Background
The son of Lily and Moses Isaac Richler, a scrap yard dealer, Richler was born on January 27, 1931, and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Mile End area of Montreal.
(From Mordecai Richler, one of our greatest satirists, com...)
From Mordecai Richler, one of our greatest satirists, comes one of literature's most delightful characters, Duddy Kravitz -- in a novel that belongs in the pantheon of seminal twentieth century books. Duddy -- the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal -- is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and totally hilarious. From his street days tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand plan to "be somebody," Duddy learns about living -- and the lesson is an outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy. As Richler turns his blistering commentary on love, money, and politics, The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz becomes a lesson for us all...in laughter and in life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671028472/?tag=2022091-20
(Joshua Then and Now is about Joshua Shapiro today, and th...)
Joshua Then and Now is about Joshua Shapiro today, and the Joshua he was. His father a boxer turned honest crook, his mother an erotic dancer whose greatest performance was at Joshuaâs bar mitzvah, Joshua has overcome his inauspicious beginnings in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal to become a celebrated television writer and a successful journalist. But Joshua, now middle-aged, is not a happy man. Incapacitated by a freak accident, anguished by the disappearance of his WASP wife, and caught up in a sex scandal, Joshua is besieged by the press and tormented by the ghosts of his youth. Set in Montreal, the novel chronicles the rocky journey we all make between the countries of the past and the present. Raucous, opinionated, tender, Joshua Then and Now is a memorable excursion into Mordecai Richler's comic universe. From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394493516/?tag=2022091-20
(This comic novel won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize ...)
This comic novel won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Moses Berger decides to write a history of the wealthy Gursky family in Canada, and traces it back to the mysterious Solomon's grandfather - a forger, Arctic explorer and self-styled rabbi.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394539958/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0771074956/?tag=2022091-20
(St. Urbains Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderful...)
St. Urbains Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in disgrace. His alter ego is his cousin Joey, a legend in their childhood neighbourhood in Montreal. Nazi-hunter, adventurer, and hero of the Spanish Civil War, Joey is the avenging horseman of Jakes impotent dreams. When Jake becomes embroiled in a scandalous trial in London, England, he puts his own unadventurous life on trial as well, finding it desperately wanting as he steadfastly longs for the Horsemans glorious return. Irreverent, deeply felt, as scathing in its critique of social mores as it is uproariously funny, St. Urbains Horseman confirms Mordecai Richlers reputation as a pre-eminent observer of the hypocrisies and absurdities of modern life. From the Hardcover edition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0297003631/?tag=2022091-20
("Among the wonders of St. Urbain, our St. Urbain, there w...)
"Among the wonders of St. Urbain, our St. Urbain, there was a man who ran for alderman on a one-plank platform - provincial speed cops were anti-Semites. There was a semi-pro whore, Cross-Eyed Yetta, and a gifted cripple, Pomerantz, who had a poem published in transition before he shriveled and died at the age of twenty-seven. A boxer who once made the Ring magazine ratings. Lazar of Best Grade Fruit who raked in twenty-five hundred dollars for being knocked down by a No. 43 streetcar. A woman who actually called herself a divorcee. A man, A.D.'s father, who was bad luck to have in your house. And more, many more."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0915220040/?tag=2022091-20
The son of Lily and Moses Isaac Richler, a scrap yard dealer, Richler was born on January 27, 1931, and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Mile End area of Montreal.
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 mother was Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, a celebrated rabbi in both Poland and Canada and a prolific author of many religious texts. )
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.
In 1949, after a brief stint on the staff of the Montreal Herald, Richler began traveling in Europe and eventually spent an extended time in Paris, where he published his first piece of fiction, "Shades of Darkness (Three Impressions)" in the literary magazine Points.
It received fairly good reviews, but sold only about 900 copies in its first few years in print in Canada.
It covered the last six months in 1956, and in that period two copies of The Acrobats had been sold.
One domestic and the other Orient.
For nights, I was kept awake thinking, 'Who in the hell do I know in the Orient?
Shouldn't we correspond?
Or did he, perhaps, buy the book in error?"
'Richler returned to Europe to take up life as an expatriate writer in London.
A novel that included more autobiographical elements than any of his other fictional works, St. Urbain's Horsemen followed the life of an expatriate Canadian living in London as he made sense of his life in middle age.
Canada's Leading Curmudgeon
In 1972, Richler returned to Montreal with his family.
Over the next decade, his output as a writer remained as varied as ever.
In addition to various projects for television, Richler wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which earned him an Academy Award nomination in 1975.
That year, Richler also published a novel for children, Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, about the travails of a young boy who had to repeat everything he said twice for adults to understand him.
The novel won the first Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award in 1976.
In 1980, Richler reemerged as a novelist with the publication of Joshua Then and Now.
The country's wealthiest family, the Bronfmans made their fortune from their Seagram's Whiskey business and later built a wide-ranging entertainment empire including large holdings in Universal Studios and Time-Warner; one member of the family, Edgar Bronfman, also served as the head of the Jewish World Congress.
Richler's last novel, Barney's Version, appeared in 1998.
Although he enjoyed uninterrupted success after The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Richler became far better known as a humorist and social commentator in the last decade of his career.
In addition to his regular essays in Maclean's, Richler published humorous and nostalgic pieces in magazines and journals ranging from Playboy to Atlantic to the New York Times Book Review.
Richler eventually published an entire book devoted to the subject of Quebec separatism, Oh Canada!
Oh Quebec!
Requiem for a Divided Country, in 1992.
Richler's defiance of Quebec separatist demandsmade him a reviled figure in some quarters, and death threats were made against him after the book was published.
Richler fought the separatists with satire and humor.
As he told an audience at the University of Waterloo in 1999, "I manned the barricades, so to speak, for the legal right to munch unilingually labeled kosher matzos in Quebec for more than sixty days a year.
I also protested the right of a pet shop parrot to be unilingually English.
As a consequence, nice people still stop me on the street and thank me for taking a stand.
It's embarrassing, for my stand, such as it is, hardly qualifies me as a latter-day Spartacus or Tom Paine or Rosa Luxemburg.
"In declining health for some time, perhaps due to his favored pastimes of drinking malt whiskey and smoking, Richler had his kidney removed in a 1998 operation.
Indeed, Richler's ability to describe the Canadian perspective was one of his greatest contributions to the country's culture.
Speaking at the University of Waterloo in 1999, he said: "One of our most attractive qualities, I think, is that we are a self-deprecating people.
Had Babe Ruth, for instance, been born a Canadian rather than an American, he would not be celebrated as the Sultan of Swat, the man who hit 714 home runs.
Instead he would be deprecated as that notorious flunk who struck out 1330 times. "
Mordecai Richler was a prominent figure on the Canadian literary landscape for more than 40 years after the 1959 publication of his breakthrough novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.
(From Mordecai Richler, one of our greatest satirists, com...)
(This comic novel won the 1990 Commonwealth Writers Prize ...)
(Joshua Then and Now is about Joshua Shapiro today, and th...)
("Among the wonders of St. Urbain, our St. Urbain, there w...)
(St. Urbains Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderful...)
Even though Richler's Jewish roots remained central to his identity for the rest of his life, he abandoned most of the Orthodox practices that he had been taught.
Both works used fish-out-of-water protagonists to illuminate larger observations about contemporary society, particularly the pretensions of the academic and artistic elites.
Quotations:
"I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence. "
"When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent. "
"Canada is one of the few places left where the small decencies are observed. If, as a young man, I was scornful of the country because we always seemed so far behind style-setting New York, I now thank God for the cultural lag. Ours, after all, is the good neighbourhood. A society well worth preserving. "
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.
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.
Novelist
