A look at the talented Emma Lazarus
Posted on Sunday, September 17, 2006
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Travel/166991/
Unless you count her father’s
money, Emma Lazarus had
no one to lean on for any of
the 38 years it took her to die, in 1887, of Hodgkin’s disease — certainly not a husband; nor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who backed away from his original encouragement of her poetry when she got too pushy; nor Henry James, who knew how to keep a safe distance from needy women; not even Henry George or William Morris, who were pleased to accept her enthusiasm for their work without ever reciprocating. But as Esther Schor elaborates with fierce, protective pride in Emma Lazarus (Schocken / Nextbook ), the 19 th-century poet best remembered for her stanzas inscribed on the Statue of Liberty was self-sustaining and self-propelling on half-a-dozen fronts — poet, journalist, activist and social worker, feminist and Zionist.
Schor, a poet and a professor of English at Princeton, sums it up: “In her brief 38 years, she did what no woman of her day did, what no Jew of her day did. She lived the double life of American Jewry without apology.... Unafraid of confrontation, she took on philosophers and rabbis, professors and philanthropists, genteel anti-Semites and parochial Jews. And she was not afraid to face herself: her own shame at being sister to the ‘caftaned Jew’; her erotic desires; her vaulting, later chastened, ambition. Her fear of a death without hope of transcendence.” Those of her best poems that are not included in the body of the text appear in an appendix; they suggest a talent as shamefully neglected as Margaret Fuller’s. And imagine arguing for a Jewish homeland in an American newspaper years before Theodor Herzl ever got to Paris or heard of Dreyfus.
THE HOMELAND How that homeland fares today is treated allegorically in A. B. Yehoshua’s astonishing new novel, A Woman in Jerusalem (Harcourt, 2006 ). A 40-something Russian Orthodox cleaning woman killed in a suicide bombing is the only character who gets a secret Hebrew name: Miryam. The man seeking to do right by her, the human-resources manager of a bakery company for which she used to work, who will ferry her body back to the former Soviet Union, is never named, even after he’s fallen in love with the idea of her — her memory and her ghost. Likewise only described by their bureaucratic roles are the bakery owner, the night-shift supervisor, the journalist, the lab technician, the consul, the sergeant and the mother. Guilt, expiation, penance, atonement — these figures, too, are more moods than faces, more states of being than hands and feet. Like sacred music, the deepest chords resound: For whom is this God-haunted city, if not for one “who believed in Jerusalem more than Jerusalem believes in itself” ?
MAO’S LAST Anybody who has ever been to China, to Beijing, to the Temple of Heaven and the royal dragons and the elephant chariots, the white marble, glazed tile, compass points and echo walls, will have heard the gongs and smelled the incense. Under a silk tent, you see numerologists and necromancers reading sacred tablets. In the 15 th century, Ming mandarins wore the winter solstice like a wristwatch. In the 20 th, Chairman Mao upped the ante. Mao’s Last Revolution (Harvard ) was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976, which concluded only when the Chairman did — blind, bedsore, heartsick and sclerotic. To this decade, Roderick MacFarquhar, a professor of history and political science at Harvard, and Michael Schoenhals, a lecturer on Chinese society at Lund University, Sweden, bring supple prose, impeccable scholarship and a Great Wall of bibliography. There are surprises: The Red Guards rampaged for only two years before the army suppressed them, if not the oedipal rage they embodied. Zhou Enlai emerges as a “risk-averse” trimmer and a wimp, which may be why he lasted as long as Mao. Nor did I know that before Jiang Qing starred in the Gang of Four, her favorite role had been Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. But mostly Mac-Farquhar and Schoenhals confirm our suspicions that without the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, China would not have been so eager to motor down the “capitalist road,” and that Mao himself, purging comrades with “deliberate opaqueness,” called every bloody shot: “The master strategist gone astray in his old age is an acceptable image; the gang leader masterminding dirty tricks is not.”
I am more struck by the language the revolting used to cloak and etherize themselves: The wings of a crow will not keep the sun out ! Work teams, production brigades, radical cadres and the Geological Institute Mao Zedong Thought Combat Regiment took up arms and poster polemics against poisonous weeds, running dogs, “sinister henchmen,” “ fat revisionists, ” right deviationists, traitors, renegades, scabs and swindlers, bandit gangs, “monsters and freaks,” Trotskyism, “eclecticism,” “ unprincipled practicalism” and “myopic routinism.” They cleansed class ranks, smashed ministries of culture and either rectified or liquidated the Sixteen Points, the Ten Indictments, the five black categories, the four olds, the “three loyalties” and the “two whatevers.” So delusional was this system of rhetorics — so autistic, abusive and paranoid schizophrenic — that one is tempted to call it an extraordinary rendition.
AND THEN THEY WERE SHOT The young Chinese artist who calls himself Yuan Zhao in Nell Freudenberger’s ramshackle new novel, The Dissident (Ecco ), observes, “When you talk with Americans, the conversation always begins with June 4, 1989.... That or the Cultural Revolution.” Well, yes — but what we saw on TV from Tiananmen Square in June 1989 was the opposite of the Red Guards. Instead of despoiling, these students at one of history’s greatest sit-ins ennobled. And then they were shot. This is much more thrilling to talk about than ordinary life, either in Los Angeles or Beijing, the two cities between which The Dissident divides its time. Yet catching such ordinary life in mirrors is what interests Freudenberger; she gives us the talented Chinese cousins who love the same girl; the Beverly Hills family of shrinks, writers and dysfunctionals in which one brother loves the other’s wife; the private school for girls where art is either makeup or a mask; a Beijing bohemia and a Beijing performance art that no longer exist except in stolen photographs.
Freudenberger won the PEN / Malamud Award for her story collection, Lucky Girls. She has taught English in Bangkok and New Delhi, and volunteered for humanitarian organizations in Asia. By looking at Los Angeles through Chinese eyes, she achieves something of the odd, off-balancing effect of Jonathan Franzen’s Indians in St. Louis in the Twenty-Seventh City. Although the stranger is a mirror, what we see is still make-believe and copycat. Nevertheless, for all its many interesting pages, The Dissident feels unfinished. It feels, in fact, like two different scaffolds leaning on each other just to stand up.
NO CHUCKLES HERE Aurelio Zen, the Italian police detective whose latest case takes him Back to Bologna (Vintage Crime / Black Lizard ), no longer believes in anything — not justice, vengeance, food or love. I’ve been following Zen ever since Michael Dibdin invented him nine mystery novels ago, in Ratking, when his mother was impossible, his lover was American, the killer escaped and even incest went unpunished. So it’s not as if he was ever Chuckles the Clown. But in Bologna not only does he have to recover from surgery for a life-threatening disease and deal with the murder of the crooked industrialist who owned the local football club, he must also spend time with Edgardo Ugo, a professor of semiotics whose “post-1968 faded leftist persona” specializes in “mimicking mimesis” with pronouncements on “our post-meaning culture.” If you don’t recognize Umberto Eco here, you flunked postmodernism. Why Dibdin has it in for Eco I can’t tell you, but it certainly is fun.
SPECIAL TOPICS So, up to a point, is Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking ), first novelist Marisha Pessl has even created a Web site to complicate the whimsy. Meanwhile, her novel is variously a bildungsroman, a gothic romance, a murder mystery, a conspiracy theory and a jukebox. It comes equipped with a “Core Curriculum” of Required Reading, from Wuthering Heights to Moby Dick to Paradise Lost, not to neglect James Joyce and Raymond Chandler; a “Final Exam” of True / False, Multiple-Choice and Essay Questions; and, at irregular intervals, drawings of the main characters. Hardly a paragraph goes by without reference to a writer, a movie or a TV show, sometimes all three. No clause will pass unclevered. This can work (“ I clapped and beamed as everyone stared at me with big astonished faces as if I were a Crop Circle” ), but not always (“ Dad wore indifference like a socialite thin as a cheese cracker forced to lunch in a football jersey” ). None of it quite makes up for never telling us who killed the film teacher at the fancy North Carolina private school from which our heroine will graduate, before she goes on to Harvard without her father. I refuse to discuss that father. I will say there is a voice here to like, part Huck Finn, part Holden Caulfield, part Fran Lebowitz and part Nora Ephron — who, by the way, has a new book of her own just out, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Knopf ), a collection of moonshines every bit as funny as Calamity Physics and four times shorter.