We know that Jewish themes are central to Ulysses but the importance of Ulysses for Jewish writers remains to be explored; Joyce himself was enduringly interested in the Jewish people but the extent of the reciprocation of this interest is an open question. This lecture will pursue three investigations: what is the nature of Joyce’s significance for Jewish writers?; how did Jewish interest in Joyce alter Irish-Jewish dialogue in the 20th century?; and, how does our sense of Jewish literature change when we acknowledge Joyce’s place within it?
Why did Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth all take a name from Joyce’s fiction for their protagonists? Why did Yankev Glatshteyn compose, in 1928, his prose-poem parody of Finnegans Wake, “Ven Joyce volt geshribn Yiddish?” And why, in Nicole Krauss’s 2005 novel The History of Love, does an elderly Yiddish poet chant passages from the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses? Cynthia Ozick said that Joyce’s art has “inflamed generations”. This lecture will explore this claim, particularly as regards—l’dor vador, from generation to generation—Jewish literature
Lev Julius is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, researching a thesis entitled “Joyceans: A History of Jewish-American Fiction”. His research aims to reconstruct the history of the Jewish-American novel, placing James Joyce at the centre. He has a strong interest in the broader context of Irish-Jewish relations and has spoken, most recently, on the place of Conor Cruise O’Brien in the history of Irish attitudes to Israel and Palestine.