Ulysses Essay 36 (53:24,31)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 7

“Citrons too…Must be without a flaw, he said.”

As Bloom continues to study the flyer which he picked up at the Jewish butcher, and which apparently caries idealistic depictions of cattle grazing on the Kinneret Farm and orchards planted with olive, citron and orange trees “north of Jaffa”, his thoughts wander from a memory of his wife tasting the olives that he had bought at Andrews the grocer and then “spitting them out” (the pits?) to recollections of his erstwhile Jewish neighbors Citron, Mastiansky and Moisel (all actual Dublin residents in 1904)* and reminiscences of pleasant evenings with Molly at Citron’s home on  St. Kevin’s Parade in the Portobello (“Little Jerusalem”) neighborhood of Dublin (from which the Blooms had since moved in order to take up residence in a more homogeneously Catholic area); then to the citron itself and its unique place in the synagogue ritual on the Festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles); and finally to an image of the scene at Jaffa port as the crates of tissue-covered citrons and oranges are loaded by Arab navvies onto the waiting steamships under the watchful eye of their (Jewish?) overseer.  

“He looked at the cattle blurred in silver heat. Silvered powdered olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning ripening. Olives are packed in jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons too. Wonder is poor Citron still alive in Saint Kevin’s parade. And Mastiansky with the old cither, Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron’s basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild perfume. Always the same year after year. They fetched high prices too, Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times. Must be without a flaw he said. Coming all that way Spain, Gibraltar, Mediterranean, the Levant. Cranes lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them in soiled dungarees.”

And so to the citron, or by its Hebrew name, the etrog. Reading about citron orchards in Palestine, Bloom is reminded of Citron, his onetime Jewish neighbor, identified in Thom’s 1904 reference guide to Dublin as Israel Citron (1876-1951) who lived at 17 St. Kevin’s Parade, and at whose home the Blooms would spend pleasant evenings with Molly relaxing in the Citrons’ basketwork chair. Bloom also remembers visiting another Jewish neighbor, the elderly and religiously observant Nisan Moisel (1814-1909), who lived nearby at 20 Arbutus Place near its junction with Pleasants Street. A third Jewish neighbor, Julius Mastiansky, a grocer at 18 St. Kevin’s Parade, is also recalled, especially for his musical prowess at playing the cither.

Bloom must have visited Moisel a number of times during the autumn Jewish festival of Sukkot, for he recalls in detail handling Moisel’s ritual etrog: it was “nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild perfume. Always the same year after year.” Moisel had told him that the citrons “fetched high prices” not only because they had they been specially imported from afar (from Spain or Gibraltar or the Levant), but because (by Jewish law) they “must be without a flaw.”  

The biblical basis for the use of the etrog (along with three other botanical species) during the Sukkot festival is found in the Torah: “On the first day [of the festival] you shall take the fruit of a beautiful tree, palm branches, boughs of a leafy tree, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days” (Leviticus 23:40). The precise details of these four species were elucidated by the Rabbis of the Talmud, and have remained unchanged over the millennia, as attested to on the obverse of coins of the Bar Kochba revolt (137 C.E.) which shows the four species exactly as they are used in synagogues today.  “The fruit of a beautiful tree” is the etrog (citron); the “palm branches” constitute the “lulav” (a tightly closed frond of the date palm); the “boughs of a leafy tree” are two leafy myrtle branches (“hadasim”); and the “willows of the brook” are three green willow twigs (“aravot”). The lulav, hadasim and aravot are bound together (and then referred to collectively by the name of the predominant component of the threesome as the “lulav”) and held in one hand. In the other hand the fragrant etrog is held abutting the lulav, and the foursome has an important ritual place during the joyful synagogal recitation of Psalms 113-118 (the “Hallel” or “Praise” prayer) on the Festival of Sukkot, with the lulav being shaken in six directions at certain specified points in the service (upwards, downwards, eastwards, northwards, westwards and southwards to indicate the Jewish belief in the ubiquity of God.

 

The etrog occupies an important place in Jewish thought and tradition.  As Bloom has learnt, it “must be without a flaw” and indeed there are a multitude of Halakhic specifications as to what makes an etrog kosher for ritual use. Classically, the citron must have a clear yellow or green rind without any marks or spots, and its “pitam” (made up of the style and stigma on the far extremity of the fruit, opposite the stem) must be unbroken – if it breaks off or is otherwise damaged the etrog become unfit for use. In Israel, prior to the Sukkot festival (which comes just five days after Yom Kippur) markets are set up selling the four species, and it is not unusual to see ultra-Orthodox Hasidim pulling out of their long coats powerful magnifying glasses with which they examine the on sale etrogim for the most minor flaw so as to be certain that they purchase only the best, which, as Moisel tells Bloom certainly “fetch high prices.”

The Hebrew original text in Leviticus 23:40 regarding the etrog is “pri etz hadar” a phrase which is usually translated as “the fruit of a beautiful tree,” although both in classical and modern Hebrew the word “hadar” is an abstract noun signifying “glory” or “splendor” and not really the adjective “beautiful” (Hebrew “yafeh”) (see Essay 3 on the biblical phrase “God enlarge Japheth”). However, the word “hadar” became so closely connected with the etrog, that in modern Hebrew “hadar” has also come to be a generic term for “citrus”, and thus the “Mo’etzet Pri Hadar” (“The Citrus Fruit Board”) is a monopolistic kibbutz-owned body that controls citrus export quotas in Israel and (often unfairly) dictates the supermarket prices of Israeli homegrown citrus fruit. To make matters worse in recent years it is not uncommon to see unpicked oranges, grapefruits and lemons lying rotting in Israeli orchards that are no longer profitable, because cutthroat competition on European markets by Moroccan and Spanish citrus farmers have made the famous Jaffa orange less attractive to the Dutch or Swedish housewife.

The word “etrog” has also undergone a recent rather quaint linguistic metamorphosis, ensuing from the necessity to protect the expensive etrog from any injury which might invalidate its ritual use (especially the loss of the pitam). Hence the etrog is usually wrapped in cotton wool, and for even further protection, many orthodox Jewish families keep a special ceremonial silver box, often engraved with motifs from the Sukkot festival, in which their cotton wool wrapped etrog is placed, and in which it is carried to the synagogue for use during the Sukkot festival. (These silver etrog containers, if antique and well made, often fetch inordinately high prices on the Judaica market, sometimes running into the thousands of dollars). The neologistic transfiguration of the noun etrog into the  verb “le’atreg” (literally “to etrogize”) was first mooted by Channel Two’s canny political pundit Amnon Abramowitz when in 2005 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suddenly shed his hawkish image: To recall – this was Sharon the belligerent I.D.F. general who turned the tide during the 1973 Yom  Kippur War by breaking through a small gap between the two ostensibly victorious Egyptian armies to open a beachhead on the western side of the Suez Canal; the rightwing Minister of Defense who initiated the disastrous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which culminated in the horrendous massacres at the Beirut Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila by the allied Christian Falangists avenging the murder of their leader Bashir Gemayel, not far from Israeli tank positions; and finally the Likud Minister of Housing who in the 1990s was responsible for massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank. So no one believed the story put out in early 2005 by Yoel Marcus, then the leading op-ed writer of the liberal Haaretz daily, that Prime Minister Sharon had told him over breakfast at a Tel Aviv café that he intended later that summer to make a full withdrawal of all Israeli presence from the Gaza Strip (both military and civilian, including some 15,000 right wing religious settlers spread over some ten settlements in the Gaza Strip). This about-face was a bombshell bigger (in Israeli eyes) than Nixon/China, de Gaulle/Algeria or de Klerk/Mandela, especially as just after the previous general election in 2003, Sharon, then the leader of the winning Likud party had told the Labor party leader, Amram Mitzna that a Likud-Labor coalition was out of the question, because “Din Netzarim ke’din Tel Aviv” (“The status of Netzarim is just the same as the status of Tel Aviv”), Netzarim being the tiniest and least important settlement of Jews in the Gaza Strip located some three miles south of Gaza City and at the time inhabited by some sixty fanatically religious and  nationalistic families. But Sharon was as good as his word and soon after his interview with Yoel Marcus, in order to gain political backing in the Knesset for his Gaza withdrawal plan, he split the Likud party, taking most of its members with him (except for a few diehards, including Sharon’s then successful Finance Minister and current Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu), and joined forces with a large segment of the opposition Labor party to create the new ruling (and short-lived) “Kadima” (“Forward”) party.

As it happened at the time of his meeting with Yoel Marcus, Sharon and his two sons, owners of a huge sheep farm in the northwestern Negev (itself located not far from the Gaza Strip) were under police investigation on major charges of corruption. The Israeli press, on the whole left-wing and strongly in favor of the Gaza withdrawal plan (which also indeed had majority support among the public) seemed to downplay the corruption charges while suddenly giving Sharon atypically favorable coverage. According to pundit Amnon Abramowitz, there was a basis for the belief of the religious nationalist sector which violently opposed the Gaza withdrawal (both on ideological and security grounds – some of which were not baseless) that it was the policy of the leftwing press – in Abramowitz’s newly created term – “le-atreg” Sharon, implying that the press was “cotton-wooling” the rotund Prime Minister as if he was an etrog wrapped in cotton wool and kept in an unbreakable silver container.

To support its argument, the right wing opposition had a rallying cry – “Ke’omek ha’chakirah, ken omek ha’nesigah” (“As deep as the investigation goes, so deep will be the withdrawal”) parodying Sharon’s famous and now empty declaration “Din Netzarim ke’din Tel Aviv,” and implying that the disengagement from Gaza was a fraudulent political maneuver on the part of Sharon to escape conviction. In spite of the religious right’s oppositional efforts, including bringing  thousands of young enthusiastic supporters to physically oppose the retreat, the total Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, both civilian and military, (and also from three settlements in the northern West Bank near Jenin) went off without a single casualty under the burning sun of August 2005 with overwhelming public support, although in retrospect there is a now a large body of Israeli public opinion who hold that the withdrawal has proved over the past decade to have been a disaster, with Palestinian Gaza having been taken over one year later by the uncompromising Islamist Hamas sector. The Hamas leadership not only instituted a highly conservative and undemocratic regime, but also consistently rained down rockets on Israel’s civilian population, first on nearby towns and villages such as Ashkelon and Sderot, but lately, especially during the last Israeli-Hamas conflict in 2014, reaching targets as far as Tel Aviv, the Jerusalem hills and (most strategically) Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s single commercial air link with the outside world.

But in August 2006 Sharon’s about-turn had not finished. Following the disengagement from Gaza, he now intended to make a further withdrawal from the populated areas of the Palestinian West Bank (hinted to by his decision to evacuate the three West Bank settlements along with the Gaza withdrawal) and to this end he called an election to be held in March 2006, with himself leading the centrist and now highly popular Kadimah party. Here fate took a hand: in December 2005 he suffered a minor stroke which his doctors attributed to a paradoxical embolism through a patent foramen ovale (an aperture between the two atria of the heart which usually closes after birth). They recommended that the defect should be closed by performing an elective innovative cardiac catheterization procedure, which was scheduled for January 5 2006. While awaiting the closure procedure the 78-year-old Sharon was started on low molecular weight heparin blood thinners to prevent another clot going to the brain and causing a further ischemic stroke. On January 5, 2006, one day prior to the scheduled therapeutic catheterization procedure, Sharon suffered a massive brain hemorrhage, which left him comatose until his death eight years later on January 11, 2014.

His successor as leader of the Kadimah party, Ehud Olmert, was elected to be Prime Minister in March 2006 with an impressive majority in the Knesset, admittedly on the coattails of the comatose Sharon. While trying to put a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians into effect (especially at a meeting with the Palestinian leader, Abu Maazen, in Annapolis in 2009) Olmert too suddenly found himself the object of a corruption investigation, leading to his resignation, the sidelining of the peace process, and the subsequent election of the hardline Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been Prime Minister ever since, while Olmert (at the time of writing) languishes in prison. This time no amount of “etroging” by the pro-peace press could help Olmert escape being found guilty of criminal charges of having accepted bribes as Mayor of Jerusalem in the 1990s to allow the illegal rezoning of the site of the much loved old Holyland Hotel in the southern reaches of West Jerusalem, and the subsequent erection on its site of the hideous and pretentious “Holyland Park Apartment Complex”, which to this day uglifies the Jerusalem skyline.

But unlike the unsightly “Holyland Apartment Complex” the flawless etrog continues to delight. According to one rather idealistic homiletic interpretation the etrog is the most desirable of the four species because it is both fragrant and tasty (in contrast to the palm whose dates are tasty but lack fragrance; the myrtle branch which is fragrant but has no taste, and the willow twig, which has neither fragrance nor taste). The coming together of the four different species during the recitation of the “Hallel”, so the homily goes, is supposedly analogous of the unity and legitimacy of all types of Jews, with “taste” representing learning and “fragrance” piety. Thus the etrog (tasty and fragrant) is the “talmid chacham” who is both scholarly and pious; the date palm (only tasty) is the “apikoros” who has studied the Torah but has heretically rejected its teachings; the myrtle (only fragrant) is the “am ha’aretz” who is pious but unlearned; and finally the poor willow (neither tasty nor fragrant) is the “boor” who is both unlearned and irreligious: all four types are “kosher” Jews.

And what about Leopold Bloom? In spite of his halakhically non-Jewish maternal ancestry, I like to think of him as a very special Jew, perhaps even a member of a “fifth species” (the shamrock?).

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* The addresses and biographical details of Bloom’s erstwhile Jewish “neighbors” are taken from Gifford & Seidman: “Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses”, University of California Press; Second Edition, 1988, p. 74