Synopsis
The play speculates on how Joyce's aesthetic was influenced by his identification with Judaism, with the Joyce character in the play seeing the Wandering Jew as a metaphor for the type of artist-in-exile he would become. The play draws on several real-life experiences of Joyce, and also on the life of a contemporary Jewish family in Dublin, the Kahns. Henry Kahn, who is paralleled with Leopold Bloom in the play, was the subject of a mistrial, which is alluded to in Ulysses, with the anti-Semitic judge in question, Sir Frederick Falkiner, making several appearances in the book, including in a dream where he sentences Bloom to death.