That Man Heine by Lewis Browne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You Can Take the Boy Out of the Shtetl, But...

The image I've always had of the 19th century poet Heinrich Heine is of a mildly dissolute, foppish, politically inept friend of Karl Marx. A Byronesque figure who inspired Schumann and Schubert to some really dreadful German Lieder of the sort that provokes hideous festivals among university arts students. Clearly I am a philistine since every 20 years or so someone does see the need for a new biography of a great artist, and even more frequently for a re-interpretation of his lyric poetry. At the suggestion of an acquaintance I plunged into a personal reconsideration of Heine, not through a recent biography but the 1927 work by Lewis Browne and Elsa Weihl. I'm glad I did.

Heine has a big role in recent historical analysis of the so-called Jewish Emancipation of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the progressive cultural assimilation of German Jews into European Christian society. Since the Holocaust, this movement and its motives have become problematic and tend to dominate any interpretation of an individual life. That Man Heine was of course written at a time of 'normal' levels of anti-Semitism - that is routine prejudice without much overt violence - in Europe and North America. So Browne's concern with Heine's representativeness as a modern, less religious, more cosmopolitan Jew, doesn't include the possibility in a self-destructive act of clinging to a culture that will ultimately abhor him.

Also, Browne was a rabbi, at least he was until he chose writing as a full-time career in the year he was researching Heine. He therefore has not only a sensitivity to the issues of Heine's Judaism but also an agenda: to explain those issues to Jews and non-Jews. He is clearly hopeful in the text that the progress made in the cultural acceptance of Jews by Christians during the 19th century will continue toward the creation of a 'better' culture. I don't read naïveté at any point but there is an obvious misplaced optimism in his project when viewed from any perspective ten years on from the book's publication.

Because of the time in which he wrote, and the man he was, I think Browne gives a picture of Heine that he probably didn't intend and perhaps is only visible at all from a considerable distance. This picture is not one of Heinrich Heine as a prototype of the emancipated Jewish artist, fighting not just the dominant culture but his own family for a place in the pantheon of German literature. It is one of Harry (named for an English supplier to his parent's shop in Düsseldorf), the apple of his mother's eye, carrying the burden of the social burden of the family name, spoilt to the extent family finances allow, encouraged in his infantile wilfulness and self-righteousness well past infancy. So far, so assimilation beckons.

But take away the institutional designations of his future life and what we're left with is not a cosmopolitan resident of a new Europe but a yeshiva boy who could be living in the shtetl. After a time acting as a brat in kindergarten and Hebrew school, the young Harry is placed with the Franciscans, in a school which is functionally equivalent to a cheder, in which the rituals of Catholicism and Latin Grammar are substituted for the Torah and Talmud. From his teenage years, Harry then sequentially eschews finance, trade, and the law in favour of a continuing life of study in a series of (for him) disappointing universities. And this at his impoverished family's expense.

Such a pattern of life might be considered as less than entirely moral or merely justifiable, except of course in the traditional patriarchal society of 'pre-emancipated' Orthodoxy. In that society it was, and still is, expected that a young man called to study will be supported by his family. They will find the resources necessary so that the young man does not have to work, only to study. Harry clearly considered this level of family support, and sacrifice, his due, not to study Talmud but to indulge his passion for poetry.

I can't help but see the displaced yeshiva boy, the child who is father to the man, taking advantage of a traditional cultural male privilege in the rest of Heine's life. His sarcastic response to the most trivial perceived slights seem to me not so much created by cultural dissonance in an assimilated but suspicious Jew, but by frustration at not being treated as an established rabbi of the poetic arts. A general attitude of ironic disillusion is his protection, not against anti-Semitism (he formally converts to Protestantism) but against alternatives to his interpretive judgements. His move to Paris is psychologically the appointment to a much bigger, and more liberally orthodox (yes, yes, the oxymoron is intentional) synagogue as Chief Rabbi of his own cult of Napoleonic revolution. And so on.

Whether my interpretation of Browne's Heine has any merit I can't say. But it's what I'm left with. So in some sense at least, it could be what he meant.

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