Emma Lazarus

American writer and poet of Jewish descent. She was born into the family of a wealthy planter, a descendant of an ancient Sephardic family who moved to the New World from Portugal to escape the persecution of the Inquisition. She received a home education thanks to the wealth of the family, where the children were not denied anything. She began publishing poems in 1866. For a long time, she was engaged in public activities: the settlement of Jewish refugees who left the Russian Empire during the pogroms and arrived in the United States. In journalistic articles, Emma denounced American Jews for their callousness and indifference. Returning to poetry, she began to translate from Hebrew into English poems of the so-called period. "Golden Age of Spanish Jewry" (Yehuda Galevi, Ibn Ezra, Ibn Gebirol). Some of these translations were included in the prayer books. In 1883, the French presented the United States with the Statue of Liberty. The statue was ready and waiting to be transported overseas. It remained to build a pedestal, the costs of which were borne by the American side. An unusual auction was held - the poets sold their previously unpublished poems. Under the terms of the competition, the poem that raised the most money will be knocked out on a pedestal. Giants such as Walt Whitman, Henry Longfellow, Francis Brett Garth, and Mark Twain took part in the auction. When the auction organizer invited Emmy Lazarus to participate, she initially declined, saying she could not compose poems to order. The organizer said: "Remember the refugees from Russia." That was enough. Two days later, Emma's poem "The New Colossus" raised twenty-one thousand dollars and won first prize. So five lines from the sonnet are carved on a plate that adorns the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus traveled twice to Europe, in May 1885 after her father's death in March, and then in September 1887. After a second trip, she returned to New York seriously ill and died two months later, on November 19, 1887, presumably from lymphogranulomatosis. Emma Lazarus is known as an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. She spoke in favor of the creation of a Jewish state thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began using the term Zionism. Emma Lazarus was not married and had no children.