Книга: Mordecai Richler «Barney`s Version»

Mordecai Richler, CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001)^[1] was a Canadian Jewish author, 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.^[2] His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Barney's Version, and the Jacob Two-Two children's stories. His 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1990.

Biography

The son of a scrap yard dealer, Richler was born and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Mile End area of Montreal, a neighbourhood he would 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 at age nineteen, intent on following in the footsteps of a previous generation of literary exiles, the so-called Lost Generation of the 1920s. Richler returned to Montreal in 1952, working briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then moved to London in 1954. Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", he returned to Montreal in 1972. In England, in 1954, Richler married his first wife, the French-Canadian Catherine Boudreau, a divorcee nine years his senior, but on the eve of their wedding he met and was smitten with the married Florence Mann (nee Wood). Some years later they both divorced and married each other and he adopted her son Daniel. The couple had five children: Daniel Richler, Jacob Richler, Noah Richler, Martha Richler, Emma Richler. 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.

Journalism career

Throughout his career, Richler wrote journalistic commentary, and contributed to The Atlantic Monthly, Look, The New Yorker, The American Spectator, and other magazines. In his later years, Richler was a newspaper columnist for The National Post and Montreal's The Gazette. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he wrote a monthly book review for Gentlemen's Quarterly. He was often critical of both Quebec nationalism and Canadian nationalism. Another favourite Richler target was the government-subsidized Canadian literary movement of the 1970s and 80s. Richler was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2001, just a few months before his death. Journalism constituted an important part of his career, bringing him income between novels and films.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Richler published 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 Saint Lawrence Boulevard (known colloquially as "The Main"). Richler wrote of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.

To a middle-class stranger, it is 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.^[3]

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.

Praise and criticism

Joshua Then and Now

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 has been described in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as "one of the foremost writers of his generation".^[4] A 2004 oral biography by Michael Posner was entitled The Last Honest Man.

Detractors noted his propensity for recycling material, incorporating elements of his journalism into later novels.^[2] Some critics thought Richler more adept at sketching striking scenes than crafting coherent narratives.^{[citation needed]} 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,^[5] English Canadian nationalists, and Quebec nationalists.^[6] Richler's long-running dispute with Quebec nationalists was fueled 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.^[7]

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.^[8] 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.^[9] 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".^[10]

His views were strongly criticized by some in Quebec and to some degree among Anglophone Canadians.^[11] His detractors maintained that Richler had an outdated and stereotyped view of Quebec society, and that he risked polarizing relations between francophone and anglophone Quebecers. After the publication of Oh Canada! Oh Quebec, Pierrette Venne, a future Bloc Québécois MP, called for the book to be banned.^[12] Daniel Latouche compared the book to Mein Kampf.^[13] Nadia Khouri believes that there was a racist undertone in some of the reaction to Richler, pointing out how some of his critics emphasized that he was not "one of us"^[14] or that he was not a "real Quebecer".^[15] 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.^[16] Other Québécois 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.^[17] Some Quebecers acclaimed Richler for his courage and for attacking the orthodoxies of Quebec society,^[18] and he has been described as "the most prominent defender of the rights of Quebec's anglophones."^[19]

The reaction to Richler's book itself raised concerns for some commentators^[20] 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;^[21] an anti-semitic 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 language press compared him to Hitler.^[22] 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.^[23]

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 pure 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.^[24]

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.

Awards and recognition

On June 28, 2011 it was announced that Richler will receive a star on Canada's Walk of Fame and will be inducted on October 1 at Elgin Theatre in Toronto.^[25]

• 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 for Barney's Version
• 1998 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (Canada & Caribbean region) for Barney's Version
• 1998 The QSpell Award for Barney's Version.
• 2000 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.
• 2000 Honorary Doctorate, Bishop's University, Lennoxville, Quebec.
• 2001 Companion of the Order of Canada
• 2004 Number 98 on the CBC's television show about great Canadians, The Greatest Canadian
• 2004 Barney's Version was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2004, championed by author Zsuzsi Gartner.
• 2006 Cocksure was chosen for inclusion in Canada Reads 2006, championed by actor and author Scott Thompson
• 2009 "Extraordinary Canadians: Mordecai Richler" is a book-length biography about Richler published by Penguin Canada and written by the acclaimed writer M.G. Vassanji.
• "Barney's Version" was also adapted to radio by the CBC

Published works

Novels

• 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)
• St. Urbain's Horseman (1971)
• Joshua Then and Now (1980)
• Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)
• Barney's Version (1997)

Short story collection

• The Street (1969)
• The summer my grandmother was supposed to die

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)

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 (1976) ^[26] 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)
• Barney's Version (2010, screenplay by Michael Konyves, based on Richler's novel of the same name; Richler wrote an early draft)

See also

• List of Quebec authors
• Quebec bashing

Further reading

• Charles Foran Mordecai: The Life & Times (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2010)
• Reinhold Kramer Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain (2008)
• “Mordecai Richler, le Québec et les Juifs”, by Victor Teboul, Ph.D.

References

Mordecai Richler, le Québec et les Juifs, by Victor Teboul, Ph.D. http://www.tolerance.ca/Article.aspx?ID=102138

External links

• Mordecai Richler in 'Face to Face: The Canadian Personalities Hall', Canadian Museum of Civilization

• Mordecai Richler's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Mordecai Richler at the Internet Movie Database
• Yiddish phrases & cultural references in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
• CBC Digital Archives: Mordecai Richler Was Here
• Obituary of Richler
• Literary biography of Richler
• Obituary by Robert Fulford
• Mordecai Richler at Find a Grave