immigrant in the United States, where his name is anglicized to Ruskin), as is Huckleberry Finn (a middle-aged drifter who befriends Ruskin), and Ishmael from
Moby Dick
(who has a brief walk-on role as a bartender in New York).
The New Colossus
begins in the year of America’s centennial and works its way through the major events of the next decade and a half: Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, the building of the Statue of Liberty, the general strike of 1877, the exodus of Russian Jews to America in 1881, the invention of the telephone, the Haymarket riots in Chicago, the spread of the Ghost Dance religion among the Sioux, the massacre at Wounded Knee. But small events are also recorded, and these are finally what give the book its texture, what turn it into something more than a jigsaw puzzle of historical facts. The opening chapter isa good case in point. Emma Lazarus goes to Concord, Massachusetts, to stay as a guest in Emerson’s house. While there, she is introduced to Ellery Channing, who accompanies her on a visit to Walden Pond and talks about his friendship with Thoreau (dead now for fourteen years). The two are drawn to each other and become friends, another of those odd juxtapositions that Sachs was so fond of: the white-haired New Englander and the young Jewish poet from Millionaire’s Row in New York. At their last meeting, Channing hands her a gift, which he tells her not to open until she is on the train heading back home. When she unwraps the parcel, she finds a copy of Channing’s book on Thoreau, along with one of the relics the old man has been hoarding since his friend’s death: Thoreau’s pocket compass. It’s a beautiful moment, very sensitively handled by Sachs, and it plants an important image in the reader’s head that will recur in any number of guises throughout the book. Although it isn’t said in so many words, the message couldn’t be clearer. America has lost its way. Thoreau was the one man who could read the compass for us, and now that he is gone, we have no hope of finding ourselves again.
There is the strange story of Catherine Weldon, the middle-class woman from Brooklyn who goes out west to become one of Sitting Bull’s wives. There is a farcical account of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis’s tour of the United States—hunting buffalo with Bill Cody, traveling down the Mississippi with General and Mrs. George Armstrong Custer. There is General Sherman, whose middle name gives homage to an Indian warrior, receiving an appointment in 1876 (just one month after Custer’s last stand) “to assume military control of all reservations in the Sioux country and to treat the Indians there as prisoners of war,” and then, one year later, receiving another appointment from the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty “to decide whether the statue should be located on Governor’s or Bedloe’s Island.” There is Emma Lazarus dying from cancer at agethirty-seven, attended by her friend Rose Hawthorne—who is so transformed by the experience that she converts to Catholicism, enters the order of St. Dominic as Sister Alphonsa, and devotes the last thirty years of her life to caring for the terminally ill. There are dozens of such episodes in the book. All of them are true, each is grounded in the real, and yet Sachs fits them together in such a way that they become steadily more fantastic, almost as if he were delineating a nightmare or a hallucination. As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character—filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone—until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing begin to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.
There are definite flaws, however. Although Sachs works hard to
Moby Dick
(who has a brief walk-on role as a bartender in New York).
The New Colossus
begins in the year of America’s centennial and works its way through the major events of the next decade and a half: Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, the building of the Statue of Liberty, the general strike of 1877, the exodus of Russian Jews to America in 1881, the invention of the telephone, the Haymarket riots in Chicago, the spread of the Ghost Dance religion among the Sioux, the massacre at Wounded Knee. But small events are also recorded, and these are finally what give the book its texture, what turn it into something more than a jigsaw puzzle of historical facts. The opening chapter isa good case in point. Emma Lazarus goes to Concord, Massachusetts, to stay as a guest in Emerson’s house. While there, she is introduced to Ellery Channing, who accompanies her on a visit to Walden Pond and talks about his friendship with Thoreau (dead now for fourteen years). The two are drawn to each other and become friends, another of those odd juxtapositions that Sachs was so fond of: the white-haired New Englander and the young Jewish poet from Millionaire’s Row in New York. At their last meeting, Channing hands her a gift, which he tells her not to open until she is on the train heading back home. When she unwraps the parcel, she finds a copy of Channing’s book on Thoreau, along with one of the relics the old man has been hoarding since his friend’s death: Thoreau’s pocket compass. It’s a beautiful moment, very sensitively handled by Sachs, and it plants an important image in the reader’s head that will recur in any number of guises throughout the book. Although it isn’t said in so many words, the message couldn’t be clearer. America has lost its way. Thoreau was the one man who could read the compass for us, and now that he is gone, we have no hope of finding ourselves again.
There is the strange story of Catherine Weldon, the middle-class woman from Brooklyn who goes out west to become one of Sitting Bull’s wives. There is a farcical account of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis’s tour of the United States—hunting buffalo with Bill Cody, traveling down the Mississippi with General and Mrs. George Armstrong Custer. There is General Sherman, whose middle name gives homage to an Indian warrior, receiving an appointment in 1876 (just one month after Custer’s last stand) “to assume military control of all reservations in the Sioux country and to treat the Indians there as prisoners of war,” and then, one year later, receiving another appointment from the American Committee on the Statue of Liberty “to decide whether the statue should be located on Governor’s or Bedloe’s Island.” There is Emma Lazarus dying from cancer at agethirty-seven, attended by her friend Rose Hawthorne—who is so transformed by the experience that she converts to Catholicism, enters the order of St. Dominic as Sister Alphonsa, and devotes the last thirty years of her life to caring for the terminally ill. There are dozens of such episodes in the book. All of them are true, each is grounded in the real, and yet Sachs fits them together in such a way that they become steadily more fantastic, almost as if he were delineating a nightmare or a hallucination. As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character—filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone—until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing begin to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.
There are definite flaws, however. Although Sachs works hard to
Similar Books
