"You're a stinker who writes garbage about people", an audience member told Mordecai Richler after he gave a speech at a Montreal synagogue. Partly true. Richler was rarely afraid to speak his mind, even when it meant uncovering and mocking the darker motives that drive us. Yet he's one of the greatest writers this country has produced, an unequaled poet of the colloquial. He had no theory, but a wonderful pudding of detail. He used to say that if scholars want to understand the Russian Revolution, they should turn to the stories of Isaac Babel. I'd add: if scholars want to understand Canada in the last half of the twentieth century, or the secularization of western Jews, or the recent history of the male, they should turn to Mordecai Richler.

My interest in Richler began many years ago, when I first laughed my way through The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I taught several of his novels, and relied partly on them for my first book, Scatology and Civility in the English-Canadian Novel (short-listed for the Raymond Klibansky Prize), but it wasn't until Tom Mitchell and I wrote a second book, Walk Towards the Gallows (winner of the Margaret McWilliams Award for the best scholarly book on Manitoba history), that I realized the pleasures of writing biography. Recounting the life of Hilda Blake, a Brandon servant who murdered her employer's wife 100 years ago, I realized that in a biography I could work through the complex social and literary threads of a particular era while still telling a good story.

Richler's life was certainly a good story, full of incident and battle. He defied his Orthodox Jewish grandfather, suffered a tortured relationship with his mother, was sexually initiated early, and escaped to the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he joined in drunken parties with the local fishermen and prostitutes, eventually landing in jail. At the same time his life and writing touch on many of the cultural flashpoints of the 20th Century. On Ibiza, his confrontation with a Nazi colonel, spurred him to write about the Holocaust and also about Canadian anti-Semitism. In France during the 1950s, he hung around with Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider) and other American hipsters who helped determine the shape of the 1960s counter-culture. In London, he took part in the demonstrations during the Suez Crisis, protesting the British Conservative government's intervention in the Middle East even as he and other Leftists grew disillusioned with the way that the Soviets were crushing the Hungarian Revolution. Returning to Canada, he entered the battle between Parti Quebcois separatists and Montreal's Anglo minority.

All of this and much else besides found its way into his brilliant novels. I spent 4 months at the University of Calgary in 1999 and 2003, going through the 265 boxes of the Richler archives. Put those boxes end to end and they'd stretch across a football field. Several weeks before he died in 2001, Richler gave me permission to speak to his friends and family, and to quote from the letters and manuscripts in his archives even though he had often declared a very visceral objection to literary biography. He was defensive because so much of his best work was pulled, still bleeding, from real life.  The literary biographer's job: trace where the blood's coming from.

Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2008 and won both a 2009 Canadian Jewish Book Award and the 2009 Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best book of literary criticism published in English Canada.  CBC.ca placed it among the Top 100 Pop Culture Mementoes of 2008, alongside Madonna's Sticky & Sweet tour.

Of late, I have been working on another book with Tom Mitchell.  In 1919, the shadowy Citizens' Committee of 1000 managed to bring the federal government and about 30,000 Winnipeg workers to heel.  With the release (under the Access to Information Act) of correspondence between Acting Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen and the Citizens' field general A.J. Andrews, we can now tell the true story of how the Citizens were able to steer the federal government to suppress the Winnipeg General Strike.  When the State Trembled: How A.J. Andrews and the Citizens' Committee Broke the Winnipeg General Strike will be published in September 2010 by the University of Toronto Press.

Dr. Kramer can be contacted at (204) 727-7344 or by e-mail at kramer@brandonu.ca.
 

Dr. Reinhold Kramer
Arts
English
Brandon University
270–18th Street
Brandon MB  R7A 6A9
CANADA

Phone: (204) 727-7344
Email: kramer@brandonu.ca
Website