4 Key Works by Mordecai Richler You Should Be Reading

Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) had been dead less than a week when Adam Gopnik’s obituary, which perfectly sums up Richler’s life and career, appeared in the New Yorker on July 8, 2001: “Mordecai Richler, who died last week, had by the end of his life become inseparable from a place, Montreal, and even a country, Canada, without ever flattering or even saying anything particularly nice about either.”

Richler has been called many things: social realist, satirist, a keen observer of human life and of the Jewish-Canadian experience. In fact, the city of Montreal is inseparable from his works, from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to The Street, from Barney’s Version to Solomon Gursky Was Here.

Some critics have compared The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz to J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) because of its importance in the history of Canadian fiction. It is undoubtedly the book that will make you fall in love with Mordecai Richler’s prose. Duddy Kravitz is a complex character and a force of nature, a child of the St. Urbain Street that was also the street of Richler’s childhood.

Mordecai was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1931, in an English-speaking neighborhood, the so-called Mile End, in a bilingual city, Montreal. He was fluent in three languages, English, French, and Yiddish, the language his grandparents had brought with them from Europe when they emigrated to Canada. Richler’s maternal grandfather, Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, was an important figure in the Jewish cultural scene in prewar Poland, a rabbi, author, and translator of the Zohar.

Just like Richler, Duddy has a troubled relationship with the Montreal Jewish community. He fluctuates in and out of it, his actions and thoughts driven by a determination (or obsession?) to make it in his life, to own land in Canada. A phrase uttered by his shoemaker grandfather becomes his mantra: “A man without land is nothing.”

When he discovers that a lake in the Laurentians is up for sale, that plot of land becomes his obsession, his raison d’être. He will do whatever it takes to buy it. His life becomes a restless quest, punctuated by strange, funny, terribly tragic, and bittersweet moments. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was not Richler’s first novel. Five years before Kravitz he had published The Acrobats (after moving to Paris), then Son of a Smaller Hero (1955), and A Choice of Enemies (1957). Kravitz was, however, the book that made him famous worldwide.

Even while based in Paris or London, Richler continued to write about Montreal, much like James Joyce (1882-1941) continued to write about Dublin while living in Trieste, Pula, Rome, and finally Zurich. Today, Richler’s description of Montreal’s winding exterior staircases remains as iconic as the staircases themselves, a quintessential part of Montreal’s architecture: “Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here a prized plot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. And endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there. But, as the boys knew, each street between St Dominique and Park Avenue represented subtle differences in income. No two cold-water flats were alike.”

Richler grew up in a three-story grey and red row house at the north end of St. Urbain Street at number 5257. He graduated from Baron Byng High School 4251. He would stop for smoked meats at Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen on Boulevard St. Laurent or have lunch with his friends at Wilensky’s, on Fairmount Street West and Clark. In the 1930s and 1940s, Yiddish was spoken everywhere, in factories as well as in bakeries, cigar stores, and grocery stores.

While Richler has immortalized his old neighborhood in almost all his works, from St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971) to Joshua Then and Now (1980), the northern end of St. Urbain Street is the real star of The Street (1969). This collection of short stories is the perfect companion to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and a powerful introduction to his later works.

St. Urbain Street, located between Boulevard St. Laurent and Avenue du Parc, was, as Richler describes it in one of the eleven stories in the collection, “one of five working-class ghettos between the Main and Park Avenue.” The world of The Street is predominantly Jewish.

“Our world,” he writes in The Street, “was rigidly circumscribed. Outside, where they ate wormy pork, beat the wives for openers, didn’t care a little finger if the children grew up to be doctors, we seldom ventured, and then only fearfully. Our world, its prizes and punishments, was entirely Jewish. Inside, God would get us if we didn’t say our prayers. You ate the last scrap of meat on your plate because the children in Europe were starving.” In another short story, The Main Richler describes how Montreal’s Jewish community adapted to the outbreak of World War II, the “war in Europe,” as he calls it.

He describes the refugees, “mostly German and Austrian Jews,” and how they crushed the expectations that the Montreal Jewish community had of them. Richler writes that they were “far more sophisticated and better educated than we were. They had not, like our immigrant grandparents, come from shtetls in Galicia or Russia. Neither did they despise Europe. On the contrary, they found our culture thin, the city provincial, and the Jews narrow. This bewildered and stung us.”

If Richler’s St. Urbain Street is an enclosed Jewish cosmos, Montreal comes across as a deeply divided city, a city governed by notions of class, religion, ethnicity, and economic inequalities. St. Urbain Street, a “place of wonders” is alive with colorful characters, and lies at the crossroads between U.S. and British influences, between Montreal’s French-speaking and English-speaking communities. This unique “place of wonders” no longer exists, but it still shines, more than five decades later, in the witty prose and vivid memories in Richler’s books.

30 years separate The Street from Solomon Gursky Was Here, a weighty saga with an intricate plot that follows the (fictional) Gursky family and its patriarch, Ephraim Gursky, across five continents and more than a century. It took Richler three years of intensive writing and nearly three decades of drafting before he was finally able to write the word “end.”

As in all Richler’s novels, we find Montreal and its Jewish community here, but there is also more to it than that. This is, after all, a novel of contrasts. Inuit legends go hand in hand with incredible anecdotes of Jewish life. Fact blends with fiction, legends with history. The frozen, desolate wilderness of the North American Arctic gives way to the noisy, crowded streets of Montreal. There’s the doomed Franklin Expedition (1845-1848) and the 1972 Watergate Scandal, the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-1899 and Mao’s Long March.

The Gurskys seem to have witnessed every crucial moment in Canadian nation-building. To convey this sense of grandeur, Richler mixes the tropes of magical realism with a slightly Dickensian structure (the novel does feature a genealogical table). The task of telling this incredible story is entrusted to Moses Berger, a lonely, hard-drinking failed writer who must muster all the mental strength he possesses to walk past a bar without stopping for a drink.

His fixation on Solomon Gursky echoes Duddy Kravitz’s obsession with the Laurentians. His lonely days in the countryside around Lake Memphremagog recall the loneliness of cigar-smoking Barney Panofsky, the protagonist of Barney’s Version. More than a chronicler, he is a private investigator. His approach to the labyrinthine history of the Gursky family quickly turns into an investigation into the depths of human consciousness.

After all, the man he is determined to write about, Ephraim Gursky, has a larger-than-life persona. Just like Barney and Duddy, he is restless and determined to rise above what society deems worthy and acceptable. The novel’s title is not, however, “Ephraim Gursky Was Here,” as one might expect after reading the first part. Halfway through, we realize that, just as all roads lead to Rome, all the characters, all the shady and funny sub-plots that make up Solomon Gursky Was Here lead, precisely, to Solomon Gursky.

The novel most people immediately associate with Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version, is also his most complex, personal and, arguably, relatable work. The title itself raises an important question: is there any such thing as truth? There’s no easy answer, of course. It is a question that the greatest writers, artists and filmmakers have grappled with.

In Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), a murder is revisited by four witnesses who offer four conflicting versions of what happened. The film and its unconventional, non-linear narrative stunned audiences around the world, just as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction would do, for different reasons, four decades later. Since Rashomon, the narrative technique of relying on different, subjective, and often unreliable accounts of different witnesses of a specific event has become known as the Rashomon Effect. This brings us to Barney’s Version.

Richler’s novel is the self-serving autobiography of Montreal-born Barney Panofsky, a bitter, aging Jewish-Canadian TV producer who has decided to write his story (and that of his three wives) to set the record straight after the personal attacks on him by popular novelist Terry McIver.

Barney is a typical unreliable narrator: he has something of Alvy Singer, the bitter but ultimately sympathetic protagonist of Woody Allen’s iconic Annie Hall (1977), and of Zeno Cosini, the flawed and neurotic narrator of Zeno’s Conscience (1923), the groundbreaking third novel by Italian writer Italo Svevo (1861-1928). He is also, like Richler himself, incredibly observant.

The novel is divided into different parts, each devoted to one of his three wives. Clara Charnofsky, a suicidal poet and mentally unstable free spirit, is the protagonist of the first section. Barney meets her in Paris, where he moved in the early 1950s.

Her death marks the end of Barney’s Parisian interlude. Back in Montreal, he marries The Second Mrs. Panofsky (we are never told her real name). It is during the wedding reception that Barney meets Miriam Greenberg. It is love at first sight. She will become Barney’s third wife, The Third Mrs. Panofsky, the woman with whom he will have three children and whom he will love, in his own way, for the rest of his life.

If Barney’s three wives shape the structure of the novel, two other persons profoundly influence Barney’s life and mental health: the successful writer Terry McIver, an old acquaintance turned sworn enemy, and his long-time friend Bernard “Boogie” Moscovitch. After mysteriously disappearing, the latter will haunt Barney’s consciousness forever. At one point Barney is even held as a suspect in Boogie’s alleged death. Barney’s Version is not, however, a crime or detective novel. It is a story about love and human relationships, about community, identity, and regret.

Early in the novel we begin to sense that something is wrong, that we cannot trust Barney’s stories, and not because of his sarcastic and often hilarious invectives. His recollections are full of inconsistencies, and increasingly muddled, and his sentence structures are often ungrammatical. Is this a case of objectivity versus subjectivity, or is there something else going on?

Barney’s Version is a powerful novel, partly autobiographical (Richler did meet Florence Mann, the love of his life, shortly before his marriage to Catherine Boudreau), and above all a fun and entertaining read. In a sense, it can be seen as Richler’s all-encompassing work (even Duddy Kravitz, now a man in his 60s, makes a brief appearance), just as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) sums up all the themes and preoccupations Joyce had addressed in his earlier novels, short stories, and poems.