In a remarkable 1949 Holiday magazine essay titled “Here is New York,” E. B. White wrote, “The terrain of New York is such that a resident sometimes travels farther, in the end, than a commuter. Irving Berlin’s journey from Cherry Street in the lower East Side to an apartment uptown was through an alley and was only three or four miles in length; but it was like going three times around the world.”

He had traveled far even before taking up residence on Cherry Street. He and his parents and five siblings were part of the migrating flow of oppressed Russian Jews to the United States in the late 19th century. Irving was 5 at the time. The immigrants cherished their new freedom, but their poverty didn’t make life much better than it had been.

When his cantor father died, Irving at 13 decided to relieve his family of housing and feeding him and went out to seek his fortune, starting as a singing waiter in a Bowery saloon. Eventually he began writing songs.

In a long career, he wrote both words and music even though he couldn’t read music or write it. Humming his melody to someone who could, he got the melody in his head onto paper. For his 1949 show “Miss Liberty” he didn’t write all the lyrics, however. For one song he composed a setting for words already famous: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet inscribed on the Statue of Liberty pedestal.

“Miss Liberty” featured the rivalry between two 19th century New York newspapers to amass donations for the building of a pedestal for the Bartholdi statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” given to the United States by the French. If you had the money (in 1949), could you have resisted investing in a Broadway musical with book by Robert E. Sherwood, music by Irving Berlin, choreography by Jerome Robbins, direction by Moss Hart? How could it miss? But, by Irving Berlin’s standards, it did. Those four big names on the credit list apparently were all that kept it going for 308 performances.

Irving was convinced the song he made of Emma Lazarus’s words would become another “God Bless America” which had become like a second national anthem. He was enraged if anyone disagreed. He was more angered when he found he was not the first to put the words to music. Gordon Jenkins had done it in a recorded musical drama, “Manhattan Tower,” three years earlier.

Irving used it anyway. Neither use of Miss Lazarus’ words made much of a splash.

Years later, Irving said of the show, “We went after something which could have been very significant, but which didn’t come off.”

n Bob Jones lives in Lewisburg. E-mail comments to rjones@opexonline.com.