HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

The Wandering Jew
Mattress Grave and utilizing many of the poet's
own sayings. Its historic basis was a visit paid to the
dying poet by Lady Duff-Gordon, an Englishwoman
whom Heine had known in his brilliant
early days of exile as Little Lucy. Zangwill blended
Lucy and La Mouche, the last woman to visit
Heine, into one figure, a sympathetic listener who
afforded the sick man an opportunity to review
his entire past life and to air his final views. Heine
saw himself, in Zangwill's reconstruction, as a paradox:
a German Parisian, a Jewish German, a hated
political exile who yearned for his homeland, a
sceptical sufferer with a Christian patience, a romantic
poet expressing in classic form the modern
realistic spirit, a poor Jew. The dying poet exclaimed:
"My father was Germany, my mother
was the Ghetto; the brooding spirit of Israel
breathes through me that engendered the tender
humor of her sages, the celestial fantasies of her
saints." Heine spoke to his English visitor of his
baptism as an act of youthful folly, as a necessary
card of admission into European culture. He deeply
regretted this step of apostasy. He envisaged the
religion of the future as Judaism broadened by
Hellenism, the beauty of goodness mated with the
goodness o^ beauty.
[119]