Any time I’ve been interviewed, I’m always asked where did I get my research on the people who lived in Jewtown. There was very little there but one of the sources came from a really good book if one is interested in the history of the Jewish people in Ireland. Dermot Keogh’s History of the Jews of 20th Century Ireland is a fascinating read. It mainly centres on the Dublin Jewish community and a lot about the politics during the Second World War but there were two pages dedicated to Jewtown.
The two pages consist of a map of Jewtown and a summary of the census records from 1901 and 1911. There are a few links to other texts and some autobiographies, which made things a little bit more interesting. From these snippets, I tried to reimagine the lives of some of these residents and how they must have felt. In the larger image, you should be able to make out some of the ideas I came up with – some of which did come to fruition. For example, if you look in the left margin of the pages, you’ll see Two Sisters and Mary and Joseph. Two Sisters was one of the first poems I wrote for Jewtown and very early versions of Mary and Joseph went through 3-4 years of edits. I was also interested to see the discrepancies between Keogh’s work and the actual census records. For example Sarah Hodes is Saran Hodes in Keogh’s book and there were a few inconsistencies with ages of people, which I marked.