Ulysses Essay 9 (19:20)
Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 9
 “Salt bread”

While talking to Haines, Stephen is still occupied with Mulligan’s supercilious mien, and with obvious irritation he contemplates the probability that soon Mulligan will request the key to the Martello tower which they have been co-renting, and that he will have to find other lodgings:
“He wants the key. It is mine, I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.”

By “salt bread” Stephen is alluding Dante’s Paradiso in which his dead great-great-grandfather predicts a life of exile for Dante which will entail eating the lower class salty bread of others, as compared to the fine non-salted bread he was used to in Florence. But conversely “bread and salt” has for me a positive connotation. I recall my father, after making the blessing on the two challah breads on Friday night (the double portion recalling God’s instruction to the Israelites in the desert to collect a double portion of manna on Friday to provide for Shabbat as well), breaking the challah into small pieces for all present and then sprinkling salt on each person’s piece. The source of the custom is Talmudic and relates to the idea that with the Temple no longer extant, the table where the family eats represents the Temple altar, and just as the sacrifices in the Temple were salted so do orthodox Jews salt their bread to this day.

Also, not only among Jews, but in Eastern Europe generally and also in the Middle East, it is customary to welcome an important guests on their arrival at a city by presenting them with bread and salt. I have heard that landlords and real estate agents in Israel put out bread and salt for new rentees, although I have never come across this custom myself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ulysses Essay 29 (46:25) Chapter 3 (Proteus) Note 15 “ Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum ” Stephen becomes aware of some clouding of the late spring sky, noting to himself that the summer solstice is only five days off, but dismisses the possibility of a threatening thunderstorm, since there are “ no black clouds anywhere, are there? ” These ruminations of contrasting light and darkness, stir up a vague memory of a line from the Easter Holy Saturday liturgy: " Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum ”     (“ Lucifer, I say, who knows no setting ”), “Lucifer” (literally: “bringing light”) is here a synonym for the morning star (Venus) as clearly expressed in the full version of the liturgical text which, quite typically for Joyce, Stephen has slightly altered by substituting “ dico ” for “inquam ” (Latin synonyms for “ I say ”). The original text runs: “ Flammus eius Lucifer matutinus inveniat. Ille, inquam, Lucifer qui nescit occasum Christus filius tuus, qui, regressus...
Read more
Ulysses Essay 30 (48:1) Chapter 4 (Calypso) Note 1 “Mr Leopold Bloom” We first meet 38-year-old Mr. Leopold Bloom in his home at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin at 8 a.m., just as Stephan Dedalus is breakfasting with Mulligan and Haines in the Martello tower a few miles away on the Dublin seacoast. Bloom too is thinking of food (especially the kidneys and other internal organs that he fancies) while giving his cat a saucer of milk. Bloom, as we later learn, is the son of a Hungarian Jew (Rudolph Virag) and an Irish Protestant mother (Ellen Higgins). Rudolph, in an apparent attempt to conceal his Eastern   European origins, had changed his surname from “Virag” (“flower” in Hungarian) to the quasi-equivalent “Bloom” after immigrating to Ireland. (Bloom in fact gives himself the pseudonym “Flower” in his clandestine and sexually redolent correspondence with Martha Clifford, a woman some time back had responded to Bloom’s ad requesting a typist). Since orthodox Jewish law (“Hal...
Read more
Ulysses Essay 1 (3:5) Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 1   “ Introibo ad altare Dei”   It is 8 am on Thursday morning, 16 June 1904 (3 Tammuz 5664 by the Hebrew calendar), and in a disused Martello military tower overlooking Dublin’s Kingstown Harbor, medical student Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan is performing a mock Catholic mass with his shaving bowl, using the then ubiquitous Latin rite. Mulligan parodies the celebrant of the mass as he begins the rite by declaring “ Introibo ad altare Dei ” - the introductory part of a biblical verse (Psalms 43:4 [Vulgate 42:4]) and constituting the Latin translation of the original Hebrew text: “ Ve’avo’ah el mizbach * Elohim ” -   “I will go to God’s altar”. Taking it a bit further, one cannot but note that Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, who is witnessing Mulligan’s antics with less than approbation, does not join in the fun. Discontented with the presence of Haines, (an obnoxious Englishman that Mulligan has slyly seque...
Read more