Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler CC (27 January 1931 – 3 July 2001) was a Canadian novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and satirist whose novels of Jewish Montreal — particularly The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971), Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), and Barney’s Version (1997) — made him one of the great comic novelists in the English language and the most important literary chronicler of Canadian Jewish life. He was also Canada’s most feared satirist, whose essays and polemics on Quebec nationalism, Canadian cultural policy, and literary pretension made him a permanent source of controversy.

Life

Richler was born and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Jewish neighbourhood of Montreal — a world of immigrant families, Orthodox synagogues, cheap flats, and fierce ambition that would become the setting for his greatest fiction. His grandfather was a rabbi; his parents’ marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce. At nineteen he fled to Paris, then London, where he lived for nearly twenty years, writing novels and screenplays (including the adaptation of his own Duddy Kravitz and the script for Life at the Top).

He returned to Montreal in 1972 and became the most prominent — and most combative — literary figure in Canada. His attacks on Quebec language laws, his savage review of Canadian arts funding, and his mockery of Canadian cultural nationalism made him simultaneously the most admired and most resented Canadian writer of his generation. He smoked cigars, drank Scotch, played poker, and said exactly what he thought in print. He died of kidney cancer at seventy.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

Richler’s breakthrough novel and one of the great picaresque comedies. Duddy Kravitz, a working-class Jewish boy from St. Urbain Street, is driven by his grandfather’s maxim that “a man without land is nobody.” He schemes, hustles, exploits, and betrays his way toward acquiring a piece of lakefront property in the Laurentians — destroying several relationships along the way.

Duddy is a magnificent creation — ambitious, energetic, vulgar, funny, and finally pathetic. Richler refuses to sentimentalise him (Duddy’s treatment of the epileptic Virgil is genuinely cruel) or to condemn him entirely (Duddy’s hunger is the hunger of the immigrant, the outsider’s desperate need for legitimacy). The 1974 film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, is one of the finest Canadian films ever made.

St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971)

Richler’s most complex and ambitious novel. Jake Hersh, a Canadian-Jewish television director living in London, is on trial for indecent assault — but the novel is really about Jake’s obsession with his cousin Joey, a mysterious figure who may or may not be a Nazi-hunter, an adventurer, an Israeli agent, or a fraud. Jake’s fantasy of Joey as a Jewish avenger — the horseman who rides out to punish the persecutors — is Richler’s exploration of post-Holocaust Jewish identity: the desire for justice, the longing for heroism, the fear that the heroic narrative is a delusion. Won the Governor General’s Award.

Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)

Richler’s most ambitious novel — a sprawling, multi-generational saga of the Gursky family (loosely based on the Bronfman whisky dynasty) that spans from the Franklin Expedition of 1845 to modern Montreal. The novel is a dazzling construction, mixing comic realism with elements of magic, mythology, and Jewish mysticism. It is Richler’s Great Canadian Novel — an attempt to capture the full scope of Canadian history through the lens of one extraordinary family.

Barney’s Version (1997)

Richler’s last and most personal novel. Barney Panofsky — a foulmouthed, scotch-drinking television producer with three marriages behind him and Alzheimer’s disease closing in — writes his memoirs, getting facts wrong, contradicting himself, and gradually losing his grip on the past even as he tries to preserve it. The novel is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking. Won the Giller Prize.

Children’s Books and Essays

Richler wrote the beloved children’s series beginning with Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975). His essay collections — Hunting Tigers Under Glass (1968), Shovelling Trouble (1972), Home Sweet Home (1984), Broadsides (1990) — are savage, funny, and invariably controversial.

Critical Standing

Richler is now recognised as one of the most important Canadian writers and one of the great comic novelists in English — comparable to Philip Roth (with whom he shares the territory of Jewish male anxiety) and Saul Bellow (whose intellectual comedy he admired). His St. Urbain Street is as much a literary geography as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Joyce’s Dublin.

The Roth comparison is particularly illuminating: both writers drew on the same sources (immigrant Jewish communities, the tension between loyalty and escape, the comedy of sexual desire and masculine inadequacy), but their temperaments diverged. Roth was a virtuoso of voice and consciousness; Richler was a satirist and storyteller whose comedy was more social and less psychoanalytical. Richler was also, crucially, a Canadian — and his Canadianness was not incidental. He understood the particular condition of being from a country that the rest of the world barely noticed, and he used that provincialism as both subject and vantage point. His contempt for Canadian cultural pretension was not self-hatred but a specific, informed critique of a country that he loved deeply and found endlessly exasperating.

Collecting Richler

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959, André Deutsch) in first UK edition brings $100–$300. St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971, Weidenfeld & Nicolson) first editions bring $50–$150. Canadian first editions (McClelland & Stewart) are also collected. Barney’s Version (1997, Knopf Canada) is available for $15–$40.