by M G Vassanji
“Their country.” How telling. And how far young Mordecai of St. Urbain Street had come when he wrote this, how far young Canada had come. Anti-Semitism might have existed at the street level, among the poor. But it was at the level of haughty discrimination at public places such as the beaches, clubs, and restaurants that it stung. The Jewish insecurity and self-consciousness about their humble origins was not easily shaken off; as many would attest to this day, “it never goes away.” This would be a recurrent theme in Richler’s fiction, as indeed of other Jewish writers of his generation in Canada and the United States.
MORDECAI’S FATHER, Moses Isaac Richler, known as Moe, was the oldest of fourteen children, the only one born in the Old Country, from where he had been brought as an infant. He was not a successful man.
He worked … for my fierce, hot-tempered grandfather and a pompous younger brother. Uncle Solly, who had been to high school, had been made a partner in the [scrap] yard, but not my father, the firstborn. He was a mere employee, working for a salary, which fed my mother’s wrath. Younger brothers, determined to escape an overbearing father, had slipped free to form their own business, but my father was too timid to join them.
He would be remembered by his son as being short, stout, and fleshy, with a shiny bald head and the floppy Richler ears, though like Mordecai he was slim when young. Moe lived on perpetual hopes for the future, with ready excuses for his failures that even his son learned to mock. A mildmannered man afraid of his own father, he made attempts at sternness that had little effect on a rebellious Mordecai. His brothers, successful in their own businesses, humoured him and sometimes let him work for them. His wife, Leah (Lily) Rosenberg, scorned him and nagged him to do better.
But Leah had doted on her own father in his lifetime and worshipped his memory after his death in 1935. Mordecai was four at the time; what he could recall of that old grandfather in rabbi’s black garb, with flowing grey beard and Eastern features, was sitting on his lap once and drawing a man riding a horse, the man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. A Hasid of the Old Country. Throughout his childhood the boy must have heard enough praises about his mother’s father, the great rabbi, “a lion of a man … a king of Israel,” to want to shut him off from his mind. Still, although he hardly made anything of it until much later in his life, the fact remains that he came from an illustrious rabbinical pedigree. And he was not the first writer in the family.
Both Jehudah Rosenberg and his second wife, Sarah Gitel (the first wife had died), came from a long line of Hasidic rabbis, in her case tracing their origins to the disciples of the mystic Baal Shem Tov. For Orthodox Jews, Rabbi Rosenberg’s name was one to contend with. Among his scholarly achievements, besides the dry treatises on law and traditional medicine, was a translation, from Aramaic into Hebrew, of the Zohar, a mystical commentary on the Torah. The creative and mystical were evidently his métier. He was also the author, in Hebrew, of a version of the famous legend of the Golem of Prague, an English translation of which is in print. In that story, the golem, a Frankenstein’s monster–like creature, saves the Jews of Prague from an outbreak of anti-Semitism.
In 1912 Jehudah Rosenberg had become one of the thousands who left Poland to settle in North America. He came to Toronto. A year later he was followed by his wife and a brood consisting of the five youngest children; two older boys stayed behind. The rabbi already had four children from his first marriage. Leah, born in Poland, was Sarah’s sixth child. After living in the Jewish neighbourhood of Toronto’s Kensington area for a few years, in 1919 the family headed for the better rabbinical pastures of Montreal.
Evidently, in Moses Richler, hapless son of a scrap dealer, Leah had married the wrong man, and she appreciated neither his excuses for himself nor the practical jokes that he liked to make, perhaps to try to win her. The marriage had been arranged by her father. She loved him but never forgave him for that. During the Depression, times were hard for the couple, and according to Lily her family helped her out with food parcels and cash. She was also more educated than Moe, although she had not been allowed to finish high school. She read Keats and Shelley, and popular novels such as King’s Row by Henry Bellamann and The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. She craved culture and a better life, and even wrote stories, based on life in her father’s home. On the other hand, simple Moses assiduously read the New York Daily Mirror, especially for the views of the outspoken and fiercely anti-Hitler Walter Winchell, and “devoured” Popular Mechanics, Doc Savage, and Black Mask. He did not know Beethoven from Bartók.
The boy Mordecai attended one of the Jewish parochial schools of the neighbourhood, called the Talmud Torah, where he studied English, French, and modern Hebrew. Two days a week after school the boys repaired to the backroom of the Young Israel Synagogue for Talmud studies. There, Mr. Yalofsky, the young teacher, might begin by demonstrating to these New World boys some of the finer points of Jewish law that had tested the wisest of the old rabbis.
—If a man tumbles off the roof of an eight-story building and four stories down another man sticks a sword out of the window and stabs him, is that second man guilty of murder? Or not?
—Rabbi Menasha asks, did he fall or was he pushed off the roof?
—Rabbi Yedhua asks, was he already dead of heart failure before he was stabbed?
—Were the two men related?
—Enemies?
—Friends?
“Who cared?” asks the older Mordecai Richler many years later. “Concealed on our laps, below the table, at the risk of having our ears twisted by Mr. Yalofsky, was the Herald, opened at the sports pages.” The boy, whose mother must have hoped he would become a rabbi one day and keep alive the tradition of her father, was on his way to becoming a modern agnostic and simply a writer. But those lessons from Mr. Yalofsky’s class were not in vain; they would remain indelible in Mordecai’s mind, and he would go on to extend them with his own readings and research. His knowledge of the Jewish tradition, as demonstrated in his novels, would be impressive. The English teachers, too, left a mark on the boy; from them he learned of Hemingway’s Spain and Steinbeck’s California, imbibed socialist ideas, and heard the anarchist labourer Sacco’s speech to the Massachusetts court.
When Mordecai was thirteen, his parents’ marriage finally ended. His mother had become “enthralled” with one of the German Jewish refugees of the war; these new Jews of Western Europe were the sophisticated lot, not “timorous innocents out of the shtetl.” They spoke better English, besides German and French, and took an interest in opera and literature; they would not be caught sitting rapt like Moses Richler before Lili St. Cyr as she simulated intercourse with a swan on the stage of the Gayety. The refugee that Mrs. Richler fell in love with was the boarder the family kept in the spare bedroom to earn extra money. His name was Julius Frenkel.
A divorce in Quebec would have required parliamentary approval, a costly process. And so a loophole was found, and the marriage was annulled in the Quebec court on the false grounds that Lily Richler had married when underage and without her father’s approval. I’m a bastard, the boy bragged to his friends, this being his solace for the very obvious pain and embarrassment of the broken home. He stayed with his mother and saw his father mostly on weekends, Moe having agreed to pay $28 monthly to Lily for Mordecai’s care. His older brother Avrum was in university, at Queen’s, in Kingston.
Though a typical teenager—“I embarrassed him. I got into trouble”—Mordecai developed a bond with his father that tightened over the years. For while Lily, whom Julius Frankel never married, worried about Mordecai’s education and fuelled his ambition, filling his ears with talk of culture and eulogies of her father the rabbi, Moses was the simple friend who demanded nothing and was always available with earthy, common-sense, manly advice, a person easy to talk to, who took him to the Richler family gatherings and the synagogue. Who told jokes.
“Hey, do you know why we eat hard-boiled eggs dipped in salt water just before the Passover meal?”
“No, Daddy. Why?”
“To remind us that when the Jews crossed the Red Sea they certainly got their balls soaked.”
After parochial school, Mordecai attended Baron Byng High School, a yellow-brick structure on St. Urbain Street, which in his fiction became transformed into Fletcher’s Field High School. It possessed the grim external look of a penitentiary; nevertheless, it was for the boys the heart of the ghetto. Almost all the pupils were from Jewish working-class families of the neighbourhood, those from well-heeled Outremont attending Strathcona Academy; interaction between the two groups was minimal. The Baron Byng parents may have worked at humble and menial jobs, but they well knew that education was the way out of poverty and were therefore fiercely competitive about their kids’ education. It was not marks but ranking that mattered, Richler tells us, and being number two meant that there was someone else, the bragging Mrs. Kauffman’s kid, perhaps, who was number one. “On St. Urbain Street, a head start was all. Our mothers read us stories from Life about pimply astigmatic fourteen-year-olds who had already graduated from Harvard or who were confounding professors at MIT.”
The Jewish Public Library in the area was well attended and organized readings and lectures. The Kanader Adler, Montreal’s daily Yiddish paper established in 1907, brought local and world news besides promoting Yiddish culture. It was what the zeyda (grandfather) Shmarya read, sitting in his balcony, overlooking the street. Its English-language version was the Jewish Daily Eagle. Yiddish theatre was active in the city, and in the delis and pubs of the Main, world events were followed closely. Not surprisingly, politics in the ghetto followed a leftish bent.
Thirteen-year-olds entering Baron Byng were told by their teachers to work hard, especially if they desired to go on to the city’s prestigious McGill University. Entrance to McGill required an average mark of sixty-five for graduating high-schoolers, but the Jews had special consideration: they needed seventy-five. Whether this was official policy or not, it was common knowledge, and the practice lasted well into the 1960s. Their counterparts in the ghettos of the American cities, of course, faced similar obstacles to get into the elite Ivy League colleges. The boys already knew that, and Baron Byng consistently outperformed most, and perhaps all, other schools in Quebec. Taking in through its doors the uncouth sons of plumbers, peddlers, and factory workers, Baron Byng magically produced future doctors, lawyers, scientists, philanthropists, and community leaders. Among its graduates it would later boast a Nobel Prize winner, Rudolph A. Marcus; two of Canada’s leading poets, A.M. Klein and Irving Layton; a leading politician, David Lewis; actor William Shatner; and writer Mordecai Richler. Toronto’s Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, also graduated from this school.
Mordecai Richler would describe himself at thirteen as short for his age and pimply. He is remembered as awkward with girls, bookish, and a loner. Different from the rest even then, he would go to basketball games sometimes with a profound-looking tome in his hand, such as H.G. Wells’s Outline of History; a librarian convinced him to read All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about a young German in the trenches of the First World War, which he enjoyed and where he learned that latkes were also German. Even if he would later boast that he had read only trivial books as a boy, these examples show an exceptional sensibility. He was, one might say, a boy with an attitude: a smart aleck not afraid to speak up, even to his teachers. And as a scion of famous rabbinical scholars, he stood out for his articulation, his writing abilities, and his sheer arrogance. He was also a good artist as a child, and Lily enrolled him in an art class. If one were to go by remembered accounts of him, even taking into account distorted and jaundiced memories, he seems to have been respected by his contemporaries but was not high up in the popularity contest.
His mother had ambitions for him as a rabbi, the traditional vocation a couple of her own brothers had already followed. But Mordecai knew from early on that he wanted to be a writer. Always perfect English, always taking notes, by far the best writer his teachers knew. That is how he is remembered.
THE RICHLERS had traditionally followed the Chabad-Lubavitch branch of the Hasidic movement. Shmarya Richler, the zeyda, had after his arrival set himself up in the scrap metal business. Stern and dictatorial in all matters, he demanded strict observance in religion and ritual from his family; young Mordecai was the rebel in the brood, harbinger in the old man’s fearful, angry eyes of his precious world’s coming end—all that the Eastern Jews had struggled to keep, had brought with them. The battles between the two emblematize a contest between their different worlds. Shmarya, too, was a small man, with a dome head, a beard, and a pinched face; in the writer’s description of their tussles, however, he takes on a titanic aspect. There was a shul (synagogue) around the corner from St. Urbain where the family went for evening prayers. One day Mordecai and his young uncle Yankel, playing with a chemistry set in the basement, failed to appear at shul. On his return, Grandfather Richler “descended on us, seething, his face bleeding red. One by one he smashed our test tubes and our retorts and even our cherished water distiller against the stone wall. Yankel begged forgiveness, but not me.” A few days later, continuing his rebellion, Mordecai blackened Yankel’s eye. Grandfather summoned Mordecai to his study and thrashed him with his belt.
But “vengeance was mine,” says the writer, slightly blasphemously. That vengeance consisted of discovering Shmarya cheating on the scrapyard scales once, thus reducing him pitifully in estimation. Before, he had been stern, cruel, perhaps righteous. And now? “Scornful, triumphant, I ran to my father and told him his father was no better than a cheat and a hypocrite.
“What do you know?” my father demanded.
“Nothing.”
“They’re anti-Semites, every one of them.”
The short-changed peddler happened to be a drunken Irishman.
Mordecai resisted wearing the yarmulke, would not keep the Sabbath. When he told his father he was an atheist, having read about Charles Darwin, Moe told him simply to put his yarmulke on or he would cut off his allowance. The boy complied; he had only been testing. One Sunday afternoon, visiting the zeyda with his father, not having been to shul the previous evening, which was the Sabbath, he found Shmarya waiting for him. Before the entire family, denouncing him as a Sabbath goy, his grandfather pulled him by the ear, slapped him about the face, and threw him out of the house. The two never spoke again.
It is a remarkable relationship, between a rigid, tyrannical Orthodox patriarch from the shtetl who controlled the entire family and the rebel grandson who broke away to become a secular and outspoken writer. As far as we can tell they never got to understand each other at the time. But many years later, when Mordecai was closer in age to his grandfather, he would take time to cast a sympathetic eye on poor Shmarya.
Shmarya Richler died when Mordecai was fourteen. When Mordecai went to the house on Jeanne Mance Street to attend the funeral, the coffin had been set on the living room floor, the grieving aunts and uncles gathered around. One of the uncles cornered the teenager as he entered, barring his way, we imagine, and told him, “You hastened his death … you are not a good Jew … don’t you dare touch his coffin!”
That was the instruction the old man had left in his will, his final punishment of the rebel. Mordecai was not to touch his coffin. Mordecai turned to his father. Help me, help me, he pleaded silently.
And so the rebellion, the breaking away, was not easy. It never is.
AT THE DEATH OF HIS FATHER, in 1967, Mordecai Richler wrote a moving tribute to that erstwhile loser; he wrote of how the two had become closer over the years. He missed him, he would say, in a rare display of open emotion. In Richler’s fiction, Moe appears in various guises, always down-to-earth, always likeable. Even in the guise of a mobster’s enforcer, there is that goodness to him, a certain gentleness. Not so Lily. Richler never wrote anything approaching a tribute to his mother, always mentioning her in relation to Moe, and he acknowledged her father,
Jehudah, whom she worshipped, only in his later years. In his fiction she is not a likeable character. In life she was a hard and bitter woman, out of place in her milieu, often aloof; she has not been remembered well by almost everyone, including her two sons. But she doted on Mordecai.
The hurt in his childhood—his parents’ divorce—would have been ameliorated by the closeness of the community in which Richler grew up. There was the synagogue, the school, the Talmud Torah, the clamorous life of the street with its vibrant oral culture and robust sense of humour. There were aunts and uncles and their numerous offspring; there were births and deaths, anniversaries and festivals. At his own bar mitzvah he performed brilliantly. At such close quarters, and with such large families, naturally there were conflicts, many of them bitter. People could not but reveal themselves. Everyone knew everyone else, heard secrets and rumours.
He would return to this communal set-up repeatedly in his fiction and essays. From it he would derive his moral outlook. Specifically, the major influences on his life include his relationships with his two grandfathers—one of them dead but famous and revered, living on in his mother’s memory to an oppressive degree; the other authoritarian and a bully, pious but, in his grandson’s eyes, a cheat. There was then the trauma of his parents’ quarrels, his mother’s treatment of her husband, her extramarital affair, which was his humiliation, and the couple’s ultimate divorce. Life on the street and in the school among other Canadian kids would have been fun. But the attitudes of the adults, especially his grandfather Shmarya and his mother, Lily, despite all the professions of piety and tradition, were hypocritical, a lie. Perhaps this was too harsh a judgment, but from it undoubtedly he acquired his hatred of hypocrisy and double-talk. More and more, in the positions he took in his later years, it was the simple honesty and unpretentiousness of his father, Moe, that he leaned toward.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1948, one day there came in the mail his final report from Baron Byng High School: a depressing 64.6 percent. Algebra and French had done him in. (The fact that marks from so long back are remembered reflects a culture that was academically competitive and traditionally respectful of scholarship.) He did reasonably in English, well in history. Mordecai Richler would not have been admitted to McGill even had he not been a Jew. He did not even apply. He entered Sir George Williams College (SGW), run by the YMCA, instead. Within days of his admission he was a reporter for the students’ weekly, the Georgian, one of the few with his own byline. “Emancipation Hop Riotous Success: Annual Freshman Frolic Sparked by Westernaires” was the headline of one of his first reports, in the October 14, 1948, issue. Three weeks later he wrote an enthusiastic feature on Israel: “A People Come Home!” By the following year, his name appeared on the masthead as the day editor. And he had already become controversial, winning opprobrium or approval from Georgian readers.