Solomon Gursky Was Here
by Mordecai Richler
MORDECAI RICHLER (1931–2001) wrote ten novels; numerous screenplays, essays, and children’s books; and several works of non-fiction. He gained international acclaim with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which was later made into a movie. During his career, he was the recipient of dozens of literary awards, including two Governor General’s Awards, The Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Mordecai Richler was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2001.
The Acrobats
Son of a Smaller Hero
A Choice of Enemies
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
The Incomparable Atuk
Cocksure
The Street
St. Urbain’s Horseman
Joshua Then and Now
Barney’s Version
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country
This Year in Jerusalem
Images of Spain
Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports
Shovelling Trouble
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album
Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions
Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions
On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It
Dispatches from the Sporting Life
The following are used by permission:
“Bei Mir Bist du Schon” by Jacob Jacobs (English version by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin, music by Sholom Secunda). Copyright © 1937 by Warner Bros. Inc. (Renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Extracts from Captain Al Cohol used by permission of the Department of Culture and Communications, Government of the Northwest Territories.
“Future Generations” by Abraham Reisen, translated by Leonard Wolf in The Penguin Book of Modem Yiddish Verse. Copyright © 1987 by Irving Howe, Ruth Wisse and Chone Shmeruk. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books U.S.A. Inc.
“Gerontion” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T.S. Eliot. Used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd., London, U.K.
“Heat Wave” by Irving Berlin. Copyright © Irving Berlin. International copyright secured. All rights reserved including right of public performance for profit. Copyright renewed 1960 Irving Berlin. Used by permission of Warner/Chappell Music Canada Ltd.
Strangers Within Our Gates or Coming Canadians by J.S. Woodsworth. Copyright © University of Toronto Press 1972. Reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press.
The Unquiet Grave; A Word Cycle by Palinurus by Cyril Connolly. Copyright © 1981 by Deirdre Levi. Used by permission of Persea Books.
For Florence
Introduction
by David Bezmozgis
“I am thrice homeless,” wrote Gustav Mahler, “as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” A similar construction could be applied to Mordecai Richler: an anglophone in Quebec, a Jew in Canada, a Canadian throughout the world. But whereas Mahler felt the need—however conflicted—to assimilate, Richler wore his homelessness like a badge and built his career around it. All his books incorporate one or another of these identities—often all three. (Actually, a fourth and equally important identity, that of the writer, also factors into the equation.) And when I think about Richler’s work I think of the novels in which he gives voice to the sum of his preoccupations: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version. It was in these, his mature Montreal books, that Richler defined his style and his subject matter, and they constitute the core of his legacy. He once said: “I do feel forever rooted in St. Urbain Street. That was my time, my place, and I have elected myself to get it right.” Over the course of his career Richler not only acquainted readers—Canadian and otherwise—with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants, but he progressively asserted his little neighbourhood’s place in the grander scheme of Canada’s history and culture.
When The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was published in 1959, St. Urbain Street and Montreal’s Jewish enclaves did not exist in the popular imagination. What little had been heard about Jewish Montreal had been heard from poets: Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and most notably, A.M. Klein. With Duddy Kravitz, though, Richler effectively put his corner of Montreal on the literary map. Other than the occasional side trip to the Laurentians, the book is set entirely in Montreal and, more precisely, in the environs of St. Urbain Street. Richler immerses the reader in the particularities of Jewish Montreal in the 1940s and 1950s, a world he portrays as vibrant, comic, cruel, pathetic, and perfectly self-contained. When the uniformed and uniformly Jewish Fletcher’s Field High cadets march down Esplanade Avenue, they pass the Jewish Old People’s Home where on the balcony above, bedecked with shawls and rugs, a stain of yellowing expressionless faces, women with little beards and men with sucked-in mouths, fussy nurses with thick legs and grandfathers whose sons had little time, a shrunken little woman who had survived a pogrom and two husbands and three strokes, and two followers of Rabbi Brott the Miracle Maker, watched squinting against the fierce wintry sun.
“Jewish children in uniform?”
“Why not?”
“It’s not nice. For a Jewish boy a uniform is not so nice.”
For a Canadian literature strongly identified with a rural and Protestant tradition, such writing represented a significant departure. And though later in the book Richler also notes a corn field, silo, and cows, the cows and fields exist for the sole purpose of firing Duddy’s entrepreneurial dreams: he wants to possess the fields, displace the cows, and build a summer resort for Montreal’s Jews. “A man without land is nobody,” Duddy’s grandfather declares. Not unlike the homesteaders who came before, Duddy also aspires to own a piece of the country, but he differs from them in his methods and motivations—the things that define character.
If part of the challenge associated with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was to create a space within Canadian literature for St. Urbain Street, then the ongoing challenge for Richler was how to continue to develop this material. One way he accomplished this was to allow his stories to stray more and more from the epicentre of St. Urbain. In subsequent books—St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now—he set a considerable amount of the action in London and Spain, respectively. Though grounded in Montreal, the stories and the protagonists were more cosmopolitan. I assume this was partly a reflection of the change in Richler’s personal fortunes. In the 1950s he had been a young man hustling to make his name as a writer—an enterprise that bore no small resemblance to Duddy Kravitz’s “nervy” commercial pursuits—but in the 1960s and thereafter his heroes came to reflect the man Richler had become, a man legitimized by his success as an author. Still, I think there is more to this than the superficial association between a writer’s life and his art. Rich men can write about poor men, and often do. What stimulates a writer’s imagination is partly ingrained and enigmatic and partly volitional. And if in Duddy Kravitz Richler designed to introduce St. Urbain Street to Canada, in the latter books he set out to illustrate St. Urbain Street’s impact on Canada.