A Persistent Interest in the Other: Gerry Mc Donnell's Writings on Irish Jews

Abstract

A Persistent Interest in the Other: Gerry Mc Donnell’s Writings on Irish Jews Shai Afsai For the past five years, sponsored by an annual grant awarded to my Providence synagogue, Congregation Beth Sholom, I have interviewed and photographed members of Jewish communities in different parts of the world, afterward sharing my experiences in Rhode Island and with readers elsewhere. I have looked at Judaism in Israel,1 Nigeria,2 the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine,3 Cuba, Poland and Ireland.4 In preparing for my 2018 summer visit to Ireland, I came across a March 2012 programme produced by Dublin City University’s School of Communication and Inter Faith Centre that featured Zalman Lent, rabbi of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation, as its guest.5 Asked by one of his interviewers about places of Jewish significance in Ireland, Lent highlighted Dublin’s synagogues and its Jewish museum, and then added that the city’s old Jewish cemetery in Ballybough was a noteworthy place to visit, too. He went on to refer to ‘a book of poems … I think it’s called Elegy – Mud Island Elegy – that was written about the graves in the Ballybough Cemetery’, which he described as ‘quite interesting’. Curious about this, I searched online for the book and information about its author. Though out of print, I succeeded in procuring a copy of Mud Island Elegy (2001), once owned by University ollege Dublin’s library, and found it was composed by the contemporary Irish poet and Dublin resident Gerry Mc Donnell. Now a retired civil servant, the sixty-nine year old Mc Donnell, who is a member of the Writers Guild of Ireland and the Irish Writers’Union, subsequently wrote a number of other Jewish-related works put out by the Belfast-based Lapwing Publications. Mc Donnell’s Lapwing oeuvre includes Lost and Found (2003), an extended poem about Mono, a homeless Jewish man living in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and intimated to perhaps be one of the thirty-six righteous ones that, in rabbinic lore, ensure the continued existence of the world; James Joyce: Jewish Influences in Ulysses (2004), a poetry and short essays Shai Afsai Studies • volume 108 • number 431 298 Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 66 21/08/2019 09:14 chapbook revolving around Joyce’s choice to give Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of his sprawling stream-of-consciousness novel, an ethnically Jewish background; and I Heard an Irish Jew (2015), a collection of poems and prose with Jewish content. Having in due course become acquainted with several of his works, I hoped I might be able to see Mc Donnell when I arrived in Ireland, but my initial emails to him were all returned undelivered. Eventually, with the help of Lapwing’s Dennis Greig – who shares Mc Donnell’s curiosity about the Jewish people – I was able to inform Mc Donnell of my desire to connect in Dublin and discuss his work. ‘I’ve received your correspondence from Lapwing Publications. I would like to meet you’, Mc Donnell informed me in an email. ‘I was thinking of the Westin Hotel on Westmoreland Street near Trinity College. I haven’t been in it recently but my memory of it is a spacious and quiet hotel. We should be able to find a suitable spot in which to talk’. First encounter On the agreed day, I made my way to the Westin Hotel from Trinity College’s Manuscript and Archives Research Library, adjoining the famous Long Room, to which I had been granted access during my stay in Dublin in order to gain information on Theodore Lewis, the Dublin-born and Trinity Collegeeducated rabbi who moved to Rhode Island and then served as spiritual leader of Newport’s Touro Synagogue for thirty-six years.6 The Westin Hotel is indeed spacious. After I located Mc Donnell – whitebearded , bespectacled, wearing a blue fedora, blue shirt and blue slacks – we found a quiet spot to sit. I had been looking forward to a pint of beer or a shot of whiskey with the author following my research at Trinity College’s library, but he informed me that he gave up alcohol years ago. We ordered coffee and cookies. I had...