Poems and Ballads.
Tenderly Inscribed To Her Father
Lazarus, Emma, translator. Heine, Heinrich. Poems and Ballads. To Which Is Prefixed a Biographical Sketch of Heine. New York: R. Worthington, 1881.
8vo.; navy cloth, stamped in gilt and blind; spine slightly cocked; skillfully and sympathetically recased; all in all, a very pretty copy. In a specially made cloth folding box.
First edition of the first substantial English language edition of the collected work of Heinrich Heine; translated, selected, and edited by Lazarus, who also contributes an 18-page introduction. A poignant family presentation copy, inscribed by Lazarus: To my father—for whose sake these translations were made—from his affectionate daughter Emma Lazarus June 21st 1881. With a few stray pencil tickings, presumably entered by Lazarus or her father, throughout.
A seminal volume in Judaic letters, with an association that carries with it an allusion to many decades of American Jewish history: with this presentation, Lazarus pays tribute to her spiritual and biological forefathers—Heine, the German Jewish-born poet whose complex verse and equally complex late embrace of his Jewish heritage (renounced earlier) paralleled, and heavily influenced, Lazarus’s journey to Jewish self-discovery; and Moses Lazarus, Lazarus’s intelligent, driven, and demanding biological father, who helped to instill in her a thirst for knowledge, literacy, and education.
Lazarus was in her late twenties when she undertook the challenge of researching, translating, and editing Heine’s collected poems. Her endeavor was, in many regards, a daring one: it required intellectual rigor and personal and political fortitude, as Heine’s artistic and personal reputation (with both Jewish and anti-Semitic readers) was at a low ebb in the decades following his death in 1856.
Heinrich Heine, poet, journalist, and literary critic, was born in Dusseldorf as Harry Heine (Hebrew name, Hayim) in 1797. He came from a socially active German-Jewish family: his father Samson Heine was a haberdasher known for his charitable work within the Jewish community; his closest uncle was a prominent Hamburg banker. Young Harry came to poetry after first dabbling with the military, finances, philosophy (which he studied under the auspices of Hegel) and finally law.
On July 20, 1825 Heine was awarded a doctoral degree in jurisprudence from the University of Gottingen. Earlier, however, he underwent a radical and decisive life-change when he abruptly converted to Christianity, adopting the legal name Heinrich in the process. In retrospect, many scholars have explained Heine’s conversion as a defensive reaction to the pervasive anti-Semitic climate then gripping much of Europe. Rosenbach says that “his family considered his conversion necessary, since it was a conditio sine qua non for public office; he had opposed it for a long time” (UJE, Vol. 5, pp. 297-98), and Lazarus adopts a similar stance in her introductory remarks. At the time, however, Heine’s act caused him to be regarded with great suspicion, both by his Jewish contemporaries and by non-Jewish intellectuals and government officials. Heine found himself in many senses ostracized by both camps, a situation that he was unable to rectify during his lifetime.
Heine began to write poetry while pursuing his law degree. His Geidichte was published in Germany in 1822; four years later the first volume of his Reisebilder, which initiated a new literary genre combining autobiographical confession with political analysis, appeared. The first German edition of Heine’s collected poems (Buch der Lieder) appeared in 1827. In 1831 he was expelled from Germany for supporting the ideals of the French Revolution; Metternich, Austria’s chancellor, personally ordered Heine’s arrest. Heine fled to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1835 the German Bundesrat banned Heine’s works from all countries within the German confederation, severely hampering h
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