were men, and partly 'cause many of the agents were men. So it becomes a very male-dominated literary world, Jewish-American writing. And partly, you could also put the standard of the character of some of these writers, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller. They were very masculine in their writing and in their preoccupations. Whereas in this poem, the Mother of Exile, there’s something welcoming, nurturing, and comforting in her presence. In the presence of American democracy. America becomes feminine and maternal, but also Jewish. The woman with a torch, the Hebrew phrase, eshet lapidot, referring to the prophetess Deborah, wife of Lappidoth, also means woman of the torch in judges. And then there’s the democratic theme.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp.” Why this juxtaposition between the ancient lands and the new modern democratic world of America? Why this disdain for the storied pomp of the ancient lands of Europe? Because this is saying something about a new America, a new world, not just democratic, post-Civil War, which was after quite recent 1861 to '65, where less than 20 years on from the Civil War. And of course, made new by this new influx of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, and also from Ireland. And it also connects Lazarus and her poem to the Puritan tradition of America as a new Israel as a promised land, which is very important to much 19th century American writing. Not so much 20th century, but very important to 19th century. If you think of people like Melville, Hawthorne and the echoes of Puritanism and Puritan imagery in a lot their most important writing. And of course, there’s the image of the torch, the beacon, the light, I lift my lap. And this juxtaposition between the ancient lambs and the new and the modern embodied by America. And of course, on the other hand, between the poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. On the one hand, and the golden door on the other. The last lines of this sonnet was set to music by Irving Berlin, another famous immigrant, As the song, “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty.
And the lines from “The New Colossus,” appear on a bronze plaque, which was placed in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. From 1883, when “The New Colossus” was published to 1887 when she died, just four years later, these were her last years. “She travelled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887. On one of those trips, she was introduced by the wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones to William Morris at her home. And she also met Henry James, Robert Browning and Thomas Huxley during her European travels. A collection of 'Poems in Prose’ in 1887 was her last book. Her ‘Complete Poems with a Memoir’ appeared in 1888, at Boston. Lazarus returned to New York City seriously ill after she completed her second trip to Europe, and she died two months later, on November 19th, 1887. She never married. And she was buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Brooklyn. ‘The Poems of Emma Lazarus’ in two volumes were published in 1889 after her death, comprising most of her poetic work from previous collections, periodical publications, and some of the literary heritage which are executors deemed appropriate to preserve for posterity.” What is her legacy as a writer? First, and perhaps this is what makes her most famous, “Because she contributed towards shaping the self-image of the United States, as well as how the country understands the needs of those who emigrate to the United States. Her themes produce sensitivity and enduring lessons regarding immigrants and their need for dignity. What was needed to make her a poet of the people as well as one of literary merit was a great theme, the establishment of instant communication between some stirring reality and her still hidden subjectivity.
Such a theme was provided by the immigration of Russian East European Jews to America. She rose to the defence of her fellow Jews in powerful articles, either to her life had held no real Jewish inspiration. And contact with Jewish, with Russian immigrants, led her to study the Torah, the Hebrew language, Judaism, and Jewish history. And while her early poetry demonstrated no Jewish themes, her ‘Songs of a Semite’ in 1882 is considered to be the earliest volume of Jewish American poetry.” And in recent years, she has been, there’s a volume of her selected poems has been published by the Library of America. And a biography came out in 2006 by Esther Schor. Emma Lazarus was the only major 19th-century Jewish-American writer. She was also the only major American born Jewish-American writer during these years. After her, the leading Jewish-American writers for half a century were immigrants or the children of immigrants from Poland, Russia. She was one of a number of leading female Jewish-American writers from the 1880s to the 1920s on with Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska. From here on in, the next generation through to Anzia Yezierska in the 1920s and Henry Roth and Mike Gold in the 1930s. We’ll be debating these lines, these sentiments. Lazarus’s most famous poem is New York, is America the promised land? The golden door in that resonant phrase or an cursed one.
In Anzia Yezierska story hunger, later published in “Hungry Hearts” in 1920. One of her characters says, “Woe is me! Bitter is me! For what is my life? Why didn’t the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?” In Henry Roth’s rate and very underrated novel, “Call it Sleep.” He writes, “They’d been standing in this strange and silent manner for several minutes, when the woman, as if driven by the strain into action, tried to smile, and touch her husband’s arms said timidly, ‘And this is the Golden Land.’ She spoke in Yiddish. The man grunted, but made no answer. She took a breath as if taking courage, and tremulously, ‘I’m sorry, Albert, I was so stupid.’ She paused waiting for some flicker of unbending, some word, which never came. ‘But you look so lean, Albert, so haggard. And your moustache, you’ve shaved.’ His brusque glance stabbed, withdrew. ‘Even so.’ ‘You must have suffered in this land,’ she says.” Next, Tuesday, I’ll be talking about three leading Jewish-American writers from this generation of immigrants and how they wrote about the Jewish immigrant experience. And I hope you’ll be able to join me then. But in the meantime, I’d be very happy to answer your questions and let me just see what questions we have.
Q&A and Comments:
Galaxy S20 FE 5G says, “David Mamet, Clifford Odets, not worth mentioning Monte Golden.” Now, I’m not quite sure whether you’re saying that Mamet and Clifford Odets are not worth mentioning, or Monte Golden is worth mentioning or so I’m sorry to be confused by that, but it’s not quite clear to me what you say.
Rita says, “Permit me to say, you have a most distinguished speaking voice.” Wonderful to listen to. I’m very kind of you, Rita. Thank you.
Stephen Massell says, “Abigail Levy Franks is your first writer.” I presume by that he means should be my first writer. I begged to disagree only because, not only because Emma Lazarus had such a distinguished career and was so prolific, but also because she wrote the most famous poem in America of its time and raised many of the issues, which subsequent Jewish-American writers were preoccupied with for many, many years. So I’m sorry if we disagree about that, but thank you for recommending Abigail Levy Franks. I appreciate that.
Elliott Wilner writes, “Emma Lazarus’s poem about the Jewish community was actually written as a response.” But I’m not quite sure as a response to what or to whom, I’m afraid. Gene. Well, I presume, you’re talking about the Jewish community in Newport, Rhode Island, the synagogue in Newport, in which case, yes, it was Britain’s response to Longfellow’s poem. So I hope, I’ve understood you correctly about that. And in which case we absolutely agree about that.
Gene Hurwitz says, “You’ve made my day. I didn’t know that the words on the Statue of Liberty were by a Jewish writer. Better keep quiet before someone demands these words be replaced for that reason, I still remember the thrill of arriving as an immigrant flying over that statue.” Well, it is, of course, an iconic image that statue which haunted or fascinated a generation of immigrants and refugees who came to America.
And her poem is Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus” is the great poem about the Statue of Liberty, which is the great icon of modern America.
Right, Monte Golden, who I’m guessing is Galaxy S20 FE 5G says, her words are for all to be seen on the Statue of Liberty. Absolutely, Monte. And that I suppose if you had to be famous for something as a writer, there is no greater achievement than that. There are greater 19th-century American writers. I’m not sure that greater 19th-century Jewish-American writers, I don’t think there are. But there are great 19th-century American writers. But that is quite something to write the defining poem about the defining icon of America.
Q: And Serena Kapinski writes, “When Emma Lazarus became somewhat disillusioned or separate from her Jewishness, do you think her single status contributed even today, single women find it hard to flourish in observant Jewish communities?”
A: Yes, indeed. That’s a very good point, Serena. And yes, did her single status contribute? It’s interesting that she doesn’t really write about her single status or marriage or indeed many of the sort of stereotypical kind of issues that you might expect a woman writer to address. She’s interested in Gertar and Heine. She’s interested in these great historic moments, like the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal. She’s interested in the great moment of Jewish immigration. She’s interested in Jewish topics and issues because it was a time with the beginning of Zionism, with unrest in the Russian pale with the tremendous wave of pogroms that begins around the time she’s writing. And of course, therefore, of so many refugees and immigrants who flee from Russia and from Poland and come to America, many of them via Germany. So her writing is not stereotypically feminine, I wouldn’t say, but perhaps that’s a cliche to even assume that it should be, because she addresses huge issues in literary history when she’s writing about Gertar and Heine. And paying homage to George Eliot, who was clearly a very influential figure for her. She’s addressing huge issues of her time, perhaps some of the biggest issues of her time, both in America and in Russia and East Europe, and in certainly in modern Jewish history. So you could say that really to recognise the importance of these issues, to address them in poetry that is still resonant today over 140 years later, that is an extraordinary achievement. So I should not belittle her by saying, well, was there an issue here to do with her single status because she achieved so much and wrote such important poems and writings and address the biggest issues of her time in these. And that is what she is still remembered for and will continue to be remembered for many, many decades and perhaps centuries to come.
Q: David Sefton asks a very interesting question, “Was Emma Lazarus embraced by European Jewish communities?”
A: Not as far as I know, David and indeed doesn’t really have anything like the reputation in this country, in Britain, that she has in America. She’s a quintessentially American writer. It’s no coincidence that selected poems are published by the Library of America. It’s no coincidence that she’s regarded by many critics as the first great Jewish-American writer. So I wouldn’t say that she really has been embraced by European Jewish communities.
Now, there is a question, and this takes us back to Serena Kapinski’s point, which is whether critics and journalists have belittled her or not taken her sufficiently seriously because she was a single woman. I wonder if that might be the case, because so many critics and so many literary editors and so many publishers were men, whether Jewish men or non-Jewish men. You know, if you think of the most famous critics of the earlier mid-20th century, I’m thinking of people like T. S. Eliot and William Empson and I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. And you know, the list goes on and on and on. And so many of them were men. I recently interviewed the great Jewish-American writer, Cynthia Ozick for Jewish Book Week, and she has written about how she attended as a student, Lionel Trilling seminar at Columbia University in New York. And how there were only two women among the graduate students there at Trilling, the seminar. And how Trilling constantly mistook the two women for each other, whether this was on purpose. She sort of implied that it was deliberate, that it was a kind of way of snubbing the boat. And that is just an appalling image, really. And it’s clearly haunted Cynthia Ozick ever since. And you know, that was nearly 80 years ago, 70, 75 years ago.
And I therefore, you know, it has been harmed for so many women writers in the 19th century, the early 20th century, to be given their due, to be taken seriously by academics, by critics, by literary editors. It’s a scandal and has been redressed, significantly over the last, what, 30 years by a new generation of women critics, women literary editors, women journalists. And rightly so. So I do wonder whether it’s not just that she was American. And also we’ve got to remember another point, which is that American literature was trivialised in this country, in England and in Europe through much, not just the 19th century, but through much of the 20th century. When you think of the greatness of Jewish-American writers and non-Jewish-American writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and then through the 20th century. That unless they were huge self-publicists, like Hemingway or Norman Mailer or Philip Roth in a rather different way. Or unless they became famous for other reasons, like with Arthur Miller being married to Marilyn Monroe and being involved with the McCarthyism, which really contributed enormously to his fame. It was very difficult for American writers to get there due. When I studied English literature at Cambridge, there was one course on American literature and taught by the great critic, Tony Tanner.
But otherwise, it was sort of regarded. And in fact, when I took, when I studied Hertzog for a level, one of the English teacher, one of my English teachers refused to teach it because it wasn’t English literature in his view, even though, he was one of the great novels of the, certainly of the postwar period, perhaps argued of the 20th century. So I think she suffered a double kind of marginalisation, if you like, as a woman and as an American writer. And it’s hard to say, which will… And thirdly, of course, sorry, as a Jewish writer. And again, remember how hard it was until the post-war period for Jewish writers, even in America, to receive their due as major literary figures, partly because so many of the great modernists were anti-Semitic Eliot. How? And partly because the culture was so anti-Semitic and not interested in Jewish experiences and Jewish writing about those experiences.
Q: Lily Louie asks, “When and whence did Emma get to sir?”
A: So I’m terribly sorry. I must apologise for my ignorance. Oh, sorry. Get to the USA. Sorry. Right. I understand there isn’t a gap here. Get to the USA, she was born in the USA, she had Sephardi parents who were descended from immigrants, but they had been in America for over 100 years and they were a very distinguished Sephardi family. So she grew up in America. And that’s why I tried to make this, to emphasise this point because so many of the Jewish-American writers who followed her were either immigrants, certainly of the next 40 or 50 years and wrote about, mostly about the immigrant experience. Or like Bellow were the children of immigrants. And you know, I’ll look at that in much more detail as we get closer to that post-war generation. So she really does stand out, both because she was a Sephardi voice and also because she was born in America.
Paula Trischen, thank you for your kind words. I hope, I’ve pronounced your surname correctly.
“Emma Lazarus was also friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Yes. “They corresponded and she wrote an essay entitled Emerson’s personality.” Yes, indeed. She was a friend of Emerson’s and she did belong to a very interesting literary circle and was very well connected. She came from a very affluent and well-established family. And it’s quite interesting that she writes about her first breakthrough poem is about the old synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. ‘Cause Newport, Rhode Island is a very posh place. It’s not like Brooklyn or the Bronx or the Jewish districts of Chicago. It’s not an immigrant area at all. And so she did mix in very August circles. And it’s interesting that when she did go to visit England, she got introduced to such major literary and artistic figures.
Q: And Rita Small, “Not related to today’s talk, but I’d like to know where I can find your book review of David Grossman’s novel 'More Than I Love My Life?’”
A: This was mentioned in the brief bio supplied by Lockdown University. The Jewish Chronicle. I’ve written a few 100 reviews for the Jewish Chronicles since the 1990s. And so it would be somewhere on their website, I hope. And I’ve reviewed a number of Grossman’s novels and a number of major Israeli writers, Grossman, of course, of A. B. Yehoshua and the great and the very underrated Aharon Appelfeld.
Q: So and Ruth says, “I didn’t hear you mention Isaac Bashevis Singer. Does he not meet your criteria or did I miss his name?”
A: You didn’t miss his name, Ruth. Thank you for raising the question. It’s a complicated issue whether he counts as a Jewish-American writer. Yes, he lived in America for much of his life, not all of his life. ‘Cause his formative years, of course, was spent in Poland and in particular in military circles of Warsaw. When he and his brother both immigrated to America and his sister, of course, Esther Kreitman immigrated to England. He doesn’t really meet my criteria for one main reason because he primarily wrote in Yiddish rather than in English. Now, I know this is a sort of complicated issue because so many of the immigrant writers spoke Yiddish and read Yiddish because they were born in East Europe or in Russia. But they didn’t write in Yiddish. Well, some did. Abraham Cahan obviously did. But by and large, they wrote in English. And increasingly, certainly by the time we get to the 1930s, the generation of Mike Gold and Nathanael West and so on. By then they are writing in English and not even the in Yiddish for the Yiddish periodicals and so forth. So Singer, I think is an odd case. And of course, it was Saul Bellow who famously translated Singer’s breakthrough story, “Gimple the Fool” for “Partisan Review,” which was then America’s leading literary publication. And Irving Howe and his memoirs writes a wonderful description of Saul Bellow just sitting down with a typewriter. 'Cause Saul Bellow, of course, grew up speaking Yiddish in Chicago, well in Montreal and then in Chicago. And he translated “Gimpel the Fool.” And that was kind of what made Bashevis Singer’s reputation, not because it was Bellow who translated it, although the fact that the author of Augie, “The Adventures of Augie March” had translated was important. But because it had appeared in “Partisan Review,” which was such a well-known journal. So Ruth, that’s why I… Yeah, that’s why.
And iPad 99 Linda Sopa says, “An interesting anthology is Jewish American literature, Chametzky, Felstiner, et cetera, which begins with colonial times, letters home many by educated females.” Linda, thank you. Yes, I couldn’t agree more. It is the best anthology of Jewish-American writing. It’s published by Norton and it’s I suppose about 800 pages. 850 pages, would you say, Linda? And it’s full of fascinating biographical material and footnotes. And they’ve made a wonderful, the editors made a wonderful selection. The way they slice the cake is absolutely terrific. It’s a wonderful, wonderful anthology and I cannot recommend it too highly. The Jewish American literature, the anthology of Jewish American literature, published by Norton. And the two main editors are Chametzky and Felstiner. I hope I pronounce the names correctly. Another interesting question.
Q: And I fear this must be the last, Shelley Shapiro. “Why was there no Jewish woman writer like Louisa May Alcott or Edith Wharton?”
A: That’s a really good question. 'Cause of course there were major 19th and early 20th-century female American writers who enjoyed considerable fame and reputation. Well, I suppose one reason is that you’re talking about a relative until the 1880s, you are talking about a very small number of Jews in America, and therefore, divide that by two for Jewish women. And there’s an even smaller pool and then divided by the number who spoke English fluently and were well educated. You know, remember that, I mean this is, sorry, why I dwell perhaps a little bit too long about her background and her education and so on. Because it was very, very different from the writers who followed over the next 40 or 50 years. They mostly went to sort of Jewish elementary school and mostly had Yiddish as a first language and maybe Polish or Russian as well. So to have fluent English as well as several other European languages and to have been privately tutored and to have mixed with the kinds of literary figures that she did mix with, I think was really, really set her apart and put some more in the company of people like Louisa May Alcott and Edith Wharton. And Alice James one could add, and you know, many, many, many others. So I think that would be the main reason that odds were so heavily stacked against Jewish women writers. Having said that, next week, I will be back with two Jewish-American writers from the next generation, Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska. And as well as just trying to remember the name of the third writer. Can’t remember. It’ll come back to me. Anyway, we’ll find out next week, but who is… Oh, Abraham Cahan, of course. And we’ll look at how that generation wrote about the immigrant experience in a very, very different and darker way from… And last of us.
And thank you so much for your patience. Thank you for your time. Thank you for checking in. I really appreciate it and I very much hope you can join me next week. Thank you so much.