Last week I attended the humanist funeral of David Marcus, Ireland’s foremost literary editor, who supported scores of writers by publishing their short stories, novels and poems through his work as literary editor at the Irish Press and editor of more than 30 volumes of Irish short stories.
In addition, Marcus published several novels and short stories of how own, the best known
being A Land Not Theirs (published in 1986), ‘Who has ever heard of an Irish Jew?’ (1990),
and the wonderfully evocative Oughtobiography: Leavesfrom the Diary of aHyphenated Jew
(2001).
Depending on whose version of events you follow, Jewish people first came to Ireland in the
11th or the 16th century, and there has been a small Jewish presence in Ireland ever since.
Jews have made a place for themselves in contemporary Ireland as business people,
professionals, politicians, artists and writers, yet they have by and large been excluded
from current definitions of ethnicity.
To me, Irish Jews are the archetypal ‘others’ of Irish Catholic nationalism. Jews are seen
as unassimilable, as a people apart, and are racialised by a society and a State which, at
the same time, deny the existence of racism. Meanwhile, our daily existence, despite the
prominence of many Irish Jews in business, politics and the arts, is largely obscured from
view.
David Marcus’s life and work is a celebration, not only of the contribution Jewish people
have made to Irish society, but also of what is now called multi- or interculturalism. The
Jewish diaspora is the classic diaspora, and many other diasporic people have modelled
their metaphors on Jewish metaphors, such as the exodus from Egypt or the parting of the
Red Sea. Contemporary Jewish life in Europe falls between the ‘vanishing diaspora’ and a
new space for Jews in the cultures of a changing Europe.
Interestingly, the Jewish diaspora not only illustrates the centrality of exile to
contemporary migrations, but also the blurring between ‘diaspora’ and ‘home’ as migrants
uphold their connections to the countries they have left behind, while at the same time
working towards integration in their new countries.
There is little doubt that David Marcus was fully integrated into Irish society. This
grandson of immigrants from Lithuania who came to Ireland in the 1880s was a major cultural
force. But there is little doubt, too, that he never abandoned his Jewishness,
acknowledging that being born and bred in Ireland “could not make of me a complete Irishman
in the sense of that phrase which is now, thankfully, increasingly out of date.”
His writing material, Marcus writes, was primarily his “identity as a Jew and the
subjective conflicts that engendered”, and he is a prime example of the possibility of
being not ‘either/ or’, but rather ‘both/and’. Integration is not, as our ministers tell
us, about ‘doing things the Irish way’ (whatever that is), but rather contributing to
society while retaining one’s roots, complex as these might be.
Remember, however, that despite Ireland’s contemporary multi/interculturality, even a major
literary figure such as David Marcus is not allowed to fully belong, as he had his
protagonist say as far back as 1954: “By law he might be Irish… [but] … in the end perhaps
only one thing, of all his numerous connections, would remain to cling to him
– his Jewishness.”
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department
ofSociology at Trinity CollegeDublin. Her column appearsfortnightly in Metro Éireann
