6/11/92

Make ‘Em Mad, Mordecai Richler!

By: Sam Orbaum

There was a time when only the Jews of Montreal were outraged by author Mordecai Richler. Now everyone is.
    They hate him in Quebec. They hate him in Western Canada. They hate him up north, down south, in English, in French. The rich hate him, politicians and women hate him, the goyim hate him. And the Jews not only hate him, they also love him now, too, as the enemy of their enemy.
    Mordecai Richler is the Salman Rushdie of Canada.
    The 61-year-old author most famous for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz pulled into Israel for a few weeks. If no one here detests him, it's probably only because he hasn't been here since 1961.
    Richler isn't trying to get everyone mad at him. He's merely going about his job, revealing the avarice, dishonesty, betrayal, stupidity, tyranny, jingoism and neuroses in all those people who end up protesting his revelations the loudest. His savage baiting is so successful that the reactions he gets can be ironically Richlerian: those he calls antisemites sometimes prove they are, in the process of squawking that they're not.
    Teddy Kollek tried for years to invite this literary Rambo. So did the German government. The Germans finally got him, some years back, proud to show that the Germany persecuted by Richler's writing bears no resemblance to that of the Nazi era. Richler accepted their outstretched hand - and then bit it. The greatest impressions he got from his visit to Germany, he later wrote, were the sight of empty box cars, and the lack of soap in his hotel room.
    Wasn't Kollek afraid that Richler might happen upon a dead Palestinian?
    Truth is, it wouldn't have mattered. Richler is as forcefully committed to Israel splitting into two states as he is to Canada remaining as one. "I don't subscribe to this biblical claim of the Greater Israel. I don't think God issued freeholds," he said.
    "There's a need for some new thinking here the way there has been in Eastern Europe and South Africa, or Israel is going to find itself in more and more difficulties.
    "This nonsense about not speaking to the PLO. If you want to make peace with your enemy, you've got to speak to your enemy. There has to be some sort of accommodation with [the Palestinians'] legitimate yearnings, and there must be a suppression of the terrorists on both sides."
    Jewish terrorism? Recently? "From what I can see, there have been Jewish settlers who've cheated Arabs out of their land by getting them to sign false documents; there've been beatings and provocations in Arab villages. You've had people like Kahane and Levinger and plots to blow up the Dome of the Rock."
    So, is Richler making you mad yet?
    He praised Kollek, decried Ariel Sharon as a "bully" and Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir as "terrorists"; he was scheduled to meet with Amos Oz and Uri Avnery, and proposed Jerusalem as an international city.
    You can't begrudge a man his views, but Richler's pronunciamentos sound like a recording, practised catchphrases we have heard practically word for word by countless equally earnest sympathizers. At one point, while we were discussing his recent book on Quebec, he even blurted out, "Palestinians are people, too."
    I kept pulling him back to Canada, and he kept bouncing back to his views on Israel. After some time he compromised the certitude of his convictions. "Look, I don't live here, so it's difficult to pronounce from afar. I'm not at risk here, so what I say should be tempered by that.
    "I can't come here and dictate what Israel should do after I've been here only five days." He did anyway.
    "Old friends [from his days in the Habonim Labor-Zionist youth movement] who are here came in the best generation of Jewish idealism, about 1950, and they're still here. Most of the ones I've spoken to are for a peace settlement."
    I pointed out that his friends don't live on the Golan Heights or in the West Bank. "No, but I was on Kibbutz Urim, 12 kilometers from Gaza, and the people I spoke to there are strongly for a peace settlement and for giving up the Golan Heights. Now, I don't mean to leave [the Golan] tomorrow; no one’s being stupid about it, but I think they can get a real peace treaty and give it up in stages."
    Richler rejects any analogy between the independence movements in Israel and Quebec. "What's going on in Israel is tragic; what's happening in Canada is a farce."
    But if the Palestinians have a right to their own state, don't the Quebecois?
    "No, because they [Quebeckers] are better off [in Canada]. Look, for 27 of the last 33 years, the prime minister of Canada has come from Quebec, so we're not talking about an oppressed people. When francophone nationalists go to Jewish groups and make analogies with Israel, it's totally indecent. I mean, Quebeckers are not surrounded by millions of hostile people, armed and opposed to them. [Quebec] separatism is a bourgeois conceit; there's no need for it; they'd be a lot worse off. Now, they have everything they need.
    "If Quebec had been an American state, it would have gone the way of Louisiana," which lost its francophone character about 100 years ago. "So it is with many thanks to English Canada that this culture has survived."
    That's the stuff that really makes them crazy, from Chicoutimi to Chibougamau, from St. Louis de Ha! Ha! to St. Louis de Gonzague.
    Richler on Israel may sound like a string of cliches, but what he has to say about his home turf is savagely original. No one else has had the guts to come out with such controversial charges as he has in his latest book, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! : Requiem for a Divided Country.
    The book shouted out the unmentionable: Quebec has a putrid history of antisemitism. Richler thwacked Quebecois heroes off their pedestals, slammed the separatist movement as bigoted, and ridiculed the anti-English laws. He said that Le Devoir, Montreal's respected intellectual newspaper, was, during the 1920s and 1930s, "interchangeable" with the Nazi paper Der Stuermer.
    Response was livid.
    One member of Parliament from Quebec demanded in the House of Commons that the book be banned because of its "hate propaganda"; another MP from the same Bloc Quebecois called Richler a "consummate racist." Richler dismissed them both as "illiterate backbenchers." Some separatist leaders demanded that the Jews choose between Richler and Quebec, a call that B'nai Brith Canada termed "particularly obnoxious." Richler's right to call himself a Quebecker was questioned.
    Still, not all of the francophones condemned him, and not all the anglos and Jews backed him. "The reaction I got from a lot of people - Wasps, Jews and some French Canadians - was that at last someone was telling the truth," Richler said. "But there are some Jews who wished I hadn't [written the book], because I'm Jewish.
    "The Jews are intimidated. They phoned the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) to find out what their attitude should be," Richler said with a smirk. "The CJC kind of disowned me, because they don't want anyone stirring up the waters. They behaved like court Jews."
    Richler has been jibing the CJC for years. "I was enormously helpful to the CJC about 25 years ago. I received a letter from them, and it said on the letterhead, 'cable address JEWCON.' So I phoned them and said, 'Listen, if I put this on an envelope you guys are going to attack me as a self-hating Jew. How can you have a cable address like JEWCON?' Anyway, they changed it."
    Richler does not tolerate being called anti-French. And despite the vituperative reaction to Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! , he is proud of the way foe faces foe in his province.     "You can joke about [political differences] with French Canadians. I walk down the streets and go to the same bars and cafes and someone will make a joke about it [the book].
    "The worst thing that can happen is you get into a quarrel. Nobody's going to shoot you. It's an argument that's still civil, and nobody's menaced. You can't compare it with the risks here [in Israel], and the threats to children, and children wearing gas masks. This is ugly and terrifying."
    He defended the Jews as "the most bilingual community in [Montreal]," yet explained, "We [traditionally] identified with the English-speaking community, and why not? The French community at that time [when Richler was growing up] was very backward, church-riddeen and bigoted." Now, though, he says it is largely because of the French-Canadian presence that "Montreal is still the best city in Canada."
    Ironically, Richler missed the historic Canadian referendum on a new constitution which would, among other provisions, recognize Quebec as a distinct society. The vote, held October 26, could well determine the future of the country and Quebec's place in it. "I've done my bit," he said tersely. "I'm tired of it."    

THE ARCTIC is no place for a Jewish boy. So naturally, the St. Urbain Street rebel feels right at home there. Only Richler could create the Jewish Eskimo, a roaringly funny concept. A cross between whale blubber and chicken schmaltz.
    It is for this kind of comic daring - dressing a northern native in a sealskin tallis - that his novels are such a joy to read. Richler satirized mindless religious subservience in his most recent work of fiction, the manic saga Solomon Gursky Was Here, when his faithful band of Yiddish Eskimos was almost wiped out because they were determined to fast on Yom Kippur until sunset. Up there among the igloo shuls of Tuktoyaktuk, sunset can be months away. Gevalt.
    Richler had been content to write about the urban, if not urbane, of St. Urbain Street, the vibrant Montreal Jewish ghetto where he was raised. One night in 1972, "I was at a party and someone said, 'Ah, you write all these stories about Canada, but you've never even been to the Arctic.' I thought, 'Yeah, you're right.' So I arranged to go on a trip and it was an immediate fascination for me."
    Arctic towns, Richler found, can be as quaint as their names. "Whitehorse is cutesy-poo, done up like a Wild West town. Yellowknife and Inuvik and Aklavik and Frobisher are all like 19th-century frontier, total sleaze," he said with glowing affection. "I began reading the history of the Arctic, with no ulterior motive at the time, but then it surfaced in Gursky, because I thought it would be very amusing to have a Jew on that Franklin Expedition [of the mid-19th century], surviving on schmaltz herring.
    "On the Great Slave Lake [in the Northwest Territories], they fish for pike, and if they're only 12 pounds they throw 'em back. Ugly fish. The Eskimos had a fish plant on the shore, and I asked them, 'What do you do with this stuff?' And this guy says to me, 'Oh, there's a tribe in Chicago, called Jews, and they buy it, to make what they call "gefilte fish."' And his expression was, like, 'Don't let on that they shouldn't be buying this stuff. What a bunch of jerks to be buying this fish!' " Richler relishes this story. The Eskimos didn't know he was Jewish. "We're all just whites to them.”
    "The Eskimos have a great sense of humor, about themselves, too, and I think they'd be very amused by [combining Jewish and Eskimo cultures in Gursky]. It was an opportunity to ridicule certain cherished Jewish [icons], like the hassidim, and Yom Kippur.
"Then I went down to Crown Heights [a Brooklyn hassidic neighborhood] and spent some time there. I guess they [the hassidim] never read. I never had any reaction to the satire, to my making fun of the Lubavitcher Rebbe or his followers."
    Nor did Richler get any reaction from the Bronfman family, brutally spoofed in Solomon Gursky. "The character of Mr. Bernard [the unsavory Gursky scion] owes a considerable debt to the character of Sam Bronfman [patriarch of the Montreal-based family]. But the Bronfmans were wisely shut up about the book. They didn't comment. One of the grandchildren - he's very bright - he said, 'Oh, I enjoyed the novel very much and it has nothing to do with us.' That was the right comment. I know some of them were angry, but I've never had any direct response."
    Richler is, probably by necessity, thick-skinned about criticism. "I'm fair game. I'm criticized by the feminists, I'm criticized by the Jewish establishment, I'm criticized by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game."
    The Acrobats, Richler's first novel, was published in 1954, early in a 20-year sojourn in London. He was only 23. "I published very early, and at the time it was very exhilarating, but with hindsight, I wish it had been more difficult. Friends of mine were writers, and they had to work at jobs they didn't like, and they can draw on that. I've never been anything but a writer."
    A year later, he evoked the St. Urbain Street shtetl for the first time in the delightful Son of a Smaller Hero.
    He struck gold with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, a lusty Montreal classic that he wrote in exile in 1959. The book and subsequent film rocketed Richler beyond the limits of Canadian fame. One critic called it "one of the best films [set in a specifically Jewish milieu] ever made."
    He has scripted several films, three books of essays, two children's books - translated into Hebrew and published here by Keter - and countless articles for an array of publications from Playboy to The Ultimate Baseball Book to Life. He edited The Best of Modern Humor. His ninth novel, the comic anti-history Solomon Gursky, has been translated into Hebrew and was due to be launched here a few days ago.
    Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! was his first major work of non-fiction, but does not represent a new career direction. He's going right back to fiction after he finishes the piece he has come here to write, on assignment for The New Yorker. He is tracking down his boyhood friends from Habonim and writing about how they live now.
    Richler would not divulge anything about his next book, but at this early stage he strikes an optimistic note. "Your favorite novel is always the next one you're going to write. I always start off dreaming of perfection. I never achieve it, but that's the way you start out." The Great Canadian Novel.
    "You always go back and read one of your novels, and you'll find passages that make you cringe. There are passages that please you, but there are some that you say, 'Oh my God, I could have done that better.'
    "I rewrite an awful lot. Gursky took me five years. But you reach a point where it's boring to work on it. Then you turn it in. It's finished. At that point you can only do a novel harm, in a way. As long as Gursky is [413 pages], I must have cut about 40,000 words, because in the end, certain things didn't belong. Yeah, it's a long novel. But it covers 150 years."
    Richler rejects the notion that Moses Berger, the writer in Gursky, is styled after himself. "The character that came closest to my own feelings was Jacob Hersh in St. Urbain's Horseman. A family man." Richler, married for the second "and last" time, has five children.
    He bristled at the suggestion that his protagonists are unsympathetic. "I think Moses Berger was a nice sympathetic guy. Joshua [in Joshua Then and Now] was sympathetic. Henry Gursky, the hassid living up in the Arctic, was such a character."
    At my next question, Richler practically flicked the cigarette he had taken out of my pack up my nose. I wondered if he had been criticized for too much sameness in his novels. "Sameness? Gursky was different. Cocksure was certainly different. I don't remember Faulkner being attacked for setting all his books in the small-town South. I can't write a novel about a Catholic kid growing up, or about the Catholic hierarchy. I don't know enough about it. So there's a relationship between one book and another. Why not?"
    Richler is as odd as a black polar bear: He is a Canadian who has not sought to live elsewhere to succeed internationally, and has succeeded anyway. He is a Jew who persecutes the antisemites. He is not afraid of what "they" will say, about him, his books, the Jews, the Quebecois. He is a worldwide celebrity so completely unpretentious that he wore a wrinkled shirt to an ambassadorial reception in his honor. He is thoroughly politically incorrect. And in all the time I have heard him speak, he has never, not ever, punctuated a phrase with "eh?"
    Canadians must really hate him for that.

( Box )

All in the Family

    "Mordecai. Feh."
    In my family, you can't utter Mordecai Richler's name to many of my uncles and aunties. To my grandmother, God forbid. The elders of my family have a specific kind of sneer they use exclusively to condemn antisemites, Quebec separatists, neo-Nazis and Mordecai Richler. The curiosity is that this forbidden pariah is one of the family.
    Mordecai Richler and I are first cousins (once removed), but when we met for lunch during his visit to Jerusalem, I had to remind him who I was. "Yes, of course," he said, "Shaindel's son."
    It should be explained that we don't exactly cling to each other as sole familial survivors. His father Moe and my grandmother were the oldest of 14 Richlers at one corner of a majestic family tree, rooted in Montreal's crackling Jewish homeland, the St. Urbain Street area. (Uncle Shmuel in Hadera keeps track: he says the family tree has nearly 400 names; 49 live in Israel. )
    The who's who befuddles me beyond the 100-or-so closest relatives. Mordecai relates, "Occasionally when I lecture, somebody comes up to me and says, 'Hey, I'm your cousin,' and I'd say, 'I'm sorry, I don't know you, but I'm sure you are.' "
    Mordecai and I don't have much in common: he's from the slummy inner city of the 1930s and 1940s, a quarter of a century before I was a kid in the bungalow-suburb of - God's truth - Jesus Island. He joined Habonim as a kid; I was in Bnei Akiva. His writing is studied in schools; mine will be recycled tomorrow into toilet paper.
    We come from a matriarchal family, a great Orthodox hamula that dominated St. Urbain Street and has since taken over the world. Our epicenter was "The Bubbeh," first Bubby Molly (Mordecai's great-grandmother; my great-great-grandmother), and then her daughter, Bubby Esther.
    Molly died in 1958 at 108. Esther passed away at 93, and her daughter Celia (my grandmother), is still a barn-burner at 87.
    "I mostly associate them [the Bubbehs] with the kitchen," says Mordecai. "I remember the two of them tossing dough to make lokshen. They'd toss this dough between them over the table."
    When his father died, Mordecai flew in from London, and then flew in and out of the shiva. "The Bubbeh was very funny. I had a bottle of scotch with me," one of his many disgraces, "and they asked her what she thought of me, and she said, 'Ehr drinkt, ehr pisht' (he drinks, he pishes)." In four words she summed up his entire being.

MORDECAI WAS shmootz because at the age of 12 he kicked religion in the teeth; he snubbed the values of his staunchly Lubavitch family; he smoked, ate treif; he married a non-Jew, divorced, and married another non-Jew. Maybe they hoped he'd run out of non-Jews to marry. They accused him of writing against the family, against the religion, of fueling the antisemites, of waving dirty Jewish laundry at the goyim.
    Officious strangers used to rebuke Moe in shul for the novels his son had written.
    Muti, as Mordecai was then known, started rebelling early. "I was 12 years old and I had taken to strutting down St. Urbain without a hat, riding streetcars on the Sabbath," he writes in an essay in Home Sweet Home. "The next time my father and I started out for [my grandfather's] house on Jeanne Mance Street on a Sunday afternoon, he pleaded with me not to disgrace him, yet again, to behave myself for once, and then he thrust a yarmulke at me. 'You can't go in there bareheaded. Put it on.'

    'It's against my principles. I'm an atheist.'

    'What are you talking about?'

    'Charles Darwin,' I said, having just read a feature article on him. 'Or haven't you heard of him?'

    'You put on that yarmulke,' he said, 'or I cut your allowance right now.'

    'OK, OK.' "
    His grandfather Shmarya (Esther's husband, after whom I was named) carried a smoldering hatred for Mordecai to his grave - literally.
    "I had a very acrimonious relationship with Shmarya. That was a real humdinger. Not because of my writing, he died before that, but because I broke away from Orthodoxy. We didn't like each other, but strongly.
    "I wouldn't talk to him for the last six or eight months, and when he died, [in 1947] my mother said I had to go to the funeral. So I went and Uncle Joe stopped me and said, 'You're not allowed to touch the coffin. He put it in his will.' "
    That morbid edict was the first item in the will, according to Mordecai. "I felt ... creepy." He was 16 at the time. "Then they told me that I hastened his death, because I hadn't spoken to him."

OF COURSE, I was enthralled by Mordecai. I saw him a couple of times at the Bubbeh's. I would gawk in awe, but could never get him to notice me among all the kids running around the place. We didn't have a point of reference: he sat in a corner chair drinking scotch, I sipped chocolate milk through a straw.
    My aunties, sensing another writer was developing in the family, began working on me when I was very young. "Make the world forget Mordecai," I was told and then given a Bubby Esther kichel. Time and again: "You shouldn't read what he writes." And once: "You'll write nice things, poems even, but not lies like that sheigetz."
    His relationships with the 14 ranged from poisonous to pleasant.
    "I came back once from London, and I dropped in [to the Bubbeh's house] to see them and - I think it was Bernard - he said, 'I want you to know. We don't buy your books.'"
    He asked me about some of the relatives here. "And how's Shmuel?" I was glad he asked. Shmuel is my mother's brother, and there was a juicy story to tell. "Well, he's not a locksmith anymore. He's taken up something much more, ah, rewarding to his religious convictions. He's now a gravedigger in Hadera. And he's really enthusiastic about it. He knows the business from top to bottom by now." For the first time, Mordecai's face lit up exclamatorily. He whipped out his pen and made a note.
    If Mordecai does get in touch with Shmuel, he should come up with at least one anecdote for his next book of essays. But you will have read it here first.
    Shmuel was at work one day when his son Mendy stopped by the cemetery office to pick up the house key. He was told that his father was working "in the field." So Mendy walked up and down the rows between the tombstones, looking this way and that, softly calling out "Abba! Abba!" Mourners watching this pathetic sight were moved - and then mortified when suddenly a head popped out of a freshly-dug grave and said, "Over here!"
Just the sort of black-comic scene Mordecai Richler would invent.