The Bloomsday Project

Abstract

If your mother is an obsessive reader with a guarded inner life and you want to understand her and her family history, first you must lure her with literature. The result is The Bloomsday Project, a reported memoir about how a reticent mother and her anxious-to-connect middle-aged daughter travel together through June 16, 1904, the single fictional day of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. For six months, the women meet weekly—sometimes in person, sometimes virtually, but always in the shared dream-realm of fiction—to navigate Ulysses chapter by chapter. Spilling over the novel’s borders, their discussion flows into a multi-year conversation about regret and loss, religion and ethnicity, loyalty and betrayal, and the reading and writing of literature. Their guide is Joyce’s quasi-Jewish protagonist Leopold Bloom: wandering ad salesman, son of a Hungarian Jew turned Protestant convert, born-and-bred Dubliner, and a stranger in his home city. The idiosyncratic Bloom becomes a conduit for the daughter’s investigations into her family’s seldom-discussed history in the Hungarian Holocaust, her mother’s post-war Bronx childhood in an Orthodox-Jewish family of refugees, survivors, and immigrants, and her own identity as a secular, childless Jew several generations removed from genocide.