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‘Sherlockholmesing’ Leopold Paula Bloom


Lecture

27 February 2025 at 6.30pm

Please join us at the James Joyce Centre on Thursday, February 27th at 6.30pm for a talk by Vincent Altman O’Connor on the possible origins of Leopold Bloom.

Richard Ellmann writes, “When Dubliners asked each other in trepidation after the book appeared, ‘Are you in it?’ or ‘Am I in it?’ the answer was hard to give. A voice sounded familiar for an instant, a name seemed to belong to a friend, then both receded into a new being.”

Joyce’s methods and models in delineating his fictional characters has become a critical obsession for many, with the endeavor reaching its zenith in Vivien Igoe’s in The Real People of Joyce’s Ulysses (2016). Through years of painstaking research, she identifies the living models behind many of the fictional entities we meet in Dublin on Thursday 16th June 1904. And yet, the real-life identity of Leopold Bloom continues to challenge and haunt Joyceans to this day. Many of the contenders share personal qualities, beliefs, and aspects of a pre-Holocaust, assimilated Jewish identity with Joyce’s Jew. Yet none can be described as an Irishman whose experience as a Jew in fin de siècle Dublin was specific to that time and place.

In 2022, an Irish-Jewish model for Bloom was proposed by Neil R. Davison in An Irish-Jewish Politician: Joyce’s Dublin and Ulysses (UP Florida). The Life and Times of Albert L. Altman published by University Press of Florida. Albert Liebes Lascar Altman, a Jewish Dublin businessman and nationalist politician born in Prussian Poland, shared certain similarities with Bloom.

O’Connor, a Joycean and relative of Albert, will discuss this new model within the broad frame of Cormac Ó Gráda’s (author of Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce (2006)), observation that knowledge of Altman ‘opens up a whole new vista on Joyce scholarship’.

The event is free but booking is essential. Doors open at 6pm.

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

Cover photo: Albert L. Altman with family. From An Irish-Jewish Politician, Joyce’s Dublin, and Ulyssesby Neil R. Davison (UP Florida, 2022).

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