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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Heinrich Heine<br />

ZangwiU's essay had wide repercussions. It was<br />

translated into several languages. It helped to shape<br />

the Jewish legend of Heine not only in England<br />

but also in America and even in Eastern Europe<br />

among the Yiddish-speaking Jews. Lewis Browne,<br />

in 1927, acknowledged that in his own biography<br />

That Man Heine, he had followed to a large extent<br />

the portrait painted by Zangwill who, he felt, understood<br />

Heine best. The pattern of Zangwill was<br />

also followed by Louis Untermeyer in 1917, in a<br />

poem entitled Monologue from a Mattress Grave.<br />

Untermeyer too lets the dying Heine review his<br />

paradoxical career before a sympathetic listener.<br />

The lady chosen was La Mouche. After entertaining<br />

her with his sad humor, sentimental lapses, and<br />

tragic mockery, Heine ended with Jewish symbolism<br />

and the Jewish confession of faith, as embodied<br />

in the formula: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God,<br />

the Lord is One."<br />

Louis Untermeyer included this monologue in<br />

a volume containing translations of three hundred<br />

and twenty-five poems by Heine. In a preface, the<br />

translator, who claimed spiritual and racial kinship<br />

with the German-Jewish lyricist, traced many<br />

of Heine's paradoxical traits to his birth. As a sensitive<br />

Jew m a savagely antisemitic country, Heine<br />

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