RICHLER, Mordecai

Nationality: Canadian. Born: Montreal, Quebec, 27 January 1931. Education: Sir George Williams University, 1949-51. Family: Married Florence Wood in 1960; three sons and two daughters. Career: Freelance writer, Paris, 1952-53, London, 1954-72, and Montreal, 1972-2001. Writer-in-residence, Sir George Williams University, 1968-69; visiting professor of English, Carleton University, 1972-74. Member of editorial board, Book-of-the-Month Club, 1972-2001. Awards: President's medal for nonfiction, University of Western Ontario, 1959; junior art fellowships, 1959 and 1960, and senior arts fellowship, 1967, Canadian Council; Guggenheim Foundation creative writing fellowship, 1961; Paris Review humor prize, 1967, for section from Cocksure and Hunting Tigers under Glass; Governor-General's literary award, Canada Council, 1968, for Cocksure and Hunting Tigers under Glass, and 1971, for St. Urbain's Horseman; London Jewish Chronicle literature awards, 1972, for St. Urbain's Horseman; Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear, Academy Award nomination, and Screenwriters Guild of America award, all 1974, for the screenplay The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz; ACTRA award for best television writer—drama, Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, 1975; Book of the Year for Children award, Canadian Library Association, and Ruth Schwartz Children's book award, Ontario Arts Council, both 1976, for Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang; London Jewish Chronicle H. H. Wingate award for fiction, 1981, for Joshua Then and Now; named a Literary Lion, New York Public Library, 1989; Commonwealth Writers prize, Book Trust, 1990, for Solomon Gursky Was Here.Died: 3 July 2001.

Publication

Novels

The Acrobats. 1954; as Wicked We Love, 1955.

Son of a Smaller Hero. 1955.

A Choice of Enemies. 1957.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. 1959.

The Incompatible Atuk. As Stick Your Neck Out, 1963.

Cocksure. 1968.

St. Urbain's Horseman. 1971.

Joshua Then and Now. 1980.

Solomon Gursky Was Here. 1989.

Barney's Version. 1997.

Novels (for children)

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang. 1975.

Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur. 1987.

Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case. 1997.

Short Stories

The Street: Stories. 1969.

Plays

Duddy, adaptation of his The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (produced Edmonton, Alberta, 1984).

Screenplays:

No Love for Johnnie, with Nicholas Phipps, 1962; Tiara Tahiti, with Geoffrey Cotterell and Ivan Foxwell, 1962; The Wild and the Willing, with Phipps (Young and Willing, 1965), 1962; Life at the Top, 1965; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1974; Fun with Dick and Jane, with David Giler and Jerry Belson, 1977; Joshua Then and Now, 1985.

Television Plays:

The Acrobats, 1957; Friend of the People, 1957; Paid in Full, 1958; The Trouble with Benny, 1959; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1960; The Fall of Mendel Krick, 1963.

Radio Plays:

The Acrobats, 1956; Benny, the War in Europe, and Myerson's Daughter Bella, 1958; The Spare Room, 1961; Q for Quest, 1963; It's Harder to Be Anybody, 1965; Such Was St. Urbain Street, 1966; The Wordsmith, 1979.

Other

Hunting Tigers under Glass: Essays and Reports. 1969.

Shoveling Trouble (essays). 1973.

Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (essays). 1974.

Images of Spain. 1977.

The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays. 1978.

Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (essays). 1984; as Home Sweet Home, 1985.

Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions. 1990.

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country. 1992.

The Language of Signs. 1992.

This Year in Jerusalem: An Israeli Journal. 1994.

Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions. 1998.

On Snooker. 2001.

Editor, Canadian Writing Today. 1970.

Editor, The Best of Modern Humor. 1984.

Editor, Writers on World War II: An Anthology. 1991.

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Film Adaptations:

The Acrobats, 1957; The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1960, 1974; Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, 1977; Joshua Then and Now, 1985.

Manuscript Collection:

University of Calgary, Alberta.

Critical Studies:

Mordecai Richler by George Woodcock, 1970; Mordecai Richler, edited by G. David Sheps, 1971; "Mordecai Richler and the Jewish-Canadian Novel" by F. M. Birbalsingh, in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, June 1972, pp. 76-82; "Revaluing Mordecai Richler" by Kerry McSweeney, in Studies in Canadian Literature, 4(2), Summer 1979, pp. 120-31; Mordecai Richler by Victor J. Ramraj, 1983; "A. M. Klein and Mordecai Richler: Canadian Responses to the Holocaust" by Rachel Feldhay Brenner, in Journal of Canadian Studies, 24(2), Summer 1989, pp. 65-77; "Canada Wry" by Pearl K. Bell, in New Republic, 202 (19), 7 May 1990, pp. 42-44; "Mordecai Richler Was Here" by Kenneth McNaught, in Journal of Canadian Studies, 26(4), Winter 1991-92, pp. 141-43.

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Mordecai Richler was one of North America's most prolific, talented, and controversial Jewish authors, whose works explore themes ranging from Jewish identity and self-image and Holocaust-related guilt to the dilemma of how to live in a secular Canadian society where humanistic values have largely failed. Richler grew up in the Jewish community of Montreal, Quebec Province, Canada, in the 1930s and 1940s, a period during which his secondhand knowledge of the atrocities of the Holocaust overseas combined with his immediate experience of anti-Semitism and Quebec's own Fascist movement. A stay in Europe in the early 1950s put him into direct contact with expatriate existentialist ideas (in the style of Ernest Hemingway) and the disillusionment of the Beat generation. These two major historical and literary trends have found unique expression throughout Richler's fiction.

Although Richler's first novel-length work of fiction, The Acrobats (1954), focused primarily on the angst of an expatriate Canadian painter-rebel without a cause rather than on Jewish issues, Richler found his voice and expressed his greatest comic and literary talent in exploring Jewish topics closer to home. Much as William Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants became the basis for exploring twentieth-century themes in a microcosm, Jewish Montreal and particularly the area around St. Urbain Street became Richler's laboratory of character development for his protagonists. Son of a Smaller Hero (1955) concerns young Noah Adler's efforts to break free of a rigid and strict Orthodox Jewish family at the same time that he deals with the anti-Semitic attitudes of the Canadian Gentiles in the world outside his family. Several years later Richler expanded his use of irony and satire to denounce hypocrisy and cruelty in all layers of Canadian society in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). This novel indirectly reflects the Holocaust experience in its portrayal of social hierarchies, victims, and exploiters. Although the Jews and Gentiles in this novel are removed from the immediate atrocities of the Holocaust concentration camps, the precarious position of Jews in Montreal society impels Jews such as young Duddy Kravitz, Mr. Cohen, and Jerry Dingleman to become ruthless hustlers and exploiters in business so that they can avoid becoming victims themselves. At the same time, people such as Simcha Kravitz, Duddy's grandfather, are helpless and ineffective in their efforts to uphold traditional Jewish values against the onslaught of exploiters.

Two other novels by Richler that confront the shadow of the Holocaust through the eyes of Jews from St. Urbain Street are St. Urbain's Horseman (1971) and Joshua Then and Now (1980). In St. Urbain's Horseman, Jacob Hersh is a famous and successful writer with a fair amount of financial security, but he cannot escape the fears of anti-Semitic persecution that dominated his childhood in Montreal. Jacob Hersh finds personal meaning and identification with the victims of the Holocaust. He travels to continental Europe and Israel in search of his cousin Joey, who was supposedly an avenger of the Holocaust and a type of mythical messiah for him, but his search proves fruitless. Joshua Shapiro, the protagonist of Joshua Then and Now, also has to deal with issues of guilt and moral crises. His father, Reuben, was an exploitative and ruthless businessman like Duddy Kravitz, and Joshua, a prominent sportswriter, feels guilty for his own success and his marriage to a Gentile woman, as well as for his family's history. During a trip to Spain he tries to find truth and morality in identifying with the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. He recognizes, however, that the history of even his most beloved Spain is rife with anti-Semitism, and he is humiliated by an ex-Nazi whom he meets. In short neither Jacob Hersh nor Joshua Shapiro can find the equality, brotherhood, or moral resolution that he seeks inside or outside his own community.

Some works of Richler's journalism and nonfiction, such as This Year in Jerusalem: An Israeli Journal (1994) and the essay "The Holocaust and After," also demonstrate Richler's complex attitude toward the Jewish state and his view of Jews in the role of victim or oppressor. Richler continued to assert his claim that the writer is an advocate of the oppressed. And while he stood for a Jewish state in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he also sympathized with the sufferings of the Palestinians. Richler's most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust, however, are his works of fiction that portray North American Jews' responses to the anti-Semitism around them and to the Holocaust. The modern crises of Jews' identities in multicultural societies and in the face of a long and difficult history crystallize with incisive humor and satire in Richler's fiction, which illustrates the persistent barriers and prejudices that both Jews and non-Jews still must understand and overcome.

—Alisa Gayle Mayor

See the essay on The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.