Today is the birthday of Emma Lazarus, American poet and activist. Verses from her poem “The New Colossus” are on a plaque under the Statue of Liberty. 

She was born in 1849 in New York City, the fourth of seven children. Her father was a successful merchant and sugar refiner, and the family had the means to educate Emma and her siblings privately at home.

She took to poetry at an early age. Having studied the German and French languages and classic literature, by the age of 15, Emma was happily penning English translations of the works of Alexandre Dumas, Heinrich Heine, and Victor Hugo. She also experimented writing her own verse around the same time. 

Emma’s father was so taken with his daughter’s work that he had her poems and translations printed privately for family and friends. The warm reception led to a commercial printing of Emma Lazarus’s first book, Poems and Translation in 1867, when Emma was just 22. The work attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a mentor to the budding poet as well as a friend.  

The success of her first book of poetry led to a call for more. Her poems were printed in popular journals and she published a handful of additional collections of her own work. 

She caught the activism bug after following the news of the mistreatment of Jews in Russian pogroms. Lazarus herself was Jewish. She hailed from a long line of Portuguese Jews. Her ancestors fled to escape persecution at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition in the first half of the 1600s. They landed in New York City, when New York was still New Amsterdam.

In 1881, at the age of 36, Emma Lazarus personally observed the arrival of Jews from the pogroms in Russian to the ports in New York. They were tired, poor, and without any ties to the new country. She founded a school to help the immigrants get on their feet. It’s likely this experience inspired some of the versus in her poem “The New Colossus.”

A collection of poems as well as some of Lazarus’s prose were published in 1888, about a year after her death by cancer at age 42.

And today is the birthday of Óscar de la Renta, Dominican-American fashion designer.

De la Renta was born in 1932 in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. He was the youngest and only boy of seven children. He left the Dominican for Spain to study painting at 18. While there de la Renta began drawing clothes for newspaper advertisements and fashion houses to make extra money.

His sketches caught the eye of the wife of the U.S. Ambassador to Spain who commissioned him to design a gown for her daughter. From there, de la Renta realized his passion for fashion. 

De la Renta went on to work under Cristóbal Balenciaga and Antonio del Castillo, before founding his own eponymous fashion house. He dressed the likes of Jackie Kennedy and numerous celebrities and socialites. He served as an unofficial ambassador of the Dominican Republic and held a diplomatic passport.  De la Renta passed away at the age of 82 in 2014 at his home in Connecticut.

 

Emma Lazarus

 

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 world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that 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!"