Everything about Mordecai Richler totally explained
Mordecai Richler (
January 27,
1931 –
July 3,
2001) was a
Canadian author,
Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,
Barney's Version, and the
Jacob Two-Two children's stories. Richler's uncompromising opinions on contemporary Canada easily matched, and sometimes exceeded, the
satirical sting of his fiction.
Early years and travel
The son of a scrapyard dealer, Richler was born and raised on St. Urbain Street in the
Mile End area of
Montreal,
Quebec, a neighbourhood he'd later immortalize in his novels. He graduated from
Baron Byng High School. Richler then enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now
Concordia University) to study English but dropped out before completing his degree. He moved to
Paris,
France at age nineteen, intent on following in the footsteps of a previous generation of literary exiles. Richler returned to Montreal in 1952, working briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then moved to
London,
England in 1954. Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", he returned to Montreal in 1972, but continued to spend part of each year in London.
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Richler's career took off with the publication of 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
the Main (Boul. St. Laurent). Richler wrote poignantly of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.
To a middle-class stranger, it's 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 1974
movie version was directed by Richler's friend
Ted Kotcheff and starred
Richard Dreyfuss in his first leading role. Richler and
Lionel Chetwynd co-wrote the screenplay.
Richler as commentator
Throughout his career, Richler wrote acerbic journalistic commentary and delighted in the role of contrarian provocateur. He was an iconoclast with little tolerance for pretense or pomposity. In a characteristic putdown, Richler called Canadian film entrepreneurs "snivelling little greasers on the make." Richler contributed to
The Atlantic Monthly,
Look, and
The New Yorker. In his later years, Richler was a newspaper columnist for
The National Post and Montreal's
The Gazette. He was often critical of Quebec and Canadian nationalism. Another favorite Richler target was the government-subsidized
Canadian literary movement of the 1970s and 80s. Late in life, the onetime
enfant terrible seemed happy to settle into the role of curmudgeon. What never changed were Richler's caustic comments and disheveled appearance. He was more than willing to say the unsayable — though often in a weary mumble, with head bowed, hair askew and drink in hand.
Richler was made a Companion of the
Order of Canada in 2001, just a few months before his death. It was an ironic finale that might have made a memorable scene in a Richler novel: a fierce critic of the Canadian establishment accepting the country's highest honour.
Proponents and critics
Many critics distinguished between Richler the author and Richler the polemicist. Richler frequently said in interviews that 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, and he's been described in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as "one of the foremost writers of his generation". A 2004 oral biography by Michael Posner was entitled
The Last Honest Man.
Detractors called Richler's satire heavy-handed and noted his propensity for recycling material, incorporating elements of his journalism into later novels. Some critics thought Richler more adept at sketching striking scenes than crafting coherent narratives. Richler's ambivalent relationship with Montreal's Jewish community was captured in
Mordecai and Me, a book by Joel Yanofsky published in 2003.
Richler's most frequent conflicts were with the Jewish community, English Canadian nationalists, and Quebec nationalists.
Richler's long-running dispute with Quebec nationalists was fuelled by magazine articles he wrote in American publications between the late 1970s and mid 1990s. The articles criticized Quebec's language laws, and
separatism. Critics took particular exception to Richler's allegations of anti-semitism.
In
The Atlantic Monthly, around the time of the
first election of the
Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1976, Richler linked the PQ to Nazism, by asserting that the theme song of the 1976 PQ campaign "À partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous appartient" was a Nazi song, "Tomorrow belongs to me..." the chilling
Hitler Youth song from
Cabaret. Neither the remainder of the text, nor the music, are related. Furthermore, the
Cabaret song, never sung in Nazi Germany, was written in the 1960s by
John Kander, a Jewish American lyricist and composer, not German fascists. "À partir d'aujourd'hui" was written by well-known songwriter
Stéphane Venne when he was asked to compose a song for an advertisement of the
Caisses populaires Desjardins credit union. In
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Richler acknowledges the error, blaming himself for having "cribbed" the information from an article by
Irwin Cotler and
Ruth Wisse for the Jewish American magazine
Commentary. Co-writer of the
Commentary article Cotler eventually issued a written apology to Lévesque. Richler also apologized for the incident and called it an "embarrassing gaffe".
His views were strongly criticized by some in Quebec and to some degree among
Anglophone Canadians. His detractors maintained that Richler had an outdated and stereotyped view of Quebec society, and that he risked polarizing relations between French and English. After the publication of
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec,
Pierrette Venne, a future
Bloc Québécois MP called for the book to be banned. Daniel Latouche compared the book to
Mein Kampf. Nadia Khouri believes that there was a racist undertone in some of the reaction to Richler, emphasizing that he wasn't "one of us" or that he wasn't a "real Quebecer" Additionally some passages were deliberately misquoted; a section in which he said that Quebec women were treated like "sows" was misinterpreted to suggest that Richler thought they were sows. Other French writers also thought there had been an overreaction, including 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. Richler had always attacked nationalists, including English Canadians, Israelis and
Zionists. Some Quebecers acclaimed Richler for his courage and for attacking the orthodoxies of Quebec society, and he's been described as "the most prominent defender of the rights of Quebec's anglophones."
The reaction to Richler's book itself raised concerns for some commentators about the persistence of antisemitism among sections of the Quebec population. He received death threats, including a threat to blow up the hospital in which he was staying, and letters with swastikas drawn on them; a Francophone journalist yelled at one of his sons that "if your father was here, I'd make him relive the holocaust right now!", while an editorial cartoon in the French press compared him to Hitler. The criticism that he wrote his essay on Quebec for money was seen as evoking old stereotypes of Jews, and the demands made for leaders of the Jewish community to dissociate themselves from Richler were seen as indicating that Richler, although born in Quebec and for a time married to a French-Canadian, was "not part of the tribe" because he was anglo and
Jewish.
Following
Jacques Parizeau's comment on the day of the
1995 referendum, where the latter attributed the loss to "money and the ethnic vote", Richler created the "Impure Wool Society" which granted the "
Prix Parizeau" to a distinguished non-Francophone writer of Quebec. The group's name plays on the expression "québécois
pur laine", typically used to refer to Québécois with extensive French-Canadian ancestry. The prize (with an award of $3000) was granted twice:
Benet Davetian in 1996 for
The Seventh Circle, and
David Manicom in 1997 for
Ice In Dark Water.
Animator
Caroline Leaf created an
Academy Award-nominated animation in 1976 titled
The Street, based on Richler's 1969 short story of the same name.
Family life
Richler divorced Catherine Boudreault to marry his second wife, Florence. He adopted her son Daniel. The couple had five children, including:
- Daniel Richler - A longstanding figure in Canadian media and broadcasting, Daniel Richler has written a semi-autobiographical novel, Kicking Tomorrow (1991). The protagonist's father bears many similarities to Mordecai Richler.
- Emma Richler - author of a collection of linked short stories Sister Crazy (2001), which features a father modeled on her own. A novel, Feed My Dear Dogs was published in 2005.
- Jacob Richler - an author and columnist.
- Noah Richler - a journalist, radio producer and host, and author of This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada (2006).
- Martha Richler - a cartoonist who published a daily cartoon, most recently, in London's Evening Standard, using the pen-name "Marf". Her cartoons are in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Charles Saatchi Collection. She also wrote the companion guide to Washington's National Gallery of Art, A World of Art.
Leah Rosenberg, Richler's mother, published an autobiography,
The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses Mordecai's birth and upbringing.
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.
1974 Screenwriters 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 Barney's Version
1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean region)Barney's Version
2000 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.
2001 Companion of the Order of Canada
2004 Number 98 on the CBC's television show about great Canadians, The Greatest Canadian
Barney's Version was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2004, championed by author Zsuzsi Gartner. Cocksure was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2006, championed by actor and author Scott Thompson
Barney's Version was also adapted to radio by the CBC
Bibliography
Fiction
The Acrobats (1954) (also published as Wicked We Love
, July 1955)
Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)
A Choice of Enemies (1957)
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)
The Incomparable Atuk (1963)
Cocksure (1968)
The Street (1969)
St. Urbain's Horseman (1971)
Joshua Then and Now (1980)
Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)
Barney's Version (1997)
Fiction for children
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)
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)
Aarons pants
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
Life at the Top (1965) (screenplay from novel by John Braine)
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (film) (1974) (Screenwriters Guild Award and Oscar screenplay nomination)
The Street (short animation) (1976) (External Link) Oscar Nomination
Fun with Dick and Jane (1977 film) (with David Giler & Jerry Belson, from a story by Gerald Gaiser)
The Wordsmith (TV) (1979)
Joshua Then and Now (film) (1985)Further Information
Get more info on 'Mordecai Richler'.
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