The following is part of a series of columns in which local community members write about their favorite Jewish books. This week’s column is by Avrum D. Lank, a member of Congregation Sinai and a business reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
If Mordecai Richler had been born in Queens rather than Quebec, then Americans would mention him in the same breath as Philip Roth.
But then, if Mordecai Richler had been born in Queens, he would not have been Mordecai Richler.
Before his death at the age of 70 in 2001, this son of Jewish immigrants who grew up in the slums of Montreal left the world a treasure trove of great literature. But it was always literature focused through the lens of Canadian experience, and beyond that, Jewish Canadian experience. And beyond that, he often wrote about the experience of a Jewish Canadian in Quebec.
That made him a triple minority — a Canadian in North America, a Jew in a Christian world and an Anglophone in an increasingly Francophone city.
That is a lot to feed a muse, and some writers would have turned it into anger — righteous anger at the trials of minorities. Richler did not, perhaps because, as he titled his third novel, published in 1957, he had “A Choice of Enemies.”
That choice led him to find a common vision of humanity. It is one stripped of nationality and creed.
American or Canadian, Jew or Gentile, Anglophone or Francophone, Richler applied the same standard to all of his subjects. They had a shared goal of success and happiness and Richler had little patience for hypocrisy as he wrote about them.
As a result, some Canadians saw him as anti-Canadian, some Americans as anti-American, some Christians as anti-Christian, some Francophones as anti-French — and some Jews as anti-Semitic.
But he was none of those. Instead, he was an equal-opportunity curmudgeon with an exquisitely ironic sense of humor.
Consider his best-known character, the striver Duddy Kravitz, hero of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” which appeared as a book in 1959 and a movie in 1974. In the movie, which opens with a memorable scene of the back end of a horse, Richard Dreyfuss has his first leading role.
Like Richler, Kravitz is a product of St. Urbain in Montreal, the Canadian equivalent of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A scammer and a schemer, Kravitz gets ahead skating close to the edge of the law (recycling trolley transfers, for example).
Eventually, Kravitz makes it big in later books of the Richler opus, but he never loses a sense of where he came from, or his impatience for fakery.
In one memorable scene in “Joshua Then and Now” (book 1980, film 1985) after a particularly obnoxious friend brags about how he can tell apart all the wines in his cellar just by taste, Kravitz has someone come in take all the labels off.
Richler always was on the look out for unintended humor and irony.
In “Solomon Gursky Was Here” (1989), for example, a band of Jewish (or proto-Jewish) Eskimos has real trouble with Yom Kippur fasting thanks to the unfortunate schedule of Arctic sunrises and sunsets.
Richler also wrote a delightful series of children’s books starring Jacob Two-Two. One, “Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur” (1987) mixes seamlessly, and hilariously, a young Jacob, pizza, dinosaurs and the prime minister of Canada. Sounds strange, but it works brilliantly and was among my children’s favorite reads.
As an intellectual, Richler engaged in a memorable battle of essays with Quebec nationalists at a time when there was a real chance the province would leave Canada. Richler spoke up for who he was, as good a Canadian as anyone whose ancestors had settled the St. Lawrence Valley in the 17th century.
And as more and more of Jewish Montreal decamped for Toronto in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Richler refused to leave his native city. His last book, “Barney’s Version” (1997), features a man proud to have lower-tier season tickets to Montreal Canadians hockey games.
When Richler was made a companion of the Order of Canada shortly before his death, not everyone in his native province appreciated the honor. But I disagree.
I have always enjoyed reading Richler, and not just for his humor and sensibility. My father grew up in Montreal during the ’30s and the places Richler writes about with such loving care long have been familiar to me. That he describes them warts and all makes them that much more precious.
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