Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001)[1] was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997). His 1970 novel St. Urbain's Horseman and 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's fantasy series. In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about Canadian and Quebec nationalism. Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-Semitism, generated considerable controversy.

Mordecai Richler

CC
Pencil sketch of Mordecai Richler
Born(1931-01-27)January 27, 1931
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DiedJuly 3, 2001(2001-07-03) (aged 70)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Resting placeMount Royal Cemetery
NationalityCanadian
OccupationWriter
Spouse(s)
    Catherine Boudreau
    ​
    (
    m. 1954, divorced)
      Florence Isabel Mann (née Wood)
      ​
      (
      m. 1961⁠–⁠2001)
      Children

      Biography

      Early life and education

      The son of Lily (née Rosenberg) and Moses Isaac Richler,[2] a scrap yard dealer, Richler was born on January 27, 1931,[3] and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Mile End area of Montreal, Quebec. He learned English, French and Yiddish, and graduated from Baron Byng High School. Richler enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) to study, but did not complete his degree there. Years later, Richler's mother published an autobiography, The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses Mordecai's birth and upbringing, and the sometimes difficult relationship between them. (Mordecai Richler's grandfather and Lily Richler's father was Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, a celebrated rabbi in both Poland and Canada and a prolific author of many religious texts, as well as religious fiction and non-fiction works on science and history geared for religious communities.)

      Richler moved to Paris at age nineteen, intent on following in the footsteps of a previous generation of literary exiles, the so-called Lost Generation of the 1920s, many of whom were from the United States.

      Career

      Richler returned to Montreal in 1952, working briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then moved to London in 1954. He published seven of his ten novels, as well as considerable journalism, while living in London.

      Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", Richler returned to Montreal in 1972. He wrote repeatedly about the Anglophone community of Montreal and especially about his former neighbourhood, portraying it in multiple novels.

      Marriage and family

      In England, in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, a non-Jewish French-Canadian divorcee nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met and was smitten by Florence Mann (née Wood), another non-Jewish young woman then married to Richler's close friend, screenwriter Stanley Mann.[4]

      Some years later Richler and Mann both divorced their prior spouses and married each other, and Richler adopted her son Daniel. The couple had four other children together: Jacob, Noah, Martha and Emma. These events inspired his novel Barney's Version.

      Richler died of cancer on July 3, 2001 at the age of 70.[3][5]

      He was also a second cousin of novelist Nancy Richler.[6]

      Journalism career

      Throughout his career, Mordecai wrote journalistic commentary, and contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, Look, The New Yorker, The American Spectator, and other magazines. In his later years, Richler was a newspaper columnist for The National Post and Montreal's The Gazette. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he wrote a monthly book review for Gentlemen's Quarterly.

      He was often critical of Quebec but Canadian Federalism as well. Another favourite Richler target was the government-subsidized Canadian literary movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Journalism constituted an important part of his career, bringing him income between novels and films.

      The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

      Richler published his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, in 1959. The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s in the neighbourhood of Montreal east of Mount Royal Park on and about St. Urbain Street and Saint Laurent Boulevard (known colloquially as "The Main"). Richler wrote of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.

      To a middle-class stranger, it is true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here a prized lot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there.[7]

      Following the publication of Duddy Kravitz, according to The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Richler became "one of the foremost writers of his generation".[8]

      Reception

      Many critics distinguished Richler the author from Richler the polemicist. Richler frequently said his goal was to be an honest witness to his time and place, and to write at least one book that would be read after his death. His work was championed by journalists Robert Fulford and Peter Gzowski, among others. Admirers praised Richler for daring to tell uncomfortable truths; Michael Posner's oral biography of Richler is titled The Last Honest Man (2004).

      Critics cited his repeated themes, including incorporating elements of his journalism into later novels.[9] Richler's ambivalent attitude toward Montreal's Jewish community was captured in Mordecai and Me (2003), a book by Joel Yanofsky.

      The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz has been performed on film and in several live theater productions in Canada and the United States.

      Controversy
      Main article: Delisle–Richler controversy

      Richler's most frequent conflicts were with members of the Quebec nationalist movement. In articles published between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, Richler criticized Quebec's restrictive language laws and the rise of sovereigntism.[10][11] Critics took particular exception to Richler's allegations of a long history of anti-Semitism in Quebec.[12]

      Soon after the first election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, Richler published "Oh Canada! Lament for a divided country" in the Atlantic Monthly to considerable controversy. In it, he claimed the PQ had borrowed the Hitler Youth song "Tomorrow belongs to me..." for their anthem "À partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous apartient",[13][14] though he later acknowledged his error on the song, blaming himself for having "cribbed" the information from an article by Irwin Cotler and Ruth Wisse published in the American magazine, Commentary.[15] Cotler eventually issued a written apology to Lévesque of the PQ. Richler also apologized for the incident and called it an "embarrassing gaffe".[16]

      In 1992 Richler published Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, which parodied Quebec's language laws. He commented approvingly on Esther Delisle's The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-Wing Nationalism in French Canada from 1929–1939 (1992), about French-Canadian anti-Semitism in the decade before the start of World War II. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! was criticized by the Quebec sovereigntist movement and to a lesser degree other anglophone Canadians.[17] His detractors claimed that Richler had an outdated and stereotyped view of Quebec society, and fear-mongered that he risked polarizing relations between francophone and anglophone Quebecers. Sovereigntist Pierrette Venne, later elected as a Bloc Québécois MP, called for the book to be banned.[18] Daniel Latouche compared the book to Mein Kampf.[19]

      Nadia Khouri believes that there was a discriminatory undertone in the reaction to Richler, noting that some of his critics characterized him as "not one of us"[20] or that he was not a "real Quebecer".[21] She found that some critics had misquoted his work; for instance, in reference to the mantra of the entwined church and state coaxing females to procreate as vastly as possible, a section in which he said that Quebec women were treated like "sows" was misinterpreted to suggest that Richler thought they were sows.[22] Québécois writers who thought critics had overreacted included Jean-Hugues Roy, Étienne Gignac, Serge-Henri Vicière, and Dorval Brunelle. His defenders asserted that Mordecai Richler may have been wrong on certain specific points, but was certainly not racist or anti-Québécois.[23] Nadia Khouri acclaimed Richler for his courage and for attacking the orthodoxies of Quebec society.[22] He has been described as "the most prominent defender of the rights of Quebec's anglophones".[24]

      Some commentators were alarmed about the strong controversy over Richler's book, saying that it underlines and acknowledges the persistence of anti-Semitism among sections of the Quebec population.[25] Richler received death threats;[26] an anti-Semitic Francophone journalist yelled at one of his sons, "[I]f your father was here, I'd make him relive the Holocaust right now!" An editorial cartoon in L'actualité compared him to Hitler.[27] One critic controversially claimed that Richler had been paid by Jewish groups to write his critical essay on Quebec. His defenders believed this was evoking old stereotypes of Jews. When leaders of the Jewish community were asked to dissociate themselves from Richler, the journalist Frances Kraft said that indicated that they did not consider Richler as part of the Quebec "tribe" because he was Anglo-speaking and Jewish.[28]

      About the same time, Richler announced he had founded the "Impure Wool Society," to grant the Prix Parizeau to a distinguished non-Francophone writer of Quebec. The group's name plays on the expression Québécois pure laine, typically used to refer to Quebecker with extensive French-Canadian multi-generational ancestry (or "pure wool"). The prize (with an award of $3000) was granted twice: to Benet Davetian in 1996 for The Seventh Circle, and David Manicom in 1997 for Ice in Dark Water.[29]

      In 2010, Montreal city councillor Marvin Rotrand presented a 4,000-signature petition calling on the city to honour Richler on the 10th anniversary of his death with the renaming of a street, park or building in Richler's old Mile End neighbourhood. The council initially denied an honour to Richler, saying it would sacrifice the heritage of their neighbourhood.[30] In response to the controversy, the City of Montreal announced it was to renovate and rename a gazebo in his honour. For various reasons, the project stalled for several years but was completed in 2016.

      Representation in other media

      Awards and recognition
      • 1969 Governor General's Award for Cocksure and Hunting Tigers Under Glass.
      • 1972 Governor General's Award for St. Urbain's Horseman.
      • 1975 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Comedy for screenplay of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
      • 1976 Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award: Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.
      • 1976 Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award for Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang.
      • 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Solomon Gursky was Here
      • 1995 Mr. Christie's Book Award (for the best English book age 8 to 11) for Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case.
      • 1997 The Giller Prize for Barney's Version.
      • 1998 Canadian Booksellers Associations "Author of the Year" award.
      • 1998 Stephen Leacock Award for Humour for Barney's Version
      • 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean region) for Barney's Version
      • 1998 The QSPELL Award for Barney's Version.
      • 2000 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.
      • 2000 Honorary Doctorate, Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec.
      • 2001 Companion of the Order of Canada
      • 2004 Number 98 on the CBC's television show about great Canadians, The Greatest Canadian
      • 2004 Barney's Version was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2004, championed by author Zsuzsi Gartner.
      • 2006 Cocksure was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2006, championed by actor and author Scott Thompson
      • 2011 Richler posthumously received a star on Canada's Walk of Fame and was inducted at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto.[31]
      • 2011 In the same month when he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame, the City of Montreal announced that a gazebo in Mount Royal Park would be refurbished and named in his honour. The structure overlooks Jeanne-Mance Park, where Richler played in his youth.[32]
      • 2015 Richler was given his due as a "citizen of honour" in the city of Montreal. The Mile End Library, in the neighbourhood he portrayed in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was given his name.[33]

      Published works

      Novels

      Short story collection

      Fiction for children
      Jacob Two-Two series[34]
      • Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), illustrated by Fritz Wegner
      • Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)
      • Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case (1995)

      Travel
      • Images of Spain (1977)
      • This Year in Jerusalem (1994)

      Essays
      • Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)
      • Shovelling Trouble (1972)
      • Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)
      • The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)
      • Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)
      • Broadsides (1991)
      • Belling the Cat (1998)
      • Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)
      • Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2002)

      Nonfiction
      • On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001)

      Anthologies
      • Canadian Writing Today (1970)
      • The Best of Modern Humour (1986) (U.S. title: The Best of Modern Humor)
      • Writers on World War II (1991)

      Film scripts
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      See also

      References
      1. DePalma, Anthony (July 3, 2001). "Mordecai Richler, Author, Dies at 70". The New York Times. Retrieved January 2, 2019.
      2. "Mordecai Richler Biography". eNotes.com. Retrieved May 15, 2015.
      3. Mordecai Richler's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
      4. Brownfeld, Allan (1999). "Growing intolerance threatens humane Jewish tradition". Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Retrieved September 26, 2016.
      5. Michael McNay, "Mordecai Richler", The Guardian, July 5, 2001.
      6. "Nancy Richler novel meticulous study of Jews in postwar Montreal". Winnipeg Free Press, April 24, 2012.
      7. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 13
      8. Brown, Ruseell (1997). "Richler, Mordecai". In Benson, Eugene; Toye, William (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Literature (2 ed.). Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press. p. 1000.
      9. "Mordecai Richler: an obituary tribute by Robert Fulford". Robertfulford.com. July 4, 2001. Retrieved August 20, 2011.
      10. Steyn, Mark (September 2001). "Mordecai Richler, 1931–2001". New Criterion. 20 (1): 123–128.
      11. See, "Fighting words." By: Richler, Mordecai. New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1997, Vol. 146 Issue 50810, p8; "Tired of separatism". By: Richler, Mordecai. New York Times, October 31, 1994, Vol. 144 Issue 49866, pA19; "O Quebec". By: Richler, Mordecai. New Yorker, May 30, 1994, Vol. 70 Issue 15, p50; "Gros Mac attack". By: Richler, Mordecai. New York Times Magazine, 18 July 1993, Vol. 142 Issue 49396, p10; "Language Problems." By: Richler, Mordecai. Atlantic, Jun83, Vol. 251 Issue 6, p10, 8p; "OH! CANADA! Lament for a divided country." By: Richler, Mordecai. Atlantic Monthly (0004-6795), Dec1977, Vol. 240 Issue 6, p34;
      12. "Oh Canada, Oh Quebec, Oh Richler". Retrieved May 31, 2018.
      13. Richler, Mordecai. "OH! CANADA! Lament for a divided country," Atlantic Monthly, December 1977, Vol. 240 Issue 6, p34
      14. Video: Controverse autour du livre Oh Canada Oh Québec!, Archives, Société Radio-Canada, March 31, 1992. Retrieved September 22, 2006.
      15. "Faut arrêter de freaker" by Pierre Foglia, La Presse, December 16, 2000
      16. Smith, Donald. D'une nation à l'autre: des deux solitudes à la cohabitation. Montreal: Éditions Alain Stanké, 1997. p. 56.
      17. Smart, Pat. "Daring to Disagree with Mordecai", Canadian Forum May 1992, p.8.
      18. Johnson, William. "Oh, Mordecai. Oh, Quebec," The Globe and Mail July 7, 2001.
      19. "Le Grand Silence", Le Devoir, March 28, 1992.
      20. Richler, Trudeau, "Lasagne et les autres", October 22, 1991. Le Devoir
      21. Sarah Scott, Geoff Baker, "Richler Doesn't Know Quebec, Belanger Says; Writer 'Doesn't Belong', Chairman of Panel on Quebec's Future Insists", The Gazette, September 20, 1991.
      22. Khouri, Nadia. Qui a peur de Mordecai Richler. Montréal: Éditions Balzac, 1995. ISBN 9782921425537
      23. "Hitting below the belt.", By: Barbara Amiel, Maclean's, August 13, 2001, Vol. 114, Issue 33
      24. Ricou, above
      25. Khouri, above, Scott et al., above, Delisle cited in Kraft, below
      26. Noah Richler, "A Just Campaign", The New York Times, October 7, 2001, p. AR4
      27. Michel Vastel, "Le cas Richler". L'actualité, November 1, 1996, p.66
      28. Frances Kraft, "Esther Delisle", The Canadian Jewish News, April 1, 1993, p. 6
      29. Siemens: "Canadian Literary Awards and Prizes", The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada Archived February 5, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
      30. "Mordecai Richler would have enjoyed Montreal memorial controversy | Toronto Star". Thestar.com. March 13, 2015. Retrieved May 15, 2015.
      31. "Press Release: Canada's Walk of Fame Announces the 2011 Inductees". Canada's Walk of Fame. June 28, 2011. Archived from the original on July 10, 2011. Retrieved June 28, 2011.
      32. Peritz, Ingrid (June 24, 2011). "Mordecai Richler to be honoured with gazebo on Mount Royal". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved December 25, 2011.
      33. "Editorial: At last, a Richler library". Montrealgazette.com. March 12, 2015. Retrieved May 15, 2015.
      34. The Jacob Two-Two books are about 100 pages each. Two of them are Richler's only works in Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), which catalogues them as juvenile fantasy novels and reports multiple cover artists and interior illustrators.
          "Mordecai Richler – Summary Bibliography". ISFDB. Retrieved July 25, 2015. Select a title to see its linked publication history and general information. Select a particular edition (title) for more data at that level, such as a front cover image or linked contents.
      35. "The Street". National Film Board of Canada. Retrieved August 21, 2012.

      Further reading
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