In Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New
World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (2015), Hasia
Diner seeks the human realities beneath the stereotypical
picture of bearded, dark-clothed Jewish men peddling wares in
the streets. Many of these men were young––it was physically
demanding work to carry loads weighing more than 100 pounds
for long distances, and dangerous to carry cash. They came to
the doors of people's houses and established relationships
with them, making friendly talk and thereby dispelling
ignorant suspicions about Jews. They sold clothes and other
small marketable goods, accepted orders, made deliveries.
Although many of their customers had very little disposable
income, the salesmen fed their appetites for small luxuries in
the way that Sears catalogues and the Amazon site would later.
Sometimes relations were so cordial that they were invited to
stay the night before heading off again in the morning. They
saved money from their hard labors and often used it to found
less itinerant businesses later in their lives.
This sociological phenomenon studied in Diner's book received
a powerful impetus in the last decades of the 19th century
when Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and eastern Europe
streamed westward in search of better lives. Their diaspora
took them to frontiers in the Americas, South Africa, and
Australia, and also in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Bloom's
father emigrated from Hungary, passed through London, and took
up the profession of traveling salesman in Dublin. Oxen
recounts how his son followed in his footsteps just after
finishing school:
That young figure of then is seen, precociously
manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in
Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him
bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a
mother's thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone
over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!),
already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the
family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented
handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright
trinketware (alas! a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful
of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife
reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding
virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his
studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than
these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at
duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm, seated
with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle.
The saccharine tone of these sentences suggests some possible
underlying irony about Bloom's energetic salesmanship, and for
a moment the narrative dips into outright mockery with the
word "oleaginous." But what is most striking about the
passage is its confirmation of the doorstep intimacies that
Diner describes. Far from seeming a wandering Jew, or a dangerous
anti-Christ, or a scheming Shylock, to Dublin's poor Catholic
housewives and their daughters Bloom was a charmer, even a bit
of a heartthrob.
After his marriage, when he and Molly were enduring financial
hardships, they turned their flat on Holles Street into a
used-clothing shop specializing in the concert wear familiar
from Molly's singing career. In Sirens Simon Dedalus
recalls how he "saved the situation" for Ben Dollard one night
by finding him a suit to wear in a concert. "Our friend Bloom
turned in handy that night," Dedalus says. "I knew he was on
the rocks.... The wife was playing the piano in the coffee
palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration and who
was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business?
Do you remember? We had to search all Holles street to find
them till the chap in Keogh's gave us the number. Remember?...
By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things
there.... Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court
dresses. He wouldn't take any money either. What? Any God's
quantity of cocked hats and boleros and trunkhose. What?"
True to the upwardly mobile ethos of Jewish entrepreneurs,
Bloom moved on to better jobs, better dwellings, a comfortable
bank account, and an investment in Canadian railway stock. His
father saved enough money to buy a hotel in County Clare.
Through many centuries, in many lands, this pattern of
financial success has earned Jews enmity from the Christians
around them. Various Catholics in Joyce's Dublin scorn Bloom's
economic prudence, speculate about his riches, and deplore his
lack of Christian charity, but Joyce pointedly refutes the
stereotypes. In the anecdote about the used-clothing business,
he makes his protagonist un-grasping even at a time when he
was desperately poor: "He wouldn't take any money either."
For Bloom, the traveling salesman's trick of getting ahead by
befriending the people with whom you hope to do business has
lasted a lifetime.
