Mordecai Richler

Canadian writer

• Born: January 27, 1931
• Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Died: July 3, 2001
• Place of death: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Challenging the myths and realities of both his inherited Jewish and Canadian cultures through his novels and essays, Richler became the first well-known Jewish Canadian writer outside his native country. As a realist and a satirist, Richler fueled controversies for more than four decades, and he died as one of the most respected literary figures in Canada.

Early Life

Mordecai Richler (MOHRD-ih-ki RIHK-lur) grew up in the St. Urbain Street neighborhood of Montreal, the son of Moses Isaac Richler, a scrap-metal dealer, and Lily Leah Rosenberg, the daughter of a rabbinical scholar who had emigrated to Montreal from Galicia in 1904. Richler’s mother published The Errand Runner: Reflections of a Rabbi’s Daughter in 1981.

Richler’s early life in this mainly Jewish working-class section of Montreal would fuel much of his later fiction. He attended the predominantly Jewish Baron Byng High School and studied English for several years at Sir George Williams College (later Concordia University) in Montreal, but he left the program before completing his degree and sailed to Europe in 1951 at the age of nineteen.

Richler would spend almost twenty years living abroad in Paris, in Spain, and, after a brief return in 1952 to Canada for work with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, in London. His literary career began during these expatriate years. He published his first novel, The Acrobats, in 1954, which was soon followed by Son of a Smaller Hero (1955) and A Choice of Enemies (1957). Neither of these early novels found commercial success.

Life’s Work

Richler’s breakthrough work was The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz , which he published in 1959. Like several of his later novels, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz features a Jewish Canadian protagonist in struggle with his society and presents a rich blend of realism and satire. (Richler’s adaptation of the novel into a popular film would win an Academy Award nomination and a Screenwriters Guild of America award, both in 1974.) The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a coming-of-age novel, but, unlike most works of this type, Richler’s novel satirizes not only the society in which he is growing up but also the hero himself, both of which suffer from greed and a tendency to exploit others. The closest model to Richler’s work is probably Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run (1941), which also contains a Jewish antihero and a satirical portrait of an avaricious society. Thanks to Richler’s comic touch, Duddy Kravitz made a fascinating character (played by Richard Dreyfus in the film his first starring role) and won the hearts of many readers.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz led to a Guggenheim Fellowship and to other successes for Richler. The Incomparable Atuk (1963) was his next novel, a satire of Canadian culture, especially its nationalism, through the central character of an Eskimo poet. His next novel, Cocksure (1968), pilloried the media and entertainment industries. In 1972 he returned to Canada and settled in Montreal, and his life work was set. After a failed early marriage, Richler had married his second wife, Florence, in 1960, and their five children all found careers in the arts and media in Canada.

Richler’s later novels continued to develop his earlier settings, characters, and themes. St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971) featured Jacob Hersh, a Canadian writer living in London and looking back on his life and rise to prominence and wondering about the costs of success. Joshua Then and Now (1980) returned to Montreal and a satirical examination of a Jewish Canadian’s moral crises. Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, followed Jewish scholar Moses Berger’s attempt to write the history of one of the central but mysterious families in Canadian commerce (inspired by the real-life Bronfman family of Seagram’s Whiskey fame). Barney’s Version (1997), which won both the Giller Prize and the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour, again featured a protagonist who left behind a Montreal ghetto to achieve fame and fortune.

Soon after his first novels appeared, Richler began to write and publish cultural criticism that carried his trademark satire and humor. As a contributor to Canadian, British, and American periodicals (including The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and The New Yorker), and in columns in Canadian papers (such as The National Post and The Gazette), Richler continued to explore the provincialism, materialism, and hypocrisy that his novels had first exposed. Many of these pieces were collected in the books of nonfiction he published for over thirty years, from Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1969), Shovelling Trouble (1973), and Notes On an Endangered Species and Others (1974), to Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990). In addition, Richler produced collections of essays and memoirs of Canadian life, such as The Street (1969) and Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984), as well as a controversial book on the Quebec sovereignist movement, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992).

Richler also produced a trilogy of popular and award-winning children’s books beginning with Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975), about a boy who has to repeat things so that adults will understand him. The book won both the Ruth Schwartz Book Award and the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children Award. In addition to his fiction, Richler produced a series of screenplays (like Fun with Dick and Jane in 1977 and an adaptation of his Joshua Then and Now in 1985), as well as television and radio plays. Other far-afield books include The Best of Modern Humor (a collection Richler edited in 1984) and On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001). Finally, Richler published two books of travel, Images of Spain (1977) and This Year in Jerusalem (1994).

Significance

In the foreword to his collection of essays Hunting Tigers Under Glass, Richler writes that to be Canadian and Jewish is to emerge from the ghetto twice, a self-definition that also holds the key to Richler’s recognition among world readers. He was one of the best-known Jewish Canadian writers in the twentieth century and the first Canadian writer of Jewish themes with a global readership. His novels, especially The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, helped to introduce readers in the English-speaking world beyond Canada to the particular culture and problems of Montreal’s Jewish community.

Richler functioned throughout his literary career as an outsider. His novels and essays were critical of the Jewish community as well as Canadian culture, and there are few writers who started more literary firestorms than did Richler in his essays and books. The controversies brought him into the literary spotlight, but they also tended to isolate him further as an outsider. Although Richler was an expatriate in Europe for less than two decades, he had a difficult time being accepted as a Canadian again in the years after he returned to Montreal. He continued in a kind of literary exile to the end of his life in the very communities that had given him so many of the rich materials for his literature.

Part of Richler’s importance can be measured by the number of awards he won during his career. In addition to those awards already cited, Richler was given the Governor General’s Award for Cocksure and Hunting Tigers Under Glass in 1969, and again in 1971 for St. Urbain’s Horseman. He was twice short-listed for the British Booker Prize (for St. Urbain’s Horseman and again in 1990 for Solomon Gursky Was Here). In 1998 he won the Canadian Booksellers Association’s Author of the Year award, and, only months before his death in 2001 he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Canada. Few writers have garnered more recognition in their lifetime.

Bibliography

Posner, Michael, ed. The Last Honest Man: Mordecai Richler An Oral Biography. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 2004. This posthumous volume documents Richler’s life through interviews with family and friends, editors, and other writers.

Ramraj, Victor J. Mordecai Richler. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A volume in Twayne’s World Authors series, this study focuses on Richler’s novels and finds that all Richler’s early protagonists reveal an ambivalent outlook toward their world that reflects his own world.

Richler, Mordecai. Mordecai Richler Was Here: Selected Writings. Edited by Jonathan Webb. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. A vast collection of selections from the nearly thirty books penned by Richler. Features his observations on the cities of Montreal, Paris, and London.

Sheps, G. David, ed. Mordecai Richler. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. A collection of essays on Richler’s early novels that includes a detailed study of St. Urbain’s Horseman.

Weintraub, William. Getting Started: A Memoir of the 1950’s With Letters from Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. A memoir by journalist Weintraub who met and became friends with Canadian writers Richler, Gallant, and Moore in the 1950’s, when Canadian literature was flowering. Includes correspondence between Weintraub and the three writers.

Woodcock, George. Mordecai Richler. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland & Stewart, 1971. A useful study of Richler by one of the foremost commentators on Canadian literature. This study of Richler’s work includes work up to The Street.