In addition to his fiction, Richler was a journalist, and his non-fiction writing included essays about theJewish community in Canada, and aboutCanadian andQuebec nationalism. Richler'sOh Canada! Oh Quebec! (1992), a book version of an essay that originally appeared inThe New Yorker,[1] generated considerable controversy.
The son of Lily (née Rosenberg) and Moses Isaac Richler,[3] a scrap metal dealer, Richler was born on January 27, 1931, inMontreal, Quebec,[4][2] and raised onSt. Urbain Street in that city'sMile End area. Richler was fluent in English andYiddish but had poor French.[5] Richler graduated fromBaron Byng High School and enrolled inSir George Williams College (nowConcordia University) to study but did not complete his degree. Years later, Richler's mother published an autobiography[6] which discusses Mordecai's birth and upbringing, and the sometimes difficult relationship between them. Mordecai Richler's grandfather and Lily Richler's father wasRabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, a celebrated rabbi in both Poland and Canada,chief rabbi of Montreal, 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's parents had had anarranged marriage which his mother deeply resented. She began an affair with a boarder in 1944 and divorced her husband, events which deeply upset the 12-year-old Richler.[7]
Richler moved to Paris at age nineteen, intent on following in the footsteps of a previous generation of literary exiles, the so-calledLost Generation of the 1920s, many of whom were from the United States. Richler considered his time in Paris studying and writing at his favourite café, the Mabillon on St. Germain des Prés, as the equivalent of university years.[8]
Richler returned to Montreal in 1952, working briefly at theCanadian 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.
In England, in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met and was smitten by Florence Mann (née Wood), then married to Richler's close friend, screenwriterStanley Mann.[9]
Some years later Richler and Mann both divorced their prior spouses and married each other, and Richler adopted her sonDaniel. The couple had four other children together:Noah,Emma,Martha andJacob. These events inspired his novelBarney's Version.
Richler died of cancer on July 3, 2001, in Montreal, aged 70.[4][2][10]
Richler was often critical ofQuebec but ofCanadian federalism as well. Another favourite Richler target was the government-subsidizedCanadian literary movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Journalism constituted an important part of his career, bringing him income between novels and films.
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 ofMount Royal Park including St. Urbain Street andSaint Lawrence Boulevard (or Boulevard Saint Laurent, 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.
— The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 13
Following the publication ofDuddy Kravitz, according toThe Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Richler became "one of the foremost writers of his generation".[12]
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 journalistsRobert Fulford andPeter Gzowski, among others. Admirers praised Richler for daring to tell uncomfortable truths;Michael Posner's oral biography of Richler is titledThe Last Honest Man (2004).
Critics objected to the way his journalistic writing was incorporated by him into his later novels, apparently seeing this as lazy or redundant. Richler's ambivalent attitude toward Montreal's Jewish community was captured inMordecai and Me (2003), a book byJoel Yanofsky.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was made into a film, for which Richler wrote the screenplay, and it was performed on stage in several live theatre productions in Canada and the United States.
Richler had recurrent conflicts with members of theQuebec nationalist movement. In articles published between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, Richler criticized Quebec's restrictive language laws and the rise ofsovereigntism.[13][14] Critics took particular exception to Richler's allegations of a long history of antisemitism in Quebec.[15]
Soon after thefirst election of theParti Québécois (PQ) in 1976, Richler published "Oh Canada! Lament for a divided country" in theAtlantic Monthly to considerable controversy. In it, he claimed the PQ had borrowed theHitler Youth song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from the musicalCabaret for their anthem "À partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous appartient" (which translates as "From today, tomorrow belongs to us"),[16][17] though he later acknowledged his error on the song, blaming himself for having "cribbed" the information from an article byIrwin Cotler andRuth Wisse published in the American magazineCommentary.[18] Richler apologized for the mistake and called it an "embarrassing gaffe".[15][19][20]
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"[24] or that he was not a "real Quebecer".[25] 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.[26] Québécois writers who thought critics had overreacted includedJean-Hugues Roy,Étienne Gignac,Serge-Henri Vicière, andDorval Brunelle. His defenders asserted that Mordecai Richler may have been wrong on certain specific points, but was certainly not racist nor anti-Québécois.[27] Nadia Khouri acclaimed Richler for his courage and for attacking the orthodoxies of Quebec society.[26] He has been described as "the most prominent defender of the rights of Quebec's anglophones".[28]
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.[29] Richler received death threats;[30] 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 inL'actualité compared him to Hitler.[31] One critic controversially claimed that Richler had been paid by Jewish groups to write his critical essay on Quebec. His defenders believed this accusation was evoking old stereotypes of Jews. When leaders of the Jewish community were asked to dissociate themselves from Richler, the journalistFrances Kraft said that indicated that they did not consider Richler as part of the Quebec "tribe" because he was Anglo-speaking and Jewish.[32]
About the same time, Richler announced he had founded the "Impure Wool Society," to grant thePrixParizeau to a distinguished non-Francophone writer of Quebec. The group's name plays on the expressionQuébécoispure 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: toBenet Davetian in 1996 forThe Seventh Circle, andDavid Manicom in 1997 forIce in Dark Water.[33]
In 2010, Montreal city councillorMarvin 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.[34] In response to the controversy, the City of Montreal announced it was to renovate and rename a bandstand, loosely termed a gazebo in media accounts, in his honour.[35] For various reasons, the project stalled for several years but was completed in 2016.[36] Richler has also been honoured with a mural and the renaming of a library.[35]
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz has repeatedly beenadapted as a musical play, i.e. in 1984 (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), 1987 (Philadelphia), and 2015 (Montreal).
The animatorCaroline Leaf createdThe Street (1976), based on Richler's 1969 short story of the same name. It was nominated for anAcademy Award in animation.
2011 In the same month he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame, theCity of Montreal announced that agazebo inMount Royal Park would be refurbished and named in his honour. The structure overlooksJeanne-Mance Park, where Richler played in his youth.[38]
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 inThe Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, was given his name.[39]
World famous in New Zealand (Richler coined the similar phrase "world famous – in Canada" inThe Incomparable Atuk, 30 years before the New Zealand version of the phrase made its first recorded appearance)
^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.
^The Jacob Two-Two books are about 100 pages each. Two of them are Richler's only works inInternet 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.
