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ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 only consider that Joyce chose a Jewish protagonist for his second novel to realize the fascination which the entire psychology of Jews held for him. However, the most problematic section of Nadel's book for me was his discussion of Jewish texts and their place in the minds of Jewish scholars and the Jewish psyche in general. Admittedly Nadel's description of the formation, purpose and substance of the texts is patiently and clearly spelled out for the non-Jewish reader. For someone like me it provided a wealth of new information in perfectly understandable terms, and alone was worth the price of the book. What bothered me was a sort of myopia, perfectly understandable in a book with a well-defined thesis and point of view, that suggests that the Rabbinical mindset may have been more important in Joyce's thinking than the Roman Catholic or Thomistic influences we have heard so often ascribed to him. Everything that Nadel had to say about the similarities between the Wake and the Talmud, and the raising of the former to the dignity of holy text, has all been said before by Robert Boyle about the Wake and the Bible, even if not in such specifically blasphemous terms. Granted the orality of the Talmud, the comparison of the lernen pattern to Wake reading groups is pleasant but not necessarily convincing, since the same case might be made for the problem of nuclear fission and the Teller-Fermi group in Chicago. In Miami students still gather in groups to discuss the imponderables of The Great Gatsby. Likewise süence is also as much a monkish concept as a Jewish one: a reaction to the profane. I don't intend to assert that Joyce remained oblivious to or was not influenced by the Talmud and its reception by the Jews; rather I simply want to insert a cautionary word that as ambiguous a text as either Ulysses or the Wake is the product of an equally ambiguous set of stimulae and analogues. Since Nadel's own thesis derives in part from the ambiguity of Jewish texts, I think he would agree that we must apply some of the same skepticism regarding the certainty of Joyce's sources. Quibbles notwithstanding, Joyce and the Jews is a major work that will have to be considered seriously by biographical and textual scholars and critics for years to come. Zack Bowen University of Miami 'Scandiknavery' Between Hard Covers Morris Beja and Shari Benstock, eds. Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. 396 pp. $30.00 122 Book Reviews DURING THE 1930s those on the political Left liked to boast that they not only had the right ideas about social change, but also that they threw the best parties. Since the 1960s, Joyceans could make simüar claims about their symposia: after all, Joyce is widely acknowledged as the modern author most deserving of sustained critical attention, and Joyceans are widely regarded as the folks with the smarts, the wit, and the savoir faire necessary to put together firstrate academic meetings. From all accounts, the 1986 International Joyce Symposium held in Copenhagen did nothing to damage these sentiments. No doubt some of the papers delivered during the weeklong meetings deserved the yawns and amnesia that were their fate, but the eighteen essays collected between the covers of Coping with Joyce make it clear that new, even controversial ground is being explored by very lively minds. The Copenhagen conclave was the tenth in a series of bi-annual International Symposia that began in Dublin some two decades ago under the general sponsorship of the James Joyce Foundation. For many, "venerating" Joyce—which meant everything from eating the kidneys that Bloom ate on 16 June 1904 to reduplicating the crossed processions of "Wandering Rocks"—was reason enough for making the pilgrimage to Dublin. Increasingly, however, there are those who would prefer to keep the adulation to a minimum, and instead, to keep a sharper eye on the text. As Beja and Benstock put it in the introduction : Veneration has met with skepticism by the younger generation of Joyceans, some...

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