There was no "Dlugacz" on Dorset
Street in 1904. Every other shopowner in Ulysses
appears in the 1905 Thom's Directory, but Joyce
named the butcher after a Jewish intellectual whom he knew in
Trieste, because of the Zionism that Dlugacz passionately
espoused. When Bloom infers in Calypso that the
butcher is Jewish ("I thought he was"), and sees that the
recognition is mutual, he appears to feel drawn to the man but
saves his greeting for another day. Later in the chapter he
dismisses Dlugacz's Zionism with the thought, "Enthusiast."
Like another Jewish intellectual, Ettore Schmitz (Italo
Svevo), Moses Dlugacz (1884-1943) was one of Joyce's students
at the Berlitz school in Trieste. In The Jews of Ireland,
Louis Hyman notes that the two men "had a common interest in
literature and etymology, music and philosophy. The son and
grandson of Ukrainian rabbis and himself an ordained rabbi in
his fifteenth year, Dlugacz became Joyce's pupil in English on
his appointment in 1912 to the post of chief cashier in the
local Cunard Line office" (184). When war broke out in 1914,
he lost his Cunard position and opened a small grocery store
and wholesale food business.
Hyman observes that "Dlugacz tried to win over to the Zionist
cause all Jews and Gentiles with whom he came in contact; no
doubt he tried to make a convert of Joyce, who, discussing the
Irish revival with Padraic
Colum in 1903, remarked contemptuously 'I dislike all
enthusiasms,' and who seems, in this instance, too,
to have remained unsympathetic. Dlugacz organised and
voluntarily directed courses in Hebrew and Jewish history for
the Triestine Jewish youth, and perhaps gave Hebrew lessons to
Joyce, who is reported to have studied the language" (184).
Several years later, Dlugacz began promoting emigration to
Palestine, and in 1921 he attended the twelfth Zionist
Congress in Carlsbad (185).
When Bloom pays for his kidney, having stood for some time
reading a Zionist ad with
obvious interest, the gaze of the "ferreteyed
porkbutcher" communicates recognition that Bloom
too may be Jewish: "A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked
him. He withdrew his gaze after an instant. No:
better not: another time." Bloom declines to
initiate ethnic camaraderie, and after reading the Agendath
Netaim ad he thinks, "Nothing doing." By
making his butcher deal in pork, and having him wrap this
unclean meat in pages promoting a Zionist settlement, Joyce
compounds Bloom's lack of piety and "enthusiasm" with some of
his own. Nevertheless, the meeting with Dlugacz sets Bloom's
mind off on a chain of reflections on old Jewish friends, old Jewish texts, and the ancient Jewish people. His ancestral
homeland clearly calls to him, and the allure of Zion will
recur regularly in Ulysses as one aspect of the
book's symbolic concern with home rule.
