THE LAND COLUMBUS FOUND[ToC]
The Story of the Tablet Placed Upon the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
This isn't a story at all, just a sort of "good-bye" word to the boys and girls who have read these tales of Jewish men and women who tried to do their part in the making of America. Do you remember away back to the first one, the story of the Jews who from Columbus's flag ship dreamed of the promised land, but never knew that the continent their admiral discovered would some day be a place of refuge for their race? Now, every year, thousands of men and women and children, a great many of our own people among them, seek a refuge here. If you go to Ellis Island, you may see them entering this New World where they hope to find home and happiness. I have seen them with their baskets and their bundles of household goods, their little children in their arms, (do you remember how Reuben wandered through the storm carrying his little son?), crossing the gang plank of the steamer which brings them to the island, raising their tired eyes in mute gratitude to the American flag which floats above them as they pass. And from where I stood I could also see the great Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, the woman with the light in her hand to guide the weary wanderers across the sea.
If you visit this statue, boys and girls, you will see at the base a bronze tablet with a short poem engraved upon it. The poem was written by a Jewish woman, Emma Lazarus, our first and greatest Jewish American poet. As a girl she had cared little for the history and traditions of her people; her verses were about the gods of Greece and Rome and the legends of the Middle Ages. Then, when the dreadful persecution of our people in Russia in 1881 drove many of them to our shores, she was called upon to assist in caring for some of the homeless wanderers and, like a loving mother, she gathered them to her heart.
Something new and beautiful awoke in her soul and she gave her strength and energy in caring for these exiles of her own blood. When she wrote now it was of her people. She read our long and wonderful history and immortalized the heroism of our martyrs in such poems as her tragedy, "The Dance to Death." She wrote shorter verses, too, and there are few Jewish boys and girls who have not recited or at least heard her stirring Chanukkah recitations, "The Feast of Lights," and "The Banner of the Jew." Her poems had always been very beautiful, winning the praises of such a high critic as Ralph Waldo Emerson, but now they glowed with a new beauty, her love and new found kinship with her race.
It was her passionate love for America and her knowledge of all that our country means to the Jew, both the native-born and the persecuted wanderer from other lands, that made her see in the Statue of Liberty more than a mere mass of sculptured stone. Instead she saw a gracious, loving woman guarding the gates of the New World, not like the ancient giant figure striding the harbor at Rhodes, a haughty menace to the nations, but a symbol of welcome and freedom and justice to all mankind. So she wrote her verses, to be inscribed later at the statue's base, telling as only a great poet could what America means to her children.
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!"