“He was, I thought, one of the most authentically Irish-seeming guys I’d ever met, apart from his being Ukrainian. His family left before the Orange Revolution, and now they were scattered all over. A lot of his (very good) English was perfected in Ireland: his Ukrainian accent had an Irish accent. I can’t describe it, but it suited him.”
Attention friends and strangers: there’s a new John Jeremiah Sullivan (Pulphead) essay in the New York Times Book Review, titled “My Debt to Ireland”:
“I landed in Dublin a few days before, having not been in Ireland, other than the airport, since I lived there as a 20-year-old, working in a restaurant, during whatever you call the life phase in which you try to reconnect with your roots — though what ended up happening, as is common in those cases, was I had my whole idea of ‘roots’ and ‘heritage’ and ‘blood wisdom’ and whatnot smacked out of me in a useful way and exposed for mostly self-serving sentimentality. ‘Jesus, Johnny, you’re more Irish than I am,’ said Liam, the little red-cheeked, red-haired chef for whom I chopped vegetables in a railroad kitchen in Cork, after I unspooled for him once more the glory of my Celtic lineage: Sullivan, Mahoney, O’Brien, Cavanaugh, Considine, my Fenian grandfather, my … then he began to berate me for having screwed up the tartar-sauce mixture again, for drinking seven ‘minerals’ on the job one hungover day, for having brazenly lied about knowing even the most basic, life-sustaining things about food preparation when he hired me.”
