January 13: Leopold Bloom

James Joyce, the great modernist who created one of the most famous Jewish fictional characters of the 20^th century, Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, died in Zurich at 58 on this date in 1941. Bloom is portrayed as the son of a Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish Protestant mother. He is married to Molly. Bloom is uncircumcised, irreligious, and a convert to Catholicism for the sake of his marriage, yet he regularly meets with ridicule for being Jewish. The character was based on Joyce’s Jewish friend Aron Ettore Schmitz, who under the pseudonym Italo Svevo wrote Zeno’s Conscience, a novel that Joyce championed and had translated into French and published in Paris. Zeno’s Conscience was heavily Freudian and confined all of its action to Trieste, just as Ulysses is narrowly focused on Bloom’s perambulations in the course of a day in Dublin. Ulysses was first published in its entirety in 1922. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it first on a list of the hundred best English-language novels of the 20^th century.

“[Y]es I said yes I will Yes.” —Molly Bloom (in reply to Leopold’s marriage proposal)