While I derived as much pleasure from the mystery surrounding Hitchens’ curious right-wing turn as the next aficionado of intellectual skywriting did—this stuff is like Dancing With the Stars to some of us—the main enjoyment I took from him was the elegance and wit of his prose and the suppleness of his takes on literature and culture. And the essay that got me hooked on Hitch was not about the tyrant Saddam or the feckless left or the stooge Michael Moore or the anti-Semitic grotesquerie of Mel Gibson—was not, in other words, any of the polemics dedicated to tipping every unsacred cow in the meadow of his dreams—but rather the one about James Joyce’s Ulysses. I read it in 2004, in the upstairs café of the Barnes & Noble across the street from the movie theater where I worked that summer. It was pegged to the centennial of Bloomsday—June 16, 1904, on which the novel is set—and in part devoted to explaining why Joyce chose that day as his novel’s peg. In fact the word “peg” is all too appropriate, for that day was, as Hitchens puts it, “the very first time the great James Joyce received a handjob from a woman who was not a prostitute.”

But the sentence in the essay that struck me most was this: “In some intuitive manner, Joyce seems to have had the premonition that the Jewish question would be crucial to the 20th century.” There are many possible explanations for why Joyce made his Odysseus, the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, Jewish. Among them: Joyce’s pacifism led him to identify with the persecuted Jewish people; Odysseus was the ancient wanderer par excellence, and therefore his modern iteration must be the modern wanderer par excellence—a Jew; the novelist Italo Svevo (né Aron Ettore Schmitz), whom Joyce knew in Trieste, was the real-life model for Bloom; etc. But Hitchens’ argument was more challenging and perplexing: Ulysses, he asserted, is urgent political writing disguised as escapism, and Bloom is Jewish because the Jewish question was, for Joyce, politically paramount. Joyce perceived that the Great War had not resolved all the contradictions that modernity had thrust upon an unwilling, antiquated civilization, and that chief among these was how it would deal with the Jews—emancipated yet unalterably different, and who, due to their unique history of influence over Europe and Christianity, were not merely a prominent question that had yet to be answered but the question that had yet to be answered. This was the most logically rigorous case for Jewish exceptionalism I had ever encountered.

Which is partly why a year later—on June 17, 2005, to be exact—while again home from college, I attended a reading of his at a store in Arlington, Va. It was the only time we ever spoke. As I got my book signed, I noted that Bloomsday had been the day before and asked Hitchens which his favorite chapter of Ulysses was. Hitchens paused several seconds, leaned back in his chair, and replied, “Probably the Shakespeare chapter. At the library.” As I turned to go, he called after me: “Happy Bloomsday.”

In Chapter 9 of Ulysses—the chapter Hitchens was referring to—the university drop-out Stephen Dedalus says, “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” Stephen is referring to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare Hitchens was not; “man of genius,” too, seems a stretch. Nonetheless, this Chapter 9—this was a portal of discovery. Hitchens wasn’t merely tossing something off for an anonymous book-buyer. He was telling me something about himself. Hitchens always insisted that 9/11 did not precipitate or mark a break with his past thinking, though most people never quite bought this. But in citing Chapter 9, he actually explained exactly how this could be, and he explained something more, too: that any alterations he made to his thinking did not come from fear or loathing of terrorism or Islam. Nor did they come from Marxism, neoconservatism, penchant for dramatic conversions, hedonism, Englishness, Americanness, Anglo-Americanness, iconoclasm, or even atheism. They came not in 2001 but more than a decade earlier, and they came from his Jewishness, which in turn came, as Jewishness does under Jewish law, from his mother. I don’t mean here to claim Hitchens religiously; he clearly lived and died an atheist. But if you are one of those people searching for the ever-elusive Unified Theory of Hitch, the only one that stands up to scrutiny—believe it or not—has to do with his being Jewish. And with being Stephen Dedalus.

***

What made Hitchens different from all the other middle-class English young men? “I do know a little of how I came to be of two minds,” he relates on the first page of the first chapter of his 2010 memoir, Hitch-22. His father, a stern but not cruel Navy man whom Hitchens always refers to unironically as “The Commander,” is straight out of postwar British central casting, interchangeable with characters from the Master and Commander novels by Patrick O’Brian that Hitchens loved. But his mother? She “was the exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray,” he gushed, in that first chapter, titled “Yvonne.” “She was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes.”

Continue reading: The Tenth Man

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is out of the hospital. She was shot point-blank in the head five months ago. Wow. [JTA]

• Mentioned this earlier, but it seems that in an email Sarah Palin referred to a Jewish former Alaska state representative as “Bird-Nose.” You be the judge! [JTA]

• “A Jerusalem rabbinical court recently sentenced a wandering dog to death by stoning.” Reincarnation was involved. Holy hell. [Ynet/Failed Messiah]

• The Krakow Factory, of Schindler’s List fame, is now a contemporary art museum. But here’s the secret: The art doesn’t actually work! [ArtInfo]

• The perilous occupation otherwise known as translating James Joyce into Russian. [Arty Semite]

Listen to Joyce read from Finnegans Wake. And then you can come to Housing Works Bookstore and see Ulysses acted out before your very eyes.

YouCities from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

Today’s the day! 107 years ago, in James Joyce’s fictional universe, Leopold Bloom wandered the streets of Dublin, unwittingly acting out the hero’s path in the Odyssey. And—as, I promise, you are being reminded for the very last time—tonight, at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan, we will be celebrating Bloom, an Irishman of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, with readings, performances, and music. Do come!

Your suggested Bloomsday reading is frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum’s recent paean to Ulysses‘s penultimate chapter (which is not, as he claims, the only chapter worth reading, but which is indeed one of the top three or five). Also, you can follow the whole novel on Twitter.

And, sure, a quiz: In the catechism chapter, two questions are answered with further questions. One of these answers is, “Who is M’intosh?” Well, who is M’intosh? First person to email me the correct (or an otherwise extremely persuasive) response gets a Nextbook Press volume of his or her choice.

However, this Saturday Dr. Ilana Simons and Ian Blumenstein were married by Cantor Judith Steel at Housing Works Bookstore Café in Soho—a Tablet Magazine favorite, and the location of Tablet’s upcoming (Thursday, June 16th, at 7 pm) Bloomsday event.

Mazel Tov to Mr. Blumenstein and Mrs. Simons! We hope (assuming you’re not on honeymoon) you’ll join us on Thursday at the site of your nuptials (find me for a congratulatory drink). And if I may be so bold, if you are blessed with children—Leopold or Molly have nice rings to them.

But Bloom is also a Jew, and Tablet Magazine intends not to let people forget that. So we are excited to invite you to our second annual “The Bloom in Bloomsday” celebration. This year, at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan, we will be joined by novelists Joshua Cohen and Deb Olin Unferth; Bambi Kino, a band comprising members of Nada Surf, Guided by Voices, Cat Power, and Maplewood; and the New Yiddish Repertory Theater for reading, music, and performances centered around that “allroundman” Bloom.

The event is Thursday, June 16th, at 7 pm, at Housing Works Bookstore in Soho. Admission is free, alcohol is cheap (with proceeds going to the wonderful Housing Works charity), and the uninitiated will be treated to a 15-minute pageant in which the entire 600-page novel is narrated and acted out before their very eyes.

It’s going to be a great time. Let’s claim Bloom for his people!

So, two things:

1. Lit-geeks: Which is your favorite chapter of Ulysses? Mine is Chapter Six, “Hades,” which, naturally, finds Bloom attending a funeral. Leave your answers in the comments.

2. June 16: Save the date. Tablet Magazine will, once again, be putting the Bloom back in Bloomsday.

Is ‘Ulysses’ Overrated?
Earlier: Celebrate ‘Ulysses’ with Tablet Magazine

Setting aside that St. Pats was two weeks ago, I am disappointed.

The menu was an uninteresting course of Israeli wines, or Guinness and “traditional Irish fare” like steak and potatoes. We can only pray that Ambassador Oren sprang for a keg, because I’m pretty sure serving canned Guinness to the Irish ambassador counts as a declaration of war.

The entertainment was mildly more interesting since Oren and Gov. O’Malley performed with a Celtic-influenced Israeli band Evergreen. Oren playing a Bodhrán, or Irish frame drum, and yes, there is a video, and yes, you can see it below.

But I’m still not pleased, because there is already a Jewish-Irish cultural holiday: Bloomsday. A holiday to celebrate Leopold Bloom of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the most famous Irish Jew of all time. Not to mention there is already an organization—a magazine, if you will, perhaps one of Jewish news, ideas, life and culture—which throws an annual Bloomsday party to remember that Jewish Irishman, walking the streets of Dublin, unknowingly acting out the epics of old.

Ambassador, honored guests, let me invite you to Tablet Magazine’s next Bloomsday, because relying on steak and potatoes and an Israeli band playing Celtic music for diplomacy is a mug’s game. Peace between nations requires country songs inspired by Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, selections of the novel performed in Yiddish, and a full ensemble 15 minute Ulysses shpiel, to get you up to speed. Say yes.

Earlier: Happy St. Patty’s Day!

Erin Go Bragh and all that!

For now: Here is David Mandelbaum, of the New Yiddish Repertory Theater, and Alyssa Quint, who teaches Yiddish at Columbia, performing, first in English and then in Yiddish (translated by Caraid O’Brien), a scene between Leopold Bloom and an ex-girlfriend of his, Mrs. Breen.

Manhattan’s Lower East Side is a district known today primarily for its nightlife, and when friends and I have gravitated there for that reason, frequently one or the other of us will refer to it, jokingly, as “the old neighborhood.” Fact is, this was for many years the center of Jewish life in New York City (and therefore in America), and certain vestiges—the old Forward building on East Broadway, the Tenement Museum, the mural advertising Schapiro’s kosher wine—remain to remind the young men and women frequenting the bars on Ludlow Street on Friday nights—many Jewish; hey, it’s New York—that this is actually a place of history.

Witz serves as another reminder, in a late section of the book in which our hero, Benjamin Israelien, the last true Jew on an earth where everyone has adopted the trappings of Judaism, ventures “Downtown” to the holy neighborhood, “a world not so much frozen in time as in time past”:

this lonesome stretch of barrengardened, coldflat Orchard Street: a secret message of what, encrypted for whom. Anyway, is it even Orchard Street … isn’t it maybe Grand, or Delancey I’m crossing, Division dividing Essex or Essen, hesternal Hester heading western to where I don’t know, no street numbers I’m seeing, O show me the signs—Second Avenue, I know at least, I see they’ve renamed it Avenue Bet, First Avenue, Aleph, I get it, nu, I can count …

Above is a good example of “the new language old” that Cohen has created for his protagonist. It is its own, dynamic language, albeit one spoken only in the protagonist’s head ever since he lost his tongue, in—as Cohen has put it elsewhere—“an unfortunate confluence of cunnilingus and the 137th Psalm.”

Benjamin enters a Chinese restaurant, and the waiters—“busgoys” and “busboychiks”—are dressed as, well, Chinese Jews, although not in the Kaifeng manner: “Above their uniforms, which are tuxedos, they’re turned out in yarmulkes; they’ve grown silken beards to complement their payos, like thin and greasy noodles.”

After a hearty meal, the hunted Benjamin must be on his way. The Lower East Side of Witz undeniably feels post-apocalyptic—at one point, an aimless herd of sheep crosses Benjamin’s path—and there is a general aura of infertility (“barrengardened”). Yet there is also something ruefully hilarious about the whole setpiece. I would try to describe it. But that would go against the spirit of this novel, whose epigraph reads, “Witz: being, in Yiddish, a joke“, and whose main character at one point notes, “nothing’s ever funny when you have to spell it out.”

It’s not easy to imagine someone even glancing at Joshua Cohen’s 817-page Modernist epic novel Witz and mistaking it for a run-of-the-mill Holocaust memoir or Eastern-European-genealogical romp, of the type that lands on the desks of staffers at Jewish magazines several times per week. But, as though to make absolutely certain that no one gets misled by the w-pronounced-as-a-v in the title, Cohen (at 29, an already-accomplished novelist and essayist) opens Witz with a sort of moat of difficulty. All seeking entry into its main narrative must cross.

For the first 20 pages or so, we find ourselves in a cubistically rendered mincha service in what seems to be an observant Jewish quarter somewhere in the contemporary United States. Then, we cross “from the world of the father to that of the mother,” in Cohen’s words, and land, still confused, at the Shabbos dinner of Hanna and Israel Israelian and their twelve semi-interchangeable daughters. At the end of the meal, Hanna will give birth, right there on the kitchen table, to a son, Benjamin, who happens to come out of the womb already a little old Jewish man. Benjamin will wind up being the last Jew on earth, and the novel’s protagonist. But we don’t know any of that yet.

The Shabbos dinner is divided obliquely into seven parts, one for each of the days of creation. In the first part, images of light are everywhere: The Israelians’ “table, like the sun, almost set”; Israel, finishing up work at his New York law firm before rushing home to New Jersey by sundown, has “the Sabbath to the left of him, Sabbath to the right, but there’s no Sabbath where he’s sitting—the sun stayed above him, just waiting.” In the next part, God creates water: Eldest daughter Rubina, making her bed before the guests (“the Dunkelspiels, the Kestenbaums, the Lembergs, the Friedmans”) arrive, imagines “her bed’s less a bed than an ocean.” Etcetera.

Cohen is not the only contemporary writer to arrange an ambitious novel according to kabbalistic stratagems, but he may be the most committed to the task—like Ulysses, Witz is a book that cries out for an annotated edition.

Cohen also has a Joycean yen for devising strange new compound words—“cleanscooks,” “pushpulling,” “tossturn,” “matzahballs,” “challahknife”—as well as for internal monologues that take place on toilet seats: One guest, Mr. Feigenbaum, spends most of the meal in the bathroom trying to defecate.

In the seventh section—which would be when God rested, for those of you who were asleep during that Hebrew School class—the guests gather up their coats, checking the pockets to make sure the Israelian girls haven’t helped themselves to their wallets. They go home. And then, as though it were the normal conclusion to a Shabbos dinner, the world’s last Jew is born, “His glasses’ lenses, smudgy with fluid, that and His, nu, you know, too, which is hairy as well, the beard down below and apparently, can it be, already circumcised … .”

To see what he has in store, well, you’ll just have to come to Solas, in Manhattan’s East Village, next week. Meantime, here’s a thought. Greenman’s new story collection, What He’s Poised To Do, from Harper Perennial, drops next Tuesday. (You can read the title story here.) Because the stories are intimately involved with letters and letter-writing, Greenman has set up a super-cool Website, Letters With Character, which encourages readers to submit letters they would write to their favorite literary characters.

“I write to offer my condolences,” Jaime Fuller addresses The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne, “because your life truly sucks. However, I can’t feel too sorry for you, because you have made some poor life decisions. The A on your chest does not condemn you for being an ‘Adulterer,’ but instead for the fact you are ‘Attracted to Assholes.’” Heh.

Perhaps Leopold or Molly Bloom, or Stephen Dedalus—or, hell, the Man in the Macintosh—await your missives? Send ‘em to LettersWithCharacter@gmail.com.

What He’s Poised To Do [Amazon]
Letters With Character
Earlier: Celebrate ‘Ulysses’ with Tablet Magazine

Is there something intrinsically Jewish about the Big Ambitious Novel project?
It’s the internationalism. Joyce did that by making Bloom the universal figure. A figure of exile, in the sense of how Edward Said called himself the last Jewish intellectual, because his notion of what it was to be an intellectual is to be an exile. There’s something in the charge of rootless cosmopolitanism. Which continues to sound to me like it’s in our interest, maybe not all the time, to embrace. And that really does take you back to Bloom.

What prompted you to teach this course?
Well part of it was a desire just to teach really good things to students. It was also a bit out of a desire to argue with James Wood, who as far as I’m concerned is the origin of the phrase ‘big ambitious novel,’ in that Zadie Smith review. I think he believes, along with the rest of us, that the purpose of fiction is, as E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.” But authors of these novels have realized that the scale has become much larger, the project more difficult, because we live on an interplanetary scale now, and this is how you do that.

Where did your syllabus begin?
I started it with Gravity’s Rainbow. The novel at a certain point does what Pynchon does. You’re going to have to make a certain kind of connection.

How does Ulysses fit into all of this?
Ulysses is a kind of sacred book for me. Having a sacred book is a kind of odd thing. It’s the book that just turned my head around when I was 16 years old. As far as I know, I’ve never actually written about it.

I’m one of those who thinks it’s maybe the greatest novel ever written, and a great temptation for people to try to follow. I think of Colum McCann, or David Mitchell. [Mitchell’s] Cloud Atlas seems to me clearly inspired by Joyce—you do a different voice per chapter.

What do you remember about the first time you read Ulysses?
It’s such a wonderful trick that’s played on budding intellectuals. You think Stephen is the man. And you all of a sudden discover that he’s only Telemachus, and the Ulysses figure is this advertising canvasser. And I’ll say, as a Jewish kid at 16, discovering that the modern Ulysses was Bloom, and not the one I was supposed to identify with, was quite a moment.

Earlier: Celebrate ‘Ulysses’ with Tablet Magazine

All well and good: Literature is splendid, and we all enjoy a pint of Guinness every now and again. But the traditional, Gaelic way of honoring Bloom denies a crucial aspect of his identity. For Joyce’s best-known creation, and one of the most memorable characters in all of literature, is a Jew.

This year, Tablet Magazine will not let people forget that. On Wednesday, June 16, at 7 PM, at the bar Solas in Manhattan’s East Village, we will be ringing in Bloomsday with readings and music:

• Novelists Joshua Cohen and Ben Greenman will read selected excerpts.

• Alicia Jo Rabins, of Girls in Trouble, will sing an original, specially commissioned song about Bloom’s wife, Molly.

• Actors from the New Yiddish Repertory Theater will enact one scene from the novel that has been translated into the language of Bloom’s ancestors.

• There will be a presentation, “Ulysses in Five Minutes,” for those who haven’t yet tackled the novel’s 800 or so pages.

Plus! Starting next week, The Scroll will be blogging up a storm about Cohen’s new novel, Witz, a great big wonderful Joycean novel about the last Jew on Earth. And Bloomsday attendees can expect a special midrash from Josh on this ever-so-Jewish genre.

So save the date: We’ll all be there. Let’s claim Bloom for his people!

Sweet poster, designed by our very own Len Small, after the jump.

I asked Jonathan Wilson, author of a great New York Times Magazine article on Ireland’s Jewish community, to suggest some favorite, real-life Irish Jews. He offered a few; intern Jenny Merkin came through with a few more.

• Robert Briscoe, Dublin’s first Jewish mayor (also a member of the Irish Republican Army);
• His son, Ben, another Dublin mayor;
• Chaim Herzog, the Belfast-born president of Israel from 1983 to 1993;
• Speaking of Herzog, Wilson said, “my Auntie Pearl who once dated him!”;
• Yitzah HaLevi Herzog, Israel’s first chief rabbi (and, naturally, Chaim’s father), had been Ireland’s chief rabbi;
• Daniel Day-Lewis (mother);
• Sen. John Kerry—remember, he learned during his presidential campaign that his grandfather was a Czech Jew;
• Liam Neeson: not actually a Jew. But he played Oskar Schindler … who was not actually a Jew. So an honorary Jew, twice removed.

So, have a happy St. Patrick’s Day. We’d say several cliché things now, and wish you several more, but instead we merely suggest you click on and print out this St. Patrick’s Day Bingo card and see how well you do.

The Fading World of Leopold Bloom [New York Times Magazine]
Related: Bloomsday Meets Second Avenue [Tablet Magazine]

Caraid O’Brien was born in Ireland, but after moving to Massachusetts as a girl, she found herself drawn to works by Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. She followed that passion to become one of the foremost translators of Yiddish theater. But she’s still true to her roots, and tomorrow, June 16, she’ll host New York’s Radio Bloomsday—an annual reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses on WBAI. She’ll also perform the role of Molly Bloom in the broadcast. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry spoke with O’Brien about the links between Irish and Yiddish literature, and about how a nice Irish girl became embroiled in Jewish culture.

To listen to Radio Bloomsday, tune into WBAI (99.5 FM in New York City) or WBAI.org on June 16 at 7 p.m.

Caraid O’Brien photo by Pablo Aguilar. Bloomsday 2008 by Drew Saunders; some rights reserved.