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Mordecai Richler Was Here: Selected Writings
Book by Mordecai Richler
432 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2010
About the author
Mordecai Richler
92 books393 followersWorking-class Jewish background based novels, which include
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
(1959) and
Saint Urbain's Horseman
(1971), of Canadian writer Mordecai Richler.
People best know Barney's Version (1997) among works of this author, screenwriter, and essayist; people shortlisted his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-two stories of children.
A scrap yard dealer reared this son on street in the mile end area of Montréal. He learned Yiddish and English and graduated from Baron Byng High School. Richler enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) to study English but dropped before completing his degree.
Years later, Leah Rosenberg, mother of Richler, published an autobiography, The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses birth and upbringing of Mordecai and the sometime difficult relationship.
Richler, intent on following in the footsteps of many of a previous "lost generation" of literary exiles of the 1920s from the United States, moved to Paris at age of 19 years in 1950.
Richler returned to Montréal in 1952, worked briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then moved to London in 1954. He, living in London meanwhile, published seven of his ten novels as well as considerable journalism.
Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", Richler returned to Montréal in 1972. He wrote repeatedly about the Jewish community of Montréal and especially portraying his former neighborhood in multiple novels.
In England in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, a French-Canadian divorcée nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met Florence Wood Mann, a young married woman, who smited him.
Some years later, Richler and Mann divorced and married each other. He adopted Daniel Mann, her son. The couple had five children together: Daniel, Jacob, Noah, Martha and Emma. These events inspired his novel Barney's Version.
Richler died of cancer.
People best know Barney's Version (1997) among works of this author, screenwriter, and essayist; people shortlisted his novel Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-two stories of children.
A scrap yard dealer reared this son on street in the mile end area of Montréal. He learned Yiddish and English and graduated from Baron Byng High School. Richler enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) to study English but dropped before completing his degree.
Years later, Leah Rosenberg, mother of Richler, published an autobiography, The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses birth and upbringing of Mordecai and the sometime difficult relationship.
Richler, intent on following in the footsteps of many of a previous "lost generation" of literary exiles of the 1920s from the United States, moved to Paris at age of 19 years in 1950.
Richler returned to Montréal in 1952, worked briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then moved to London in 1954. He, living in London meanwhile, published seven of his ten novels as well as considerable journalism.
Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", Richler returned to Montréal in 1972. He wrote repeatedly about the Jewish community of Montréal and especially portraying his former neighborhood in multiple novels.
In England in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, a French-Canadian divorcée nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met Florence Wood Mann, a young married woman, who smited him.
Some years later, Richler and Mann divorced and married each other. He adopted Daniel Mann, her son. The couple had five children together: Daniel, Jacob, Noah, Martha and Emma. These events inspired his novel Barney's Version.
Richler died of cancer.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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May 12, 201910/10
UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS still surface at parties.
"What kind of novels do you write?"
Legendary. Seminal. Filthy.
"Should I know your name?"
To which I usually reply, eyes modestly lowered, "Not necessarily," but, riding sufficient scotch, I become equally capable of a bellicose "Yes, if you're literate," after which my wife usually points out it is time to go home.
Mordecai Richler, On Writing
This book is a marvellous compilation of Richler's best work. It is obvious that much thought has gone into choosing the excerpts, providing a wonderful trajectory of Richler, from first to last.
I've dipped into this one with great pleasure over the last few months, when longer fiction was just not suiting me. Fiction and non-fiction are interspersed, each requiring no more than a half hour's attention, if that; and yet each providing a world of imagination that could be indulged in for hours afterwards.
It is no secret that I have long worshipped every Richler word; and in true Canadian fashion, have been hardest on those I love best. But I also always turn home again when I need to talk to someone who makes sense, who grounds me, who makes me laugh, who makes me sob uncontrollably, who makes me appreciate this business of living. There are a handful of such Canadian authors, and Richler is among the best of those.
Like when people ask him the UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS at parties, I can't put a precise definition to why Richler is one of my touchstones -- but you just know it when you feel it ...
The greater "why" is best described by Adam Gopnik in his introduction:
The satiric and deprecatory tone that he shared with Amis and Baine was therefore allied in his writing to a larger ambition -- he had to write about a city (and country) that didn't quite know it was one, about the manners of a tribe who hadn't been told they had them. The urge to inventory a reality that everyone else thought was merely a dependency, one that didn't really count, is present in his novels, and it creates an unwilled expansiveness, an appetite for setting down experience, that feels less claustrophobic than the world of his English contemporaries. It was the same tone, but they were describing a world shrinking inward. He was describing one pushing out.
I, who became Canadian by my parents' choice, love it all the more for that; and as any adopted child wants to be loved like one's own, it always flustered me to have the "adoptive parents" at arm's length. Richler allowed me to appreciate that these family squabbles would ultimately resolve themselves, when the factioned tribes started to understand themselves, and each other. He went a long way in making that possible for this country.
Again, I turn to Gopnik for the best epigraph one could leave for Mordecai Richler:
He was above all, and in everything he wrote, including his journalism, a real writer, not a show-off or time-server. He was not an artist who boasted of his sensitivities, but a writer, through and through, who hated everything pretentious and academic and fake in the literary world, yet who had an unshakeable reverence for literature. He believed in books, wanted to write one great one, and did. A provincial boy determined to live by his writing, he became a cosmopolitan man who had. He loved his family, lived by his wits, and left behind a book that will last. It's hard to imagine anyone in any city, doing more.
UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS still surface at parties.
"What kind of novels do you write?"
Legendary. Seminal. Filthy.
"Should I know your name?"
To which I usually reply, eyes modestly lowered, "Not necessarily," but, riding sufficient scotch, I become equally capable of a bellicose "Yes, if you're literate," after which my wife usually points out it is time to go home.
Mordecai Richler, On Writing
This book is a marvellous compilation of Richler's best work. It is obvious that much thought has gone into choosing the excerpts, providing a wonderful trajectory of Richler, from first to last.
I've dipped into this one with great pleasure over the last few months, when longer fiction was just not suiting me. Fiction and non-fiction are interspersed, each requiring no more than a half hour's attention, if that; and yet each providing a world of imagination that could be indulged in for hours afterwards.
It is no secret that I have long worshipped every Richler word; and in true Canadian fashion, have been hardest on those I love best. But I also always turn home again when I need to talk to someone who makes sense, who grounds me, who makes me laugh, who makes me sob uncontrollably, who makes me appreciate this business of living. There are a handful of such Canadian authors, and Richler is among the best of those.
Like when people ask him the UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS at parties, I can't put a precise definition to why Richler is one of my touchstones -- but you just know it when you feel it ...
The greater "why" is best described by Adam Gopnik in his introduction:
The satiric and deprecatory tone that he shared with Amis and Baine was therefore allied in his writing to a larger ambition -- he had to write about a city (and country) that didn't quite know it was one, about the manners of a tribe who hadn't been told they had them. The urge to inventory a reality that everyone else thought was merely a dependency, one that didn't really count, is present in his novels, and it creates an unwilled expansiveness, an appetite for setting down experience, that feels less claustrophobic than the world of his English contemporaries. It was the same tone, but they were describing a world shrinking inward. He was describing one pushing out.
I, who became Canadian by my parents' choice, love it all the more for that; and as any adopted child wants to be loved like one's own, it always flustered me to have the "adoptive parents" at arm's length. Richler allowed me to appreciate that these family squabbles would ultimately resolve themselves, when the factioned tribes started to understand themselves, and each other. He went a long way in making that possible for this country.
Again, I turn to Gopnik for the best epigraph one could leave for Mordecai Richler:
He was above all, and in everything he wrote, including his journalism, a real writer, not a show-off or time-server. He was not an artist who boasted of his sensitivities, but a writer, through and through, who hated everything pretentious and academic and fake in the literary world, yet who had an unshakeable reverence for literature. He believed in books, wanted to write one great one, and did. A provincial boy determined to live by his writing, he became a cosmopolitan man who had. He loved his family, lived by his wits, and left behind a book that will last. It's hard to imagine anyone in any city, doing more.
January 19, 2024
This book was such a mixed bag. Started out so strong but the curation of excerpts made less and less sense as it went on until the very last chapter. Richler was clearly a clever and talented writer but it seemed unnecessary to include some of his more dated pieces in this compilation. The best parts were from his works about the Montreal Jewish community.
April 6, 2015
Really what is there to say? I have been a fan of Mordecai Richler's writing since I was introduced to it my both an intro Political Science and Intro CanLit class in my first year of college. I love his acerbic wit, I appreciate his knowledge of Canadian life and politics and it amazes me that he can write characters I can identify with, even if they come from very different experiences than myself. This collection takes bit of an odd approach to Richler's work. It reproduces excerpts of his novels, short stories and essays and weaves them together to form a series of narratives based on a central theme. Even though they are from different books, some fiction and some non-fiction, the excerpts kind of gel together to for a coherent story of their own. A brilliant editing job. This volume entertained me for a few months, as I dipped into it chapter-by-chapter between reading other books. This volume reminded me how much I enjoy Mordecai Richler's writing and how much I will continue to miss new Richler writings in the future. Mordecai Richler was here, and we are better off because of it.
June 26, 2008
I found this book at a discount bin, and for the price decided to give it a try. I have been drawn to essays and memoirs lately. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed it, although I have to say that I don’t think it is a book to be read from cover to cover. I browsed and read parts of it over the past month, and there are probably parts I never got around to reading, and pieces I reread just for the pleasure of the language. I loved his insights and recollections of growing up in the Jewish area of Montreal, and I think I appreciated his writing here better than when I read some of his fiction. I may even go back to reread his fiction. After so many years I may have a different appreciation of it.
May 18, 2008
This was alright. I wish I had read some of his other books because I would probably then have a better understanding of this one. What the editor did was just take selections from al of his books and then put them in this. It was kind of annoying to read in that aspect as you'd just get connected to a character and the selection would end. It was nice that they included some photo's in the book though as some of the selections were from his non-fiction writings. If your a fan of his other stuff I'd suggest this, you'd probably get a better understanding of the characters (apparently he re-uses names sometimes which is annoying) and what is going on in places.
March 20, 2009
An interesting read, as they've taken excerpts from various different materials and arranged them in an almost historical order. It gives you, I think, a sense of how he viewed things and the significance he assigned them via retelling.
February 10, 2008
Underrated writer (in the US). Funny stuff, sort of P. Roth meets K. Amis.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews