Re-placing the Border in Ethnic American Literature

Abstract

1856, Emma Lazarus, the Jewish American poet most famous for contributing the epitaph at the base of the Statue of Liberty, wrote a pastoral poem about Jewish refugees in America titled In Exile.1 In Exile celebrates the relative refuge found by Russian Jewish immigrants who escaped from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Strange faces theirs, wherthrough the Orient sun / Gleams, Lazarus writes. Stranger still, these Jews are not Talmudic scholars, nor even tailors or peddlers like so many Jewish immigrants. But then, the Jews in Lazarus's poem are not settled in New York, but in Texas, yearning for