A good deal of my writing has been influenced by an interest in the Jewish history I’m connected to through my mum’s side of the family. But I find my dad’s family history interesting too: his ancestors were Irish Quakers, and in the 19th and early 20th Century part of the family lived in Dublin and ran a well-known shop in Great George’s Street South known as ‘Pim’s’ or ‘the Stores’. There are a couple of references to it in Dubliners: in ‘Two Gallants’ the caddish Corley mentions, apropos of the girl he’s pursuing, that “I told her I was in Pim’s. She doesn’t know my name. I was too hairy to tell her that. But she thinks I’m a bit of class, you know.” In ‘Eveline’, which I prefer to ‘Two Gallants’, the titular character works there. As the 19-year-old weighs up whether to leave her painful homelife in Dublin and elope to Argentina with her lover, she wonders:
“What would they say of her in the Stores when they found out she had run away with a fellow? Say she was a fool, perhaps; and her place would be filled up by advertisement. … She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.”
This is such a poignant story, written with such restraint and delicacy. You can hear the silences, feel the weight of Eveline’s own destiny on her shoulders. It’s an exquisite piece of writing.
First published in Dubliners, Grant Richards, 1914, and widely republished since, including by Penguin Classics, 2000)
A Personal Anthology 