Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus ( born July 22, 1849 in New York City; † November 19, 1887 ibid ) was a Jewish American poet. She is best known for the 1883 authored poem The New Colossus that is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

Life

Emma Lazarus was the fourth of seven children of Esther and Moses Lazarus, the Sephardic Jews. She was taught by private tutors, including American and European literature, German, French and Italian. Supported by her father, she began to write poetry at a young age.

Her poems have attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a leading American poet and essayist at the time, and with whom she corresponded until his death in 1882.

In addition to her own poems Emma Lazarus wrote adaptations of Italian and German poetry, especially of Goethe and Heine. About Heine also wrote a short biography. Through the reading of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda she became interested in Jewish current events. The Russian pogroms of the early 1880s increased their interest. So Emma Lazarus began in their most productive time, works of Jewish poets to translate. They also sat in essays with Jewish themes apart.

Emma Lazarus traveled to Europe twice, in 1883 and in May 1885, after the death of her father in March. From the second trip, she returned seriously ill in September 1887 to New York. Two months later she died, probably of cancer.

The first comprehensive biography of Lazarus wrote Heinrich Eduard Jacob. The idea came to him in the summer of 1939, when he met in London the " Bloomsbury House ", it was a meeting place before Hitler who had fled, the English painter William B. Parnes. He made Jacob attention to the verses in the Statue of Liberty in New York and their author. In an interview for the German -language radio WEVD, New York, Jacob said on August 20, 1949 to his interlocutor Peter M. Lindt, " Parnes had they met in London and raved as a young man for her. He was 18, she 35, he showed me his diaries from this time [ ... ] and on this occasion he told me that I once had to write a book about this woman. And I fulfill his wish now to her 100th birthday. " On June 23, 1949 held the politician Jacob K. Javits ( 1904-1986 ) in New York before the House of Representatives of the United States a speech about Heinrich Eduard Jacob and his work " The World of Emma Lazarus. "

Works

  • Admetus and Other Poems (1875 )
  • Alide: An Episode of Goethe 's Life (1874 )
  • Emma Lazarus. Selections from Her Poetry and Prose Edited by Morris Schappes (1944 )
  • Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine ( 1881)
  • Poems and Translations. Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen ( 1866)
  • The Poems of Emma Lazarus 2 vols. (1888 )
  • Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems (1882 )
  • The Spagnoletto (1876 )
  • Biographical Sketch of the life of Heinrich Heine, in: idem: Poems & Ballads Hartsdale House, NY 1947 (1948) ( " Biographical Introduction" by EL ), revised again in the Hg. Version: Andrew Moore ( Hg): H. Heine. The Rabbi of Bacharach Mondial, N. Y. 2008 ISBN 1595691006 (Series: German Classics ) Excerpt available from in Online Book Search for this book (eg Amazon.com )
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