10 - The Social Critic at Work: Mordecai Richler, “Benny, the War in Europe, and Myerson's Daughter Bella” (1956)

Summary

When Mordecai Richler passed away on July 3, 2001, Canada lost one of its most prolific and engaging writers. As a novelist and essayist, he played a prominent role in ushering Canada into the international scene of world literature. For his Canadian literary generation Richler was a pivotal figure. In several obituaries, his qualities as a trenchant satirist and keen observer of Canadian society and politics were hailed. For these qualities he has earned admiration and reaped dislike from critics, contemporaries, and readers alike. However, Richler never refrained from socially criticizing what he knew best: the Jewish community in Canada and Canadians in general.

Mordecai Richler, a third-generation Canadian Jew, was born at the beginning of the Depression in 1931 in Montreal, where his grandfather settled, having come to Canada in 1904 to escape the Eastern European pogroms. Growing up in the Jewish working-class area around St. Urbain Street, Richler attended a predominately Jewish public high school, often referred to in his work as “Fletcher's Field,” run by the Protestant School Board. Later he went to Sir George Williams College, now a part of Concordia University, as an English major. In 1950, at the age of nineteen, Richler left for Europe, returning to Canada for a short period, and two years later in 1954 moved to England, where he lived for the next eighteen years. During this time he wrote five novels and a collection of short stories (Frank and Shatzky 1997, 314–15). In 1959, he wrote his first important and publicly acclaimed novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, set in the neighborhood of St. Urbain, a place that also prominently features in his short-story collection The Street (1969) and in St. Urbain's Horseman (1971). In 1972, Richler returned to Canada and settled in Montreal, publishing a number of essay collections and three more novels, of which Barney's Version (1999) was to be the last before his death in 2001.

When Richler published The Street — a collection of stories and memoirs — in 1969, many of the pieces had already been published in magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s and subsequently anthologized. The collection was first published by the Canadian publisher McClelland & Stewart and included ten stories. The French edition, published by Éditions HMH, and the British edition by Panther came out in 1971, followed by another in 1972, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.