Trapped On St. Urbain Street (National Post September 17,2007)   

Six years after his death, Mordecai Richler remains a giant of the Canadian literary firmament, and interest in his work remains strong. This week, CBC Television will air a two-part adaptation of St. Urbain's Horseman. McClelland & Stewart is also set to release a new paperback edition of the 1971 classic. This week, the National Post comment pages present a series of essays on Mordecai Richler and his oeuvre. In today's first instalment, Barbara Kay argues that Richler's fascination with the culture of Montreal's St. Urbain Street neighbourhood was the author's dynamo, but also may have prevented him from attaining greater literary heights.

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Jews read with extreme self-consciousness, longing for flattering accounts of themselves in literature. But on the whole, the most talented Jewish writers have chosen trenchant satire of their kinsmen over collective tribal self-promotion. U.S. Jews had Philip Roth to embarrass them (Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus); we had Mordecai Richler.

Nevertheless, we Jews were grateful to Mordecai for enshrining us in literature as full-fledged Canadians. For all our vaunted collective self-confidence, we have humble expectations from our literary sons and daughters. So we laughed through tears at the savagery of Richler's caricatures. Still, we shuddered inwardly imagining what the gentiles reading his books must think of us.

With the launch of every new Richler novel, a frisson ran through the Jewish community:What mortifyingly outrageous images of our community leaders and their wives would he conjure up this time? Mordecai was never kind to us, but instead of issuing fatwas, we invited book reviewers to synagogue breakfast clubs to pour salt in our wounds.

I first saw Richler in the flesh at a Toronto synagogue reading in the sixties. The success of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz had already made him the cynosure of that mixture of pride, embarrassment, deference and angst with which Canadian Jewish readers routinely greeted his subsequent novels.

Disheveled, hunched, he looked pained and made us uneasy in turn. His eyes never left the floor. He mumbled the chosen passage hastily and without affect. His shrinking body language gave every indication that he couldn't wait to leave. The vignette captures the ambivalence we "uptown" Jews feel for Mordecai and his near-phobic recoil from us.

What is it with Richler, we constantly asked each other. Self-hatred? Anger at his parents? Questions, we were told by our aesthetic purists, and especially by Mordecai, one mustn't ask an artist! In Montreal a few years later, at a Jewish Book Month event, people literally pounded on the door for the privilege of standing in the aisle to hear Richler castigate them for complaining about his offensive Jewish characters and "confus[ing] their writers with publicists."

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In his essay, Why I Write, Mordecai said he was "forever rooted in Montreal's St. Urbain St. That was my time, my place and I have elected to get it right." It may seem churlish, given Richler's international success and mythic stature here, to wish he'd aimed a little higher and wider -- and elected to get all of Montreal Jewish culture, Quebec and Canada right as well, not to mention women -- but I do wish it, for it was his persisting loyalty to St. Urbain St. alone that blocked him from the top tier of literary achievement.

He certainly got St. Urbain St. right. His first mature fictional work, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, succeeded as a novel of an authentic character shaped by time and place. Duddy is wholly cut from St. Urbain cloth. Here is the dark side of the Jewish immigrant experience that inspired Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. St. Urbain St., a restless hive of "greeners" -- new immigrants, financially inept intellectuals, prickly Marxists, pimps, seedy small-time criminals, a world of Jews without Judaism -- was a Petri dish for growing the antithesis to the stereotype of the "nice Jewish boy."

One couldn't love Duddy, and he never breaks through the moral ceiling that he is striving toward, but he and his story, set in a traditional format over which the author had firm technical control, are fully realized literary creations, an integrated aesthetic success I don't believe Richler ever duplicated.

Richler was so hugely talented, his fictions never failed to entertain in patches, but my willingness to indulge the moral failures of his alter egos soon atrophied. Richler took his heroes into the wider world, but he didn't take the St. Urbain St. or their boyhood -- "the little Jewboy on the make" -- out of them. Spontaneous vulgarity one might indulge in a ghetto kid fighting his way up became grossness in cosmopolitan men of means. His alter egos -- Jake Hersh in St. Urbain's Horseman, Josh Shapiro in Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky -- retain their penchant, unmanly in an adult, for hyperbolic adolescent pranksterism. (In Solomon Gursky Was Here, for example, blood-drenched matzo is served at a Passover Seder. This is not funny. It conjures up one of the most pernicious group libels in history, and Richler's gleeful exploitation of it illustrates not only his meager grasp of Judaism, but his boyish obliviousness to the boundary between satire and blasphemy.)

Sexually, Richler is a misogynistic man's writer if he is anyone's. The Richler hero exudes a gamy juvenility even as he advances into middle age. His "tough guy intellectuals" were hard-drinking cynics obsessed with seducing (gentile) women with their dynamic virility. It's often been noted that Richler couldn't write mainstream women well, because the St. Urbain St. myth was woven around the lowlife men who dominated his world, for whom women are variations of whores, harpies, dupes or trophies.

And there is a further problem for Jewish women readers. For although he caricatures gentile men as savagely as Jewish men, he was crueler to Jewish women than gentile women (marrying a gentile woman was a symbol of "making it" for the Richler hero). Gentile women were aesthetically two-dimensional but genteel. Jewish women were coarse and sexually aggressive (anathema to the Richler hero). As one pundit put it: "Richler's gentile women had breasts; his Jewish women had tits."

His protagonists, each a variation on the "roaring, thundering Jew" most fully exemplified in Solomon Gursky, became less sympathetic as they aged (with the exception of Barney in Barney's Version, his last novel, and it took Alzheimer's to do that trick), as they migrated away from the source of their existential nourishment and as the burden of Richler's greater ambitions and not quite capacious enough intellect to realize them became too weighty to bear.

The plots become postmodernistically fragmented and harder to follow. Richler's Jewish characters became more and more grotesque. From satirical props, they ballooned out to fill the entire frame in Solomon Gursky -- supposedly his "Canadian" masterwork-- a mixture of farce, magic realism and equally bizarre distortions of Canadian and Jewish history to no discernible purpose.

Richler always claimed to be a moralist, but his vision, such as it is, seems to be a negative one: All the idealistic ventures that seem to offer hope for mankind are illusory -- religion, ideology, Israel-- and end badly. Solomon Gursky writes in a letter to his lackey, Moses Berger: "Look at it this way. The system was inspired, but it is man that is vile. It won't work. The sermon on the Mount. The Manifesto. The world continues to pay a punishing toll for our Jewish dreamers."

If I am reading him right, the world is a mess, and-- you'll recall I warned you we Jews are self-conscious readers --it is all the fault of the Jews.

TOMORROW

Jack Rabinovitch on his lifelong friendship with Mordecai Richler

bkay@videotron.ca

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