This Friday, the 24th of Kislev and the eve of Ḥanuka, is Heine’s Hebrew birthday. He was born December 13th, 1797.

I first encountered Heine, in Amos Elon’s survey of German Jewry, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743-1933. Here’s why I love him so much. Besides his sharp wit and poetry, Heine railed against patriotic chauvinism. In 1817 at the age of 20 he witnessed the Hep! Hep! riots and a mass burning of “subversive” books  accompanied by speeches against Jews, foreigners, “and cosmopolitans, et al.” Three years later, he penned the following prescient line in his verse tragedy, “Almansor,”:

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.
[Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.]

Heine had keen, almost prophetic insight. Elon writes that he “voiced the first, most acute prophecies about German nationalism and militarism.” Heine is famous for having predicted the dangers of Prussian nationalism manifest in a unified Germany. Living as a fugitive expatriat in France in 1834, “he saw the demons lurking under the surface of German life and warned the French:”

Watch out! I mean well with you and therefore I tell you the bitter truth. You have more to fear from a liberated Germany than from the entire Holy Alliance along with all Croats and Cossacks.

A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardor of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again, . . . the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak. . . . The old stony gods will rise from the rubble and rub the thousand-year-old dust from their eyes. Thor with the giant hammer will come forth and smash the gothic domes.

The German thunder. . . rolls slowly at first but it will come. And when you hear it roar, as it has never roared before in the history of the world know that the German thunder has reached it’s target.

(H. Heine. “Zur Geschichte von Religion und Philosphie im Deutschland,” Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, p.505.)

His  attitude towards Judaism was highly influenced by the difficulty he and other assimilated intellectual German Jews felt in the face of state oppression. But these sentiments were tempered when he experienced Polish Jewry during a trip in 1821, writing:

Despite the barbaric-looking fur cap on his head and the even more barbaric ideas within, I hold the Polish Jew in much higher regard than many a German Jew with a Bolivar hat on top of his head and Jean Paul inside it. In stark isolation, the character of the Polish Jew has evolved into an integral whole; by breathing the air of tolerance this character has acquired the stamp of freedom. . . . As for me, I prefer the Polish Jew, with his grimy fur, his flea-bitten beard, his odor of garlic, and his wheeling and dealing to many others in all their savings-bond splendor.

(Heine. Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 2, p.69.)

This description mixes criticism with a liberal romantic pride in ethnic Judaism born outside the constraints and pressures of the assimilationist Germany he was familiar with. In contrast, his attitude towards Reform Judaism reflects deep misgivings. Elon notes that Heine was “dubious about fashionable modifications like German [Jewish] prayer books and organ music. They were merely imitative of Christianity and offered only a “new stage set and decor.” The new rabbis (Heine called them souffleurs–prompters) wore a Protestant parson’s ‘white band’ in their collars. Reform Judaism was like mock turtle soup, he thought, ‘turtle soup without the turtle.’ Heine was an early precursor of the legendary Spanish anarchist who asked a Protestant missionary, ‘How can I believe in your religion when I don’t even believe in mine, which is the only true one?’” Like many Jews in his circle he submitted to a Baptism that held meaning only in the burden of shame and bitterness he would carry the remainder of his life. Professional life in Germany was entirely closed off to Jews unless they submitted to a Baptism. Regardless, his tragic humiliation has haunted his name ever since.

Fleeing Germany for freedom in France, Heine was quickly attracted to the early socialism espoused by Henri de Saint-Simon, a practical philosophy that espoused a mix of free love, pantheism, technocracy, and meritocracy — in short, liberal ideals anathema to more conservative and traditional sentiments. Meanwhile, he continued to write romantic poetry that drew its imagery from the well of both German and Jewish mythology.

Undeniably, I feel a kinship here. I am one dreaming being even when the catalog of prideful identities bifurcates and fragments my imagination in so many useless ways. I am navigating my religious, ethnic, and national identity when ethnic patriotism and religious demands make claims on the integrity and authenticity of my being Jewish, and often enough seem to distract from more universal truths.

The pity of it all is that the fathomless tragedy of the Holocaust was not only the mass slaughter of our families and the dissolution of our being. It is also in how Germany butchered and mutilated itself, for we were once Germans even if they refused to accept this, and how much the poorer they are for it. Romantics like Heine pined for acceptance as Jewish Germans, a desire absolutely justified by his ancestors cultural identity rooted in the more than 1500 year long residence amidst the misty woods and vales of Ashkenaz. Ethnic narratives profoundly shaped by Zionist self-reliance and a complete rejection of Germany following the Holocaust, conspire as well to obscure the profoundly deep connections Ashkenaz Jewry had in those lands, cities, and shtetls stolen from our grandparents and great-grandparents. Their presence as neighbors was organically entangled in their culture, but they pretended it wasn’t so, and what a bloody mess they left behind when they ripped us out from inside them.

This coming Sunday 2-5pm, December 13th, I’ll be at the Lorelei Fountain in the Bronx reading Heine’s poem Die Lorelei, drinking a toast in his honor, and lighting the third light of Ḥanuka. Anyone who cares to is welcome to join me.

Portrait of Heine by Gottlieb Gassen, 1828

Die Lorelei

by Heinrich Heine

Wonka’s oblique answer references the first stanza of a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, the “Ode” featured in his collection of poems from 1874, Music and Moonlight. I didn’t understand Wonka’s response to Veruca Salt until I read the entire poem. The meaning provided me a key to understanding the story, who the mysterious character Wonka represents, what his motivations are in finding a child to give his factory to, and what Charlie Bucket really means for him. Read the poem below, and I think you might understand too.

ODE.

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming–
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we !
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry–
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

The premise of Roald Dahl’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) asks: what would an industrial factory engaged in mass production look like if it was built by a fantasist, dreamer, and romantic in a world dominated by pragmatists, realists, and materialists. In this lonely island, Wonka wonders who will inherit his life’s work and hopes that in the next generation of children there might still be romantics. His sampling of youth via the lottery tickets provides a referendum on Charlie’s generation. The selected tourists to Wonka’s candyland are a fools gallery of technocrats, capitalists, hedonists… and opportunists. The latter is what Wonka makes of Charlie Bucket.

Poverty does not make Charlie a finer candidate than any of the others or even more sympathetic to Wonka. But the moral challenge that Charlie meets in the face of his family’s dire poverty does affect Wonka. For Charlie to give back the stolen everlasting gobstopper means returning to Wonka’s competitor Oscar Slugworth empty handed and to his family with only tales of Oompa-Loompas. Wonka is so resigned to the absence of new romantics in the world that he is willing to give up everything to Slugworth by letting Charlie walk out with the gobstopper. By returning the gobstopper Wonka is enlightened to Charlie’s enduring romantic virtue. Charlie’s elevation of an abstract moral good over an immediate material good justifies his embrace of the young lad as the rightful recipient of his vast empire of imagination.

If these insights were intriguing, note that they don’t apply to either Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) nor the screenplay he wrote for the film. Rather, credit is due to David Seltzer, an uncredited Jewish screenwriter who wrote at least 30% of the final script. Seltzer was responsible for all of Wonka’s literary references throughout the film including Wonka’s quotation from O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode” and his quote of Portia from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the end of the film, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” ( Seltzer later directed another film representing the tribulations of an alienated romantic youth, Lucas (1986).)

Dahl, furious with the casting of Gene Wilder over Spike Milligan and Seltzer’s focus on Wonka rather than Charlie Bucket, later forbid a film adaptation of his Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972). Focus on Dahl’s anti-Semitism often focuses on his 1983 outburst: “There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity … I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” It’s intriguing to speculate that a decade earlier Dahl’s animus might have been expressed in his frustration with Gene Wilder and David Seltzer’s reinvention of Wonka, the romantic industrialist, as a Magical Jew.

I mention Tolkien since one of his intentions in inventing the fairy tale geographies and histories of Middle Earth was to provide a national myth for his beloved England. The Hobbits of the Shire represented the rural peoples and provincial attitudes familiar from Tolkien’s youth. The threat and conquest of the Shire by the evil minion of Sauron were reflected in the terrible trauma suffered by the English people in the first and second World Wars.

It is not an exaggeration to say that for both religious and secular Judaism the past cannot be reached without first crossing the gaping abyss of despair and traumatic survival that describes our storytelling and documenting of the Holocaust. In Defiance, the story of the exodus from Egypt and the travails of the wilderness are retold through the true story of the Bielski brother’s trek through the forests of Belarus. This is the story of Frodo and Sam Gamgee writ large and real. And if the Jews feet aren’t as hairy as Tolkien’s hobbits, they do at least live in earth sheltered dwellings.

True Holocaust stories have assumed the role of epic sagas for the Jewish people. These aren’t the stories imagined for us by 19th century Jewish romanticists. But unlike Tolkien’s fiction, the lived experience of the Holocaust helped drive a national liberation movement to realize a sovereign state in the ancient homeland of its people, revived religious and ethnic roots among disaffected and assimilated Jews, and continues to provide a focal point for secular ethnic identity in both Israel and the Diaspora. It’s not that stories of previous persecutions don’t exist and aren’t revisited often in the Jewish calendar of fast days and period of mourning. What differentiates Defiance is that it revives the tales of defiance to oppression, from Moses to the Macabees to Bar Kohba’s rebellion against the Romans. It’s been almost two millennia since Bar Kohba’s failed uprising. Adaptation to the Diaspora and repeated disappointments from the Spanish Expulsion to Shabbtai Tzvi, put a note of skepticism at the end of every prayer for the appearance of a Messiah. What is surprising is that the film doesn’t overtly link the success of the Bielski brother’s self-reliance with the parallel struggle of Zionism and the creation of the Jewish state. On the one hand, perhaps it doesn’t need to. On the other, the film does such an excellent job of weaving the expectations of Jewish Messianism with the reality of harrowing circumstance that it almost makes sense for the Bielski borthers to live happily ever after growing their trucking company in New York City. Defiance isn’t a messianic fantasy, nor is it ideological. Hunger strips the non-essentials. This forest tale is reality tempered.

If romanticism maps historic and mythic landscapes and practices onto the present, then identifying Defiance as romantic might seem a bit of a stretch. But if it’s hard to see, then one would also be blind to the major romantic themes in Judaism: pining for the restoration of the Temple, for the revelation of the hidden messiah, and the return to the Land of Israel. These are the same themes that enabled a secular Zionism to be so easily adopted and communicated, for Yiddish to be replaced by a rehabilitated Hebrew, for urbanized Jews to embrace the field of the kibbutz. After a century of German mystic antisemites advancing the notion that Materialism was synonymous with Judaism, and convincing many that unlike the German people (rooted as they were in the deep and mysterious old European forests) Jews were a spiritually shallow people without a motherland to nourish them, the ancient desire to be rooted in the land of Israel was freshly revived. Just as Europeans were seeking out and publishing their ancient folk traditions as a historic validation of their new national identities, so Hayyim Bialik and Yehoshua Ravnitzky did the same with the Sefer Ha-Aggadad published in Odess in 1911. But the use of storytelling to derive a single identity within the diverse Jewish communities is an ancient one.

The imaginative exercise to “tell the story of the exodus as if one had themselves fled from Egypt” is what is at play in Defiance. This annual Passover tradition (actually a religious obligation) at the root of Jewish religious and ethnic identity is nothing if not romantic. What makes Defiance compelling, beyond it being an amazing true story, is that it helps the viewer place themselves in the wilderness with these Jewish survivors, as they themselves re-enacted the story of exodus without the benefit of magical interventions or prophecy.

There are other romantic aspects as well. The film presents rural Jews as capable and hardy outdoorsmen, even as it allows for the more familiar trope of urbanized ghetto Jews completely unfamiliar with the rigour of wilderness living. But in this way the viewer (who is also likely to be an unaccomplished survivalist) may experience the Byelorussian winter vicariously through the story of the Jews. The desire to rehabilitate Jews as capable fighters rooted in nature affected all of the Zionist youth movements. The idea drew heavily from the German romantic tradition. That Defiance shows ghetto Jews in the role of resistance fighters and backwoods survivalists makes this a Jewish romantic tour de force.

Simon Schama had already described Jewish familiarity with the rural European landscape in his prologue to Landscape & Memory (1995), but for those who hadn’t read it, Defiance provides some witness to the truth of this. Here is what Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory (p.27-29). It should be read by every Jewish romantic.

I had always thought of the Jews of the Alte Land as essentially urban types, even when they lived in villages: tradesmen and artisans; tailors and carpenters and butchers and bakers; with the rebbe as the lord of the shtetl; microcosms of the great swarming communities of Wilno and Bialystok and Minsk. And so it often was, but the villages we walked through, these picture-perfect rustic cottages with their slanting timber eaves and crook-fenced gardens, had once been Jewish houses. “Seventy percent, eighty percent of the people here and here and here,” said Tadeusz, “-all Jews.” So even if they had not worked the earth with their hands or cut hay in the fields, these Jews had been country people, no less than the villagers of the Cotswolds or the peasants of the Auvergne. And one group among them, people known to everyone in the border country of Poland and Lithuania, had even been people of the forest, the wilderness puszcza.

Among them, somewhere, was my family. My mother’s father, Mark, who did become a butcher, left this region along with three brothers, at the turn of the century, driven by the horseback terror of the Cossack pogroms. But his father, Eli, like many other Jews, made his living cutting timber from the great primeval forests, hauling it to the tributaries that fed the Niemen and floating the logs north to the sawmills of Grodno or, even farther downstream, all the way to the old provincial city of Kowno. The waters were full of these Jewish river rats, sometimes spending weeks at a time on the rafts , sleeping in crude cabins constructed from logs propped on end in the company of chickens and each other. During the brutal Lithuanian winters when the rivers were frozen, he would transport the timber on long sleds driven by big Polish farm horses or teams of oxen. From Kowno or Wilno on the river Viliya the lumber would be sold to the Russian railway companies for ties, or freight wagons, or shipped further downstream in rafts of a thousand or more logs, to the Baltic for export, usually handled by other and grander Jewish timber companies.

Somewhere, beside a Lithuanian river, with a primeval forest all about it, stood my great-grandfather Eli’s house; itself made of roughly fashioned timber with a cladding of plaster, surrounded by a stone wall to announce its social pretensions. My mother, who was born and grew up in the yeasty clamor of London’s Jewish East End, retains just the scraps and shreds of her father’s and uncle’s memories of this landscape: tales of brothers fending off wolves from the sleds (a standard brag of the woodland taverns ); of the dreamy youngest brother, Hyman, falling asleep at the loading depot and rudely woken by being tied to a log and heaved into the river. Was this family as improbable as the Yiddishe woodsmen of Ruthenia I had seen in an old Roman Vishniak photo, poling logs in their sidelocks and homburgs; lumberjacks mit tzitzis?

Jewish lumbermen, Ruthenia (Roman Vishniac)

And just where, exactly, was this place, this house, this world of stubby yellow cigarettes, fortifying pulls from grimy vodka bottles, Hassidic songs bellowed through the piny Poylishe velder? “Where was it?” I pressed my mother while we sat eating salad in a West End hotel. For the first time in my life I badly needed to know. “Kowno gubernia, outside Kowno, that’s all we ever knew.” She shrugged her shoulders and went back to the lettuce.

The history of the country only deepens the uncertainty. For “Lithuania” is not coterminous with the present borders of the shrunken Baltic republic; still less with its language and religion. For centuries it covered an immense expanse of territory stretching all the way from the Black Sea in the south to the Bug river in the west to the Baltic in the north. In 1386 its hunter-king JagieÅ‚Å‚o married the Polish queen Jadwiga, creating by their muon the Great Polish realm. Over time the cultural identity of the south and west of the country was colonized by Poland. Its landowning gentry can1e to speak and write Polish and call themselves by the Polish name of szlachta. In the late eighteenth century Poland was brutally and cynically partitioned and the pieces devoured by its neighbors-the Prussians, the Russians, and the Austrians. The Lithuanian heartland became Russian, and its Polish-speaking poets came to think of it as the captive homeland.

With no formal frontiers to cross, itinerant Jewish traders migrated within the Russian Empire as family connections or economic incentives beckoned, north from the Ukraine or Byelorussia, south from Latvia, magnetized by the great center of piety and cultural passion in Wilno. My great-grandfather and his four boys, like so many other wood-shleppers, were outriders of this Judeo-Lithuanian world, by Yiddish standards, real backwoodsmen, as at home with horses and dogs and two-handled saws as with prayer books and shabbos candles. We drove further north from Giby, past synagogues with drunkenly undulating gables and whitewashed walls (the wooden structures having all been burned by the SS and their local collaborators), cutting through darker woodland dominated by spruce and fir. I remembered someone in a Cambridge common room pestering the self-designated “non-Jewish Jew” and Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher, himself a native of this country, about his roots. “Trees have roots,” he shot back, scornfully, “Jews have legs.” And I thought, as yet another metaphor collapsed into ironic literalism, Well, some Jews have both and branches and stems too.

So when Mickiewicz hails “ye trees of Lithuania” as if they belonged only to the gentry and their serfs, foresters, and gamekeepers I could in our family’s memory lay some claim to those thick groves of larch, hornbeam, and oak. I dare say that even the lime tree, worshipped by pagan Germans and Lithuanians as the abode of living spirits, lay on Eli Sztajnberg’s leds and carts waiting to be turned into the clogs and sandals worn everywhere in the Lithuanian villages…

I’ve reposted Lavie’s poem below.

“Jeer at them” with apologies to William Blake

And did the Rebbe’s feet in recent time
Walk upon Iowa’s fields of green?
And were the illegal Mexicanos
On Iowa’s pleasant pastures screened?

And did the ICE helicoptors
Hover over our well-paid shills?
And was Crown Heights builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my public relations flack!
Bring me my homeless men of Texas!
Bring me my army of wetbacks!
Lie to my critics that afflict us!

I will not cease from PR fights,
I will stick it to the goyishe “Man”
Till we have built Crown Heights
In Iowa’s green and pleasant land.

Adapted from “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake from the preface to his epic poem, Milton: a Poem. In 1916, C. Hubert H. Parry composed music for the poem to be sung as a hymn called “Jerusalem” (thus Lavie’s “Jeer at them”). Wikipedia notes,

The term “dark Satanic mills”, which entered the English language from this poem, most often is interpreted as referring to the early industrial revolution and its destruction of nature.^[1] This view has been linked to the fate of the Albion Flour Mills, which was the first major factory in London, built in 1769 by Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It was powered by Watt’s steam engines, and produced 6,000 bushels of flour a week. The factory could have driven independent traditional millers out of business, but it was destroyed, perhaps deliberately, by fire in 1791. London’s independent millers celebrated with placards reading, “Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills.” ^[2] Opponents referred to the factory as satanic, and accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. An illustration of the fire published at the time shows a devil squatting on the building.^[3] The mills were a short distance from Blake’s home.

The Romantic movement which Blake helped invoke began in response to the dehumanization of industrialization, environmental devastation wrought by the intense exploitation of nature, and the loss of culture resulting from the alienation of artisans and craftsmen in the production of goods. The purpose of industrialization is to use efficiencies to lower costs, but often enough, industrialized mass production simply shifts costs away from the consumer and industry and onto the workers and the environment. Resources, both natural and human, are ruthlessly exploited resulting in environmental and social ills that ultimately cost more money to rectify than that incurred in the expense of a more humanely produced consumer good.

Lavie focuses on the exploitation of “illegal workers” and “wetbacks” (terms I’d never use) to describe just one corruption within the Rubashkin enterprise. Rubashkin’s business ultimately aims to satisfy Jewish Americans insatiable and unhealthy appetite for (kosher) meat through the mechanism of industrialized mass production. The exploitation of undocumented workers is one method of lowering the costs to the consumer. Unfortunately, lowering costs doesn’t come without a price — the true costs of environmental and social ills caused by pollution and labor abuse are simply passed onto the health and welfare of society and the environment we depend on.

With all the attention on Rubashkin’s disgusting labor practices, it’s also time to remind folks how Rubashkin has regularly sought to lower standards whether it be in food safety, worker safety, humane treatment of animals, and the pollution of the environment.

Might the Rubashkin travesty revive the nascent Jewish movement that aims to place renewed emphasis on Jewish and humane values in the Kosher Food Industry? You can do your part by supporting hekhsher tzedek.