ABSTRACT
A particularly odious joke did the rounds at my secondary school in Dublin during the late 1970s: a man walking home from the pub in Belfast one night is hauled into an alleyway by another man who points a pistol at his head. ‘Catholic or Protestant?’ asks the gunman. ‘Actually, I’m Jewish’ says the first man. ‘I must be the luckiest Arab in Belfast’ says the other, and pulls the trigger. The ‘humour’ here depends on the listener’s knowledge of two contexts:
firstly, the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland which, by the time I heard the joke, had been a part of Irish life (north and south of the border) for a decade or so; secondly, contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the bitter ethno-religious conflict consequent upon the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. Ostensibly orientated towards the first, the joke ‘turns’ on the incongruous invocation of the second; we ‘get’ it, the tension resolves, the Jew dies. Bernard MacLaverty’s long short story ‘My Dear Palestrina’ (in A Time to
Dance 1982: 31-67) also introduces a Jewish presence – in the form of the exiled Polish music teacher Marysia Schwartz – into the context of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. Both her religion and her profession throw into relief certain aspects of Northern Irish society in the pre-‘Troubles’ era. The story also serves as an early indication of the role played by art in MacLaverty’s work, and in particular the function of music in relation to the sectarian society in which he grew up.
