The New International Encyclopædia/Lazarus, Emma

LAZ'ARUS, Emma (1840-87). An American Jewish poetess and philanthropist, born in New York City, July 22, 1849, and privately educated. She was attracted in youth to poetry, and published a volume of poems and translations at the age of eighteen. Admetus and Other Poems followed in 1871, and showed ripening talent; but her first mature work is Alide, a prose romance, based on an episode in Goethe's life (1874). The Spagnoletto, a tragedy (1870), was much praised. Poems and Ballads of Heine followed in 1881, and her original poems. Songs of a Semite, in 1882. When the Jews, expelled in great numbers from Russia, began to appear in destitute multitudes in New York in the winter of 1882. Miss Lazarus interested herself actively in providing technical education to make them self-supporting. She wrote also In Exile (1882), The Crowing of the Red Cock, and The Banner of the Jew (1882). A collection of Poems in Prose (1887) was her last book. Several of her translations from mediaeval Hebrew writers have found a place in the ritual of American synagogues. Her Complete Poems with a Memoir appeared in 1888, at Boston.