Ulysses Essay 42 (67:25,31)

Chapter 5 (Lotus-Eaters) No. 3

“ Hello, ‘Leah’ tonight….Rachel, is it? No.”

Bloom doubles back to the corner of Westland Row and Brunswick Street, where he pauses to take a professional look at the multicolored hoardings promoting Cantrell and Cochrane’s Ginger Ale (Aromatic) and Clery’s summer sale. A notice about a theater performance of “Leah” by the American playwright John Augustin Daly (1838-99) with Mrs. Bandman Palmer in the title role, scheduled for that evening, arouses Bloom’s interest and sets him off on an anguished reverie about his late father, Rudolph Virag-Bloom  (“Poor papa! Poor man!”), in which he tries to come terms with Rudolph’s suicide sixteen years previously almost to the day. (Later in the course of Ulysses we learn that Rudolph had overdosed himself on 27 June 1888 with aconite, a deadly compound extracted from the root of the monkshood plant, although we are never told the exact circumstances surrounding Rudolph’s suicide).

It turns out that Rudolph had great affection for “Leah, the Forsaken” (the play’s full title) which, as Bloom notes, is due to be performed that evening (and in fact the play, starring the American actress Millicent Palmer, was indeed performed at Dublin’s Gaiety Theater on 16 June 1904). Bloom recalls that his father would often nostalgically recall having seen the play (then  entitled “Deborah”) in Vienna in 1865 in its original German version authored by the Austrian-Jewish playwright Salomon Herman Mosenthal, with the heroine played by the great melodramatic Italian actress Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906). Daly later adapted Mosenthal’s play into English, changing the name of the eponymous female protagonist from  “Deborah” to “Leah”.

Bloom tries to recall the original title of Mosenthal’s version of  “Leah” that his father had seen in Vienna, and first lands on “Rachel”, but then decides that “Rachel” is incorrect, although he does not seem to remember that in fact it was “Deborah.” Joyce wonderfully captures Bloom’s staccato thought processes: “What is this the right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No.”

“Leah, the Forsaken” was a standard fin-de-siècle stage melodrama, giving ample opportunity for the great actresses of the era, including Sarah Bernhardt (shown below in a 1901 production), to demonstrate their histrionic capabilities. In later times the play fell out of favor with producers, who regarded it as dated and far too much over the top, but a recent rare off-Broadway revival at the Metropolitan Playhouse in January 2017 occasioned favorable critical comment, including a New York Times review that suggested that it had become timely again because one of its major themes – the prohibition against Jews settling in Austria in the eighteenth century – was reminiscent of contemporary anti-Moslem immigration tendencies in the  United States.

   

The play, with overtones of Romeo and Juliet, tells the eighteenth century story of Leah, a Hungarian Jewess, who in on  her way to Bohemia after fleeing anti-Semitic persecution in Hungary. She is accompanied by an old blind man, Abraham, and a young mother, Sarah, who is succoring her baby who has taken ill. Leah tries to obtain permission from the authorities of an Austrian village  to let them stay for a few days in the village until the infant would be again be fit to travel, but is told that the law does not permit Jews to stay even overnight in the province. The villagers – except for the notably tolerant village priest and a kindhearted young woman named Madalene who tries to assist the Jewish itinerants – are intensely anti-Semitic and tell each other that Jews are filthy and spread diseases and should therefore should never be granted even temporary residence rights in their village. The most uncompromising anti-Semite of all is the schoolmaster Nathan, an apostate Jew and the villain of the piece. Nathan keeps his Jewish origins secret and foments anti-Jewish feeling among the villager by repeating the notorious blood libel that the Jews kill Christian children before Passover so as to use their blood in baking matzot (an accusation which the village priest angrily dismisses as an unfounded folktale of the uneducated masses).

Rudolf, the mayor’s son, although due to enter a marriage arranged by his father with the humane and generous Madalene, falls head over heels in love with Leah and becomes her protector. On Good Friday, Rudolf and Leah embrace in front a wooden cross in the forest, and decide to meet at the cross the following morning in order to leave town together and get married. Their conversation is overheard by Nathan, who tells the mayor of Rudolf’s intentions. When Rudolf, confronted by his angry father, refuses to renege, the mayor decides to end the relationship by buying off Leah with a purse of gold, and dispatches Nathen to carry out the mission. Nathan instead uses the money to convince Sarah, who is burdened with the blind old Abraham and her newborn child into leaving the village, although Leah has no knowledge of the transaction as she has gone to the prearranged meeting place in the forest. Nathan returns to the mayor’s home and shows the mayoral family the empty purse as proof that Leah has accepted the bribe and rejected Rudolf. Angry over Leah’s ostensible betrayal, Rudolf decides to marry Madalene. When Leah realizes that Rudolf is not going to meet her as planned, she timidly approaches the mayor’s house. The deeply disappointed Rudolf heatedly bids her leave, and Leah, not understanding his changed behavior, pleads with him. Rudolf denounces her and haughtily ignores her as he passes her by on his way to the village church where a hasty marriage with Madalene takes place. Leah watches the ceremony from afar, faints, and then repairs to the meeting site in the forest. Rudolf, apparently troubled by his conscience, comes to the site, and shows her the empty purse. They both comprehend what has happened, and Rudolf begs for forgiveness. Leah answers him bitterly and abusively, and departs the village. Five years later Leah returns and comes upon a little girl, Rudolf and Madalene’s daughter, tellingly named Leah, playing in the garden of their house. While Leah kisses her namesake lovingly, a mob of villagers, led by Nathan, start to jeer at the Jewess, bringing Rudolf and Madalene out of the house. Leah denounces Nathan as an apostate Jew and as the instigator of her tragedy, and then collapses and die at Rudolf’s feet.

In the highly dramatic scene in the forest hut (after Nathan has persuaded Sarah and her fellow-travelers to leave the village by giving her money for the journey), Abraham suddenly identifies Nathan by voice as an apostate Jew that he once knew in Pressburg. This is the scene which so impressed Rudolph Virag, himself a convert to Catholicism, and which he would frequently hark back to in the presence of his young son, as Bloom now recalls on seeing the poster advertising the performance of “Leah” in Dublin:

“The scene he was always talking about where the old blind Abraham recognizes the voice and puts his fingers on his face.

–        Nathan’s voice! His son’s voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and the God of his father.

Every word is so deep, Leopold.

Poor papa! Poor man! I’m glad I didn’t go into his room to look at his face. That day! O dear! O dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was the best for him.”

The actual text from Act 2, Scene 2 of “Leah, the Forsaken” in which Abraham reveals Nathan’s Jewish origin is recollected almost verbatim by Bloom, which is quite surprising given that nearly two decades have passed since his father’s death. The scene takes play in a hut in the forest where the old blind Abraham together with Sarah and her baby have taken refuge from a gathering storm. The villagers are waiting outside:

ABRAHAM: I hear a strange voice, and yet not a strange voice

NATHAN (to SARAH): Who is this old man?

SARAH: Abraham, sir–a poor old blind man…This is our benefactor, Abraham! Go kiss his hand––––

NATHAN: This is no time for idle acts! Come, away, away!

ABRAHAM: That voice! I know that voice! There was at Pressburg, a man whose name was Nathan. He was a singer in the synagogue. It is his voice I hear.

NATHAN (looking anxiously around): This man is mad.

ABRAHAM: It was said he became a Christian, and went out into the world.

NATHAN (angrily): Silence!

ABRAHAM: He left his father to die in poverty and misery, since he had forsworn his faith, and the house of his kindred.

NATHAN (striding to him, and laying his head on his shoulder): Silence! Silence! I say!

ABRAHAM: I will not be silent. I hear the voice of Nathan (passing his hand over NATHAN’S face) and I recognize the features of Nathan.

NATHAN (terrified): The Jew is mad! Silence, or I’ll do you injury !

ABRAHAM: With my fingers I read thy dead father’s face, for with my fingers I closed his eyes, and nailed down his coffin! Thou art a Jew! (loudly).

NATHAN (flying at him) Another word! (seizes him by his throat, and bends him to the floor)–SARAH screams and runs after him, endeavoring to save ABRAHAM)

SARAH: Oh, spare the old man. He’s mad, sir, I know.

NATHAN (bewildered as he hears knocking on the door) Coming? Ha! What’s this? (Her loosens his grip from which ABRAHAM sinks supinely, as the same moment a thunder-bolt strikes the cabin, and the storm increases).

SARAH (screams): He is dead!

NATHAN (at first confused, but recovering, as the PEASANTS all run in affright from the storm, and stand gazing around the dead body of ABRAHAM): Aye–dead! By the hand of heaven!–(Tableau).

There is obviously no end to the Jewish subtexts in “Leah, the Forsaken”, being as it is an unmitigated presentation of anti-Semitism in early eighteenth century rural  Austria, but I am more drawn to the confusion of identities that enmeshes both “Leah” itself and the deeply symbolic allusions to the play in Ulysses. To start with the play’s title: Mosenthal named his work (and its protagonist) “Deborah” while Daly changed the name of the heroine to “Leah” and the title of play to “Leah, the Forsaken”  Deborah in the Tanach is the fearless prophetess, judge and chieftain of the tribes of Israel who, in partnership with the somewhat reluctant army commander Barak (whom she has to arouse into action), leads them into an overwhelming military victory over the well-armed Canaanites who have been oppressing the Hebrews for decades. Leah, on the other hand, is a gentle passive soul, described as possessing “soft eyes” (Genesis 29:17), and apparently as being less desirable than her younger sister Rachel. Jacob, fleeing the wrath of his elder twin brother Esau whom he had tricked out of his birthright, arrives at Laban’s home, falls in love with Rachel, and works seven years tending his uncles flocks so as to win Rachel as his wife. However, the trickster is tricked, for when Jacob wakes up from, his marriage night, “…and it came to pass, in the morning, that behold, it was Leah” (Genesis 29:25). Unthwarted, Jacob agrees to work seven more years for Laban to win Rachel as his second wife, which he does uncomplainingly. In light of this biblical confusion, one can forgive Bloom for thinking that “Rachel” was the original title of “Leah, the Forsaken” rather than “Deborah”. 

As to why Daly actually preferred “Leah, the Forsaken”  to “Deborah” as the title of his English adaptation of Mosenthal’s German play, my guess is that he did so because of the contrasting personalities of their biblical namesakes – he probably felt that the militaristic Deborah was an ill-suited precursor of the play’s fleeing Jewess, whereas the eponymous protagonist of “Leah, the Forsaken” recalls in some measure the Genesis story in which the elder sister Leah is rejected in love, if not actually “forsaken”.

There is further source for confusion in “Leah, the Forsaken” in the actions ascribed to Abraham, the old blind Jew. Abraham and his wife Sarah are regarded as “the first Jews” in the bible, and their names are frequently adopted by converts to Judaism. In the play, Abraham is indeed a Jew of advanced age, but Sarah is not his wife, but a young mother who is taking care of him as they flee anti-Semitic persecution in Hungary. When the blind Abraham recognizes Nathan’s voice as that of a Jewish singer in the Pressburg synagogue, he identifies him positively (if rather unrealistically) by exploring Nathan’s face with his fingers. This scene immediately conjures up memories of the biblical Abraham’s son, Isaac, who when also old, blind and near death, is approached by his younger son Jacob, dressed by his mother Rebecca in goatskins, in order to steal the birthright blessing of his older twin brother, the hairy Esau, by misleading Isaac as to his actual identity. Isaac feels the hairy goatskins on Jacob’s arms, and immortally says, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau” (Genesis 27:22), leaving unanswered the question as to whether he was really taken in by Jacob’s deception.

Interestingly, Nathan, the apostate Jew in “Leah, the Forsaken” keeps his original given name (in contrast to that other apostate, Rudolph Virag who changes his surname to “Bloom” after taking up residence in Ireland). While it has been always been common practice for Christians to bear Old Testament names (David is probably the most popular), Nathan (in Hebrew “Natan” – “he gave”) is archetypally Jewish, and rarely used among Gentiles. The biblical Nathan was a prophet and counselor at the court of King David, and is best known for his courageous denunciation of David for the king’s inadmissible behavior in the Bathsheba affair, in which David, after espying the voluptuous Bathsheba bathing on a Jerusalem rooftop, immediately exercised his royal prerogative by demanding that she be brought to him so that he could have sex with her that very night, and thereafter on learning that Bathsheba was pregnant from him, and failing in a devious plan to lure home Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, on spurious army leave to ensure that he would sleep with his wife and thus assume paternity (Uriah, an officer and a gentleman if ever there was one, had refused to enter his home on grounds of comradely loyalty to his fellow-soldiers battling the Ammonites), had then sent (with Uriah!) an encoded order to his cousin Joab, the commander-in-chief of the Hebrew army, to place Uriah in the front line so as to expose him to almost certain death (as indeed eventually transpired, leaving behind a heartbroken Bathsheba). Finding out through court gossip about these events, Nathan tells the king about two neighbors, one very rich and possessing innumerable flocks of sheep, and one extremely poor, having only one lamb to his name, which he loved and tended as one of his children. On hearing that the rich man had  unconscionably stolen his neighbor’s beloved single lamb so as to cook it for dinner for a passing traveler, King David angrily orders that the rich man should be put to death for his crime, to which Nathan replies in two simple Hebrew words which have echoed down through the ages: “Ata ha’ish” (“You are the man”) (II Samuel 12:7).

Both the biblical Nathan and the apostate Nathan of “Leah, the Forsaken” intervened in affairs of the heart. But while Nathan the prophet fearlessly stood up for the civil rights of a loving married couple against the arbitrariness of royal power, Nathan the apostate self-hating Jew, taking racist anti-Semitism to its lowest depths, destroyed the innocent and unconditional love between Rudolf, the Gentile son of the mayor, and Leah, the wandering Jewess.

And finally to Rudolph Virag/Bloom and Rudolf, the mayor’s son in “Leah, the Forsaken”. If nothing in Ulysses is unintended (Joyce once claimed: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant”) then there must be a connection between the two, even if their names are spelt slightly differently. Rudolph Virag, born in Szombathely, Hungary, around 1815, enacts the role of the Wandering Jew during the years 1852-1865, passing through Vienna (where he sees “Deborah” starring Adelaide Ristori), Budapest, Florence, Milan and London, until eventually settling down in Dublin, where in 1865 he is converted to the Irish Protestant Church (by the Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews), and marries Ellen Higgins, a Christian woman of mixed parentage (her father was Hungarian-Jewish and her mother Irish-Protestant). The following year, 1866, Rudolph changes his surname from Virag (Hungarian for “flower”) to “Bloom” and his wife gives birth to their only child Leopold, who is baptized as a Protestant, but will later undergo a further conversion to Catholicism in order to marry Marion (Molly) Tweedy, the daughter of Major Tweedy, an Irish-Catholic officer in the British Army, and Lunita Laredo, a Gibraltarian of Spanish (and possibly Jewish Marrano) descent, whom Tweedy met while serving in Gibraltar with his army unit.

In contrast, Rudolf, the Catholic son of the village mayor, who pointedly is upbraided by his father for not appearing in church on Good Friday, the year’s most important mass, seems to be possibly envisaging conversion to Judaism as part of his plan to elope with his beloved Leah, the itinerant and persecuted Jewess. Rudolf’s rejection of his father’s Catholic religion and tradition can be juxtaposed with Leopold’s memory of his own father’s recurrent and disturbing recollection of the apostate Nathan’s flagrant betrayal of his Jewish roots:

“Nathan’s voice! His son’s voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his father and the God of his father.”

Like Nathan the apostate, Rudolph Virag/Bloom, Leopold’s father, has also rejected his Jewish roots, but unlike Nathan, in his case this was an unwilling rejection, which was pursued to in order marry Ellen, and which did not prevent him from instilling in his son Leopold not only a modicum of Jewish religious knowledge and tradition, but also an open and unswerving pride in his Jewish heritage, especially when later in the day (in the Cyclops episode), after being hounded for his ostensible Jewishness by “the Citizen”, a virulently anti-Semitic Irish nationalist,  he bravely tells his detractor that “Mendelsohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercandante and Spinoza. And the Savior was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God…your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.”