This is how I introduced the participation of the Israel Association of Writers in English in the Bloomsday celebrations tonight:

Twenty two years ago I kissed the blarney stone.  This, as you know, is not an easy task. I had to ascend to the castle’s peak, then lean over backwards on the parapet’s edge to kiss the hanging stone.  But it was, I thought, worth the risk because it would reward me with the eloquence for which the Irish are so well-known.

 

Well, it didn’t work.  I remain the same lingual blunderer as before.

 

But even if I had been blessed with that gift of gab, I would find it difficult to relate my amazement at the achievement of this evening.  For more than five years the embassy of Ireland has been celebrating Bloomsday together with the Israel Association of Writers in English and for the last year the Irish Friendship League as well. 

 

Such an opportunity to celebrate literature in itself should never be underrated.  With all the difficulties of reading Joyce’s complex and purposely obscure language, the joy we feel in declaiming words and bringing our own voices together to bring these words to life cannot be overestimated.

 

The IAWE has many reasons for putting our own writing in the background tonight and coming to celebrate Ulysses:

 

Some of us are here because Bloomsday is a literary tradition, some of us are here because Ulysses speaks so much about Judaism and the hope of a homeland for the Jews.  Some of us, like me, are here to praise Irish writing which is so much a part of my own literary background –  From Jonathan Swift to Oscar Wilde to William Butler Yeats to Seamus Heaney – Irish Writers have enriched every element of my life.  In the fifty years of my university career I have had the enormous pleasure to teach – not only James Joyce, but Paul Muldoon, Bram Stoker, Edna O’Brien, Sally Rooney and others. I have had the pleasure and honor to see the government-supported Poetry Center in the government offices in Dublin and I know how important literature is to the cultural identity of Ireland.   

And even though we’re here to celebrate Bloomsday I can’t help but add the reminder that the former senator of the Irish Free State, WB Yeats, was born on 13 June 1865.

The IAWE is here to salute Bloomsday, and to celebrate and honor the great literary tradition of Ireland. Thank you, Ambassador, thank you Malcolm Gaffson, and thank you, Michael Kagan, for the organization. May this great tradition continue and blossom, and may we find many more ways to celebrate literature together.

 What I read was the section of Ulysses that talks about transcending nationality.  

“

—Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or four eyes conversing, Christus or Bloom his name is or after all any other, secundum carnem.

 

—Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It’s all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It’s a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak.

 

—Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes’ war, Stephen assented, between Skinner’s alley and Ormond market.

 

Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that was overwhelmingly right. And the whole world was full of that sort of thing.

 

—You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn’t remotely…

 

All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything, greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.

 

—They accuse, remarked he audibly. He turned away from the others, who probably… and spoke nearer to, so as the others… in case they…

 

—Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen’s ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are proved to be so. I don’t want to indulge in any because you know the standard works on the subject and then orthodox as you are. But in the economic, not touching religion, domain the priest spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead America. Turks. It’s in the dogma. Because if they didn’t believe they’d go straight to heaven when they die they’d try to live better, at least so I think. That’s the juggle on which the p.p.’s raise the wind on false pretences. I’m, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of £ 300 per annum. That’s the vital issue at stake and it’s feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man. At least that’s my idea for what it’s worth. I call that patriotism. Ubi patria, as we learned a smattering of in our classical days in Alma Mater, vita bene. Where you can live well, the sense is, if you work.

 

Over his untastable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular. He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or didn’t say the words the voice he heard said, if you work.

 

—Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.

 

The eyes were surprised at this observation because as he, the person who owned them pro tem. observed or rather his voice speaking did, all must work, have to, together.

 

—I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest possible sense. Also literary labour not merely for the kudos of the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel nowadays. That’s work too. Important work. After all, from the little I know of you, after all the money expended on your education you are entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is equally important.

 

—You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.

 

—I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.

 

—But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.

 

—What belongs, queried Mr Bloom bending, fancying he was perhaps under some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the latter portion. What was it you…?

 

Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee or whatever you like to call it none too politely, adding:

 

—We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject.

 

(I didn’t realize that there were a lot of right wingers in the audience)