Joyce's Judapest

Brenda Maddox writes in the Times Literary Supplement about James Joyce and the Jews and a conference in Hungary:-

James Joyce in Judapest

James Joyce can never have seemed more Jewish than he did earlier this month at the Frankel Léo synagogue in Budapest. At the end of their lively concert, the youthful Pannomia Klezmer Band gave a signal and the assembled throng of international Joyceans leapt from their seats. Hands clapping and hips swaying to the merry Eastern music, they followed the tuba, clarinet, violin and saxophone band in a spontaneous horah dance up and down the aisles and out into the night.

The occasion was the Twentieth International James Joyce Symposium...[but] none before has been held as far east as Hungary, in the city that Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, dubbed “Judapest”.

Ulysses is built around the fictional fact that Leopold Bloom, the Irish Jew who wanders through Dublin on June 16, 1904, is the son of a Hungarian immigrant to Ireland. Even without reading the “Virag” signs on the brightly stocked flower shops scattered around Budapest, all at the conference knew that Bloom’s father Rudolf, settling in Dublin, had simply translated his surname from “Virag” to “Bloom”.

...As usual, at the academic symposium there were so many papers inspired by the myriad aspects of Joyce that four or five sessions had to be squeezed simultaneously into each time slot. The many on Jewish themes such as “the Hebrew vocabulary of Finnegans Wake” and “Bloom’s Cultural Jewishness and Irish Nationalism” were a strong reminder that Joyce began writing Ulysses while he was himself living in Austria-Hungary, in the cosmopolitan, polyglot port of Trieste.

In Trieste Joyce had many Jewish friends. An exile himself, he captured in his great book the ambiguous position, in Ireland and in Trieste, of the immigrant and of the Jew. Much quoted in Budapest last week was the famous exchange in Ulysses that takes place in Barney Kiernan’s pub as the drinkers discuss Bloom’s surprising claim that “Ireland is my nation”:

“And after all, says John Wyse, why can’t a Jew love his country like the next fellow?

Why not? says J. J. when he’s quite sure which country it is”.