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CULTURE SHOCK:IT WOULD HAVE been a great comfort in the years of my youth had I known that Leopold Bloom was buried in my back garden. I grew up on Aughavannagh Road in a then Dublin Corporation housing estate of Crumlin. Our back wall was the wall of the Dolphin’s Barn Jewish cemetery. It was not until I read Dermot Keogh’s Jews in 20th-Century Irelandthat I discovered that the bones of perhaps the most famous literary character of the modernist movement lay somewhere between us and the cemetery, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

Asher Benson, one of the repositories of the memories of Dublin’s Jewish community met, in the Bleeding Horse pub on Camden Street, a man called “Sniffer Cohen”. Cohen told him that, in 1942, he had been called to Bloom’s deathbed. Bloom – the son of a Hungarian Jew who had converted to Catholicism – said “Promise me to bury me in the Jewish cemetery in Dolphin’s Barn.” He then swallowed a jug of porter, and died cursing James Joyce, with whom he swore to settle accounts in hell.