Volume 31, Number 2 · February 16, 1984
The Defrocked Romantic
By Gabriele Annan
Heine's Jewish Comedy: A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism
by S.S. Prawer
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 841 pp., $69.00
The Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine: A Modern English Version
translated by Hal Draper
Suhrkamp/Insel (Boston), 1,032 pp., $29.95
Heine's Jewish Comedy is 841 pages long. To call it scholarly would be an understatement. It feels drenched in the anxiety of the scholar for having overlooked some relevant fact or opinion. It is certainly no Heinrich Heine joke book for the bedside table: the word 'comedy' in the title is used, the author explains, in the sense that Dante and Balzac used it for their divine and human comedies. What he has chosen to do is to pick out every Jewish personage, real or fictional, in Heine's life and work; every reference to the Old Testament, the Talmud, Herodotus, or any other Jewish piece of history or literature; every Jewish (or anti-Jewish) thought, opinion, feeling, taste, overtone, and gut reaction that Heine experienced in himself or in his environment.
Review, 3750 words
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