Mordecai Richler

by M G Vassanji

  But anti-Semitism, just as racism or sexism, can also be too easily invoked. Invoking it doesn’t automatically put one on the side of the righteous. Richler, always brutally honest, was not one to ignore the humour latent in this situation. And so when as a boy he discovered his grandfather cheating a goy and reported to his father, Moe’s response, after “What do you know?” was the lame non sequitur, “They’re anti-Semites, every one of them.” Similarly, the facile invocation of “the six million”:

  The Holocaust, the most unspeakable act of our time, has undoubtedly been cheapened over the years by being invoked too frequently, sometimes as blackmail of a sort. Say by the plump Toronto suburban rabbi whom I once heard brandish it before his congregation in an appeal for funds for a new state-of-the-art temple-cum-community centre. Contribute big, he seemed to be saying, or you have spat on Anne Frank’s bones. Or take my militant Zionist friend Ginsburg. Denied a choice table in the Ritz gardens or an upgrade on his flight to London, he will fire off a letter of complaint to the Montreal Gazette, saying, “Remember the 6-million.”

  The film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg, Richler said in the article, was also a cheapening of the Holocaust, made in the same vein as the director’s E.T. and Jurassic Park, trivial and predictable. A crowd-pleaser. Read Primo Levi, instead, he said, or Elie Wiesel’s Night for authenticity and dignity.

  The “unspeakable act” preyed on his mind as he pondered his heritage and its meaning to him; and despite his youthful pronouncement that it should be grieved in humanist and not communal terms, it affected him as a Jew. His creative response to it is the brilliant and complex novel St. Urbain’s Horseman.

  ON THE ONE HAND, the novel is about the middle, postwar “lost” generation that was left with no big causes to fight; the expatriates of A Choice of Enemies form one such group. In Horseman, however, that generation is represented by a descendant of Eastern European Jews, a former denizen of Montreal’s ghetto. Richler’s protagonist, Jake Hersh, now lives in London, a successful television director married to a shiksa, Nancy, with a family of three children. He should be happy in his career and home; but he is cursed with a burden, an overworked fantastic imagination in which he has taken up the cause of the Jews through his alter ego, Joey, a missing older cousin whom he has glorified into a hero.

  Jake was seven when Joey arrived with his mother and his sister to stay in the neighbourhood in Montreal. Judging by his appearance Joey seemed to have made a detour through reform school. Four months after his arrival he disappeared. He reappeared a few years later, in a red MG bearing the stickers from many exotic places, before vanishing finally and mysteriously. Whether he was in fact a criminal or a hero, or both, is unclear, but to the boys of the ghetto who observed his daring exploits with awe during his second appearance, and especially to Jake Hersh, there is no doubt that he was a hero and defender of the Jews. His dashing arrogance and pizzazz easily stood out in the unassuming, working-class St. Urbain neighbourhood. “His fire-engine red MG looked so lithe and incongruous parked right there on St. Urbain, among the fathers’ battered Chevies and coal delivery trucks, off-duty taxis, salesmen’s Fords and grocery goods vans—the MG could have been a magnificent stallion and Cousin Joey a knight returned from a foreign crusade.”

  He stayed all of five weeks, during which he was observed sipping martinis with “high-quality” girls in his mother’s backyard and driving off with a blonde in riding clothes. Not only could he ride horses, he also had a pilot’s licence. He could easily stand up to the goys. It was 1943, Duplessis was premier, and anti-Semitism found open expression. “Jewish shops were being broken and swastikas had been painted on the pavement outside the shul on Fairmont Street.” The slogan “A bas les Juifs” had been painted on a highway. Anti-Semitic flyers were openly distributed. And Joey went around Jewish businesses exhorting the Jews: “What are you going to do about it?” One day he accompanied the St. Urbain boys to the playing field, where they were liable to face harassment from a gang of French toughs. The parents, who desired no altercation with the others, in the time-honoured way—what’s a little bullying?—were not pleased. And then Joey disappeared; his MG was found turned over and gutted on the road to New York.

  Jake eventually came to London, where he is now a successful television director. As the novel unfolds, he is on trial, falsely charged with the crimes of aiding and abetting sodomy, indecent assault, and possessing cannabis, having been set up by his co-defendant, a creepy, pathetic, and envious English Jew called Harry. Through his recollections during this ordeal, Jake’s life is revealed, from his childhood in Montreal to his adult life in London as a secular Jew happily married to the shiksa—except that he is possessed by his Jewishness, haunted by the Horseman, Joey.

  Jake’s past, which he had always taken to be characterized by self-indulgence, soaring ambition, and too large an appetite, could at last be seen by him to have assumed nifty contours. A meaningful symmetry. The Horseman, Doktor Mengele, Harry, Ingrid, all frog-marching him to where he was to stand so incongruously, stupefied and inadequate, on trial in Courtroom Number One at the Old Bailey.

  Josef Mengele was the all too real doctor who conducted human experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Jake has traced the Horseman to a kibbutz in Israel, then to American and Canadian army camps in Germany, where he had apparently shown interest in the affairs of the Mengele family. Finally a woman named Ruthy contacted Jake in London; she had been engaged to Joey, who subsequently disappeared. It was through Ruthy that Jake met Harry, who became his nemesis, landing him finally at Old Bailey.

  Jake’s similarity to Mordecai Richler is more than incidental; they are the same age and their parents are separated; the father, a beloved character, dies of cancer at about the same time as Moe does. Jake, like Mordecai, has been to Ibiza; Jake, too, is married to a non-Jewish wife and is passionately devoted to her and their children. Portions of Jake’s father’s letter to him disapproving his marriage to the shiksa are taken verbatim from Moe’s letter to Mordecai when he married Cathy. (Though, if anyone, Jake’s Nancy is modelled on Florence.) The large Hersh clan bears similarity to the Richler clan; just as Mordecai did, Jake goes to Montreal for his father’s funeral. And finally, Jake’s mother, who happens to be visiting him during the ordeal of his trial, is too much like Lily, overbearing in her love and possessiveness, a love that moreover is not or cannot be reciprocated. Her plea to her son at the airport, as she departs for Montreal, begging for his love, and her subsequent anger at his indifference, chillingly forebode Lily’s last letter to Mordecai when they broke up.

  If the avenging Horseman, Joey, haunts Jake, so too does the Holocaust, personified by the Nazi Doktor Mengele:

  Sometimes Jake wondered if the Doktor, given his declining years, slept with his mouth open, slack, or was it (more characteristically, perhaps) always clamped shut? Doesn’t matter. In any event, the Horseman would extract the gold fillings from the triangular cleft between his upper front teeth with pliers. Slowly, Jake thought, coming abruptly awake in a sweat.

  The refrain Horseman, Horseman echoes through the novel; passages are quoted about the horrors of the Holocaust. How could he still hate the Germans, Nancy asks one evening. Easily, Jake replies, recalling his recurring nightmare, “the terror that took him by surprise in his living room, striking only on those rare evenings when he brimmed over with well-being” in the bosom of his family.

  ... in Jake’s Jewish nightmare, they come. Into his house. The extermination officers seeking out the Jew vermin. Ben is seized by the legs like a chicken and heaved out of the window, his brains spilling to the terrace. Molly, whose experience has led her to believe all adults gentle, is raised in the air not to be tossed and tickled, but to be flung against the brick fireplace. Sammy is dispatched with a pistol.

  NINE YEARS AFTER St. Urbain’s Horseman, in 1980—when Richler was already back in Canada—he published his next novel, as large and ambitious, titled Joshua Then and
Now, in which he continues his treatment of Jewishness and the Holocaust, as experienced by his generation, anchored as they are by their childhood in Montreal’s Jewish ghetto. That neighbourhood is all important; it provides the vision and the worldview of the protagonists and anchors those larger issues within the milieu and in a specific history.

  Joshua Shapiro is the same age as Mordecai and Jake; like them, he goes off to London, where after an ardent pursuit he marries a WASP, to whom, as to his children, he is passionately devoted, and by whom he is indulged. The theme of the ardent pursuit of a WASP, his devotion and fear of losing her, occurs in both novels, as it does in Richler’s last novel, Barney’s Version. (Miriam in that novel is actually Jewish, but to this reader she is too much like the other two wives.) If one does not want to draw easy parallels, one might at least see it as a stand-in for a preciously bought secularism. Jake returns to Canada a decade before Mordecai did, however, and is a sportswriter. Like Mordecai, he has a cottage by Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships, where much of the novel is set. Joshua’s father is a former boxer and enforcer for a crime boss, and his mother, among other things, is a stripper; but behind these disguises the reader will easily discern the spectres of Moe and Lily.

  Both Joshua and Pauline, his wife, a senator’s daughter, have a past to deal with: hers a dark family history, his his stay in Ibiza. As the novel opens, Pauline is in hospital, having suffered a mental breakdown. Coping with this crisis, as Jake does with his in Horseman, Joshua recalls his life onward from his boyhood on St. Urbain. Being Jewish is very much on the mind:

  Canadian-born, he sometimes felt as if he were condemned to lope slant-shouldered through this world that confused him. One shoulder sloping downwards, groaning under the weight of his Jewish heritage (burnings on the market square, crazed Cossacks on the rampage, gas chambers, as well as Moses, Rabbi Akiba, and Maimonides); the other thrust heavenwards, yearning for an inheritance, any inheritance, weightier than the construction of a transcontinental railway, a reputation for honest trading, good skiing conditions.

  Joshua’s childhood on St. Urbain sounds familiar from the author’s other books; it is in his adult life as resident of Westmount and the cottage by the lake that the interest lies. Through Joshua and Pauline we see the tension between the arriviste Jew and the old-Canada establishment WASP. The days of anti-Semitic discrimination are over. Here is how Pauline recalls that revolution, as seen from the campus of McGill, in the early days, presumably the 1950s:

  Then, all too swiftly, Kevin [her brother] was into law school, where their father was still a legend, and Kevin, just like the others, discovered the Jews.…

  [T]here were all those fierce, driving Jews, who didn’t play by their rules, each one hollering “me, me, me.” My God, they demanded space, lots of space, but they didn’t even know where their grandfathers came from.… [T]hey were not going to be denied.…

  “Oh my, all those short, dark men with heated black eyes. The appetite.”

  As elsewhere in Richler, for example in The Incomparable Atuk and Cocksure, the WASP male comes across as weak and effete. When Jake, in Horseman, needs a respectable lawyer, for example, we are told, in Jake’s voice, “Say what you like about the goyim, they had their uses. For his defense Jake required an upright plodding WASP.…” The Jew is aggressive, excitable, and full of appetite; you cannot fool him; son of a cobbler, a tailor, a plumber, or taxi driver, he is now a heart specialist, a psychologist, a dean at a university. A nouveau riche, with a house in Westmount, a distinguished wine cellar, a painting by A.Y. Jackson. Prone to heart trouble as he is in his stressed life, for he is a family man—“the children, the children”—he has a former classmate to consult. A life not unlike that of many immigrants today. “Survival” may have been the ethos of the WASP in Canada, but for these newcomers, it simply doesn’t hold.

  Joshua is bugged by his memory of Ibiza, and the unfinished business he believes he left there. Like his author, he had met a German, a “Nazi,” called Dr. Dr. Mueller in this book. Mueller, older, suave, and perhaps better-looking than the former ghetto urchin Joshua, loves to needle him, taunting him with “Are you a man or a mouse?” Joshua, too conscious of being a Jew, and of the German’s possible Nazi connections, hates him. He hates him especially for treating with contempt the other Jews in the town—a couple called the Freibergs, who escaped Germany after Kristallnacht and now run a hotel; Max, a peddler; and Carlos, whose family had remained Jews in secret since the Inquisition in Spain. When a pretty girl called Monique comes to the island accompanied by her mother, and prefers Joshua to the German, the latter connives to get the younger man deported. This circumstance bears a close resemblance to Richler’s own adventures in Ibiza, and Monique resembles Helen. As Joshua hastily departs, he has nothing but contempt for himself. “Run, Joshua, run. You’re not a man, but a mouse.” He has abandoned Monique, and he has abandoned the Freibergs, who it appears will lose their hotel. Above all, he has let Dr. Dr. Mueller get the better of him. German against Jew.

  But thirty years later when he finally goes to Ibiza, the Jewish avenger, it is apparent that he has followed a ghost:

  If Ibiza had changed and grown incredibly, the San Antonio he had known simply didn’t exist any more. It was gone. In place of the sweet, somnolent village there was a thrusting resort town … with a paved esplanade, elegant shops, a huge yacht basin, and an endless run of large hotels. Nobody could possibly walk into the sea and hunt fish from this waterfront any more

  or make love on the beach to a girl like Monique. His old friend Juanito, who first welcomed him upon arrival, is now a toothless grandfather forbidden to drink by his doctor. The secret policeman who told him to leave town has recovered from a stroke, laughs at the frivolity of the past, and requests a copy of Hustler. Mueller is dead, and where his villa had been, now there stands a condominium building. And the Freibergs had long sold their hotel for a profit and departed.

  The trip has been for nothing, except for the realization that the past cannot be reawakened. Joshua sets his watch to Montreal time, calls Pauline on the phone, and departs. There is a home, with matters to attend to there.

  IT WAS WHEN he was in his sixties that Mordecai Richler took on his relationship with Israel. He had first visited the Jewish homeland in 1962, when he produced a series of three articles for Maclean’s. Thirty years later he revisited it and wrote This Year in Jerusalem, in which as an older, mellower man, his engagement with Israel is more substantial and serious. The tone of this book is thoughtful and searching; it is as if, now that he is past his middle age, some confessions are in order, and the author is ready to acknowledge this part of his heritage.

  Richler’s involvement with Israel and Zionism began with his recruitment, in his first year of high school, into Habonim, a Zionist youth group with a socialist or collectivist ideological bent. The Habonim reflected the aims of its parent party (which boasted among its members David Ben-Gurion) to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. On Friday evenings the group members would meet at a house on Jeanne Mance Street to discuss and celebrate this homeland, where a glorious struggle was under way to establish it in the face of British and Arab opposition. They extolled the idyllic lives of the Jewish pioneers, sang romantic and inspirational songs in Hebrew or Yiddish, and discussed passionately the heroism of the Jewish fighters. Menachem Begin was their own Jimmy Cagney. On Sundays they would go fundraising door to door.

  Richler maintained that he joined Habonim primarily for the girls, which sounds appropriately Richlerian but cannot be the complete truth. Even before Habonim, during Talmud Torah days, he says he would playact fighting for Israel with an imaginary gun. Later he became so wholeheartedly involved with Habonim that, pretending to be over eighteen, he joined the Reserve Army based at Montreal’s Black Watch Armory, where on Wednesday nights he wore a uniform and learned to handle a gun.

  Habonim converted me into a zealot for Zion. I demonstrated. I badgered my aunts and uncl
es to join a boycott against British goods. I put in hours on our Gestetner, churning out propaganda that could be handed out on goyish street corners.

  When the United Nations General Assembly voted in November 1947 for an end to the British Mandate in Palestine and the partition of the territory into Jewish and Arab states, there was wild celebration among the Jews. “Many wept as they sang ‘Hatikvah,’ the Zionist anthem. In New York, members of Habonim and Hashomer Hatza’ir joined hands to dance a hora in front of the New York Times building. In Montreal, we gathered at the house on Jeanne Mance Street, linked arms, and trooped downtown singing ‘Am Yisrael Hai’ (The People of Israel Lives).…” He adds:

  … in that time of moral certitude, a two-thousand-year-old dream fulfilled, I was, like the other chaverim, insufferably condescending to our peers in the neighbourhood. They seemed … so blind … spending long nights studying for their university entrance exams, plotting future careers as doctors, dentists, lawyers, and notaries in what we scorned as the wasteland of the Diaspora.

  Not surprisingly, then, his final-year results from Baron Byng were not so great and he had to settle for Sir George Williams College—where, however, life took on a completely different turn. While his friends from Habonim eventually made aliyah (emigrated to Israel), he made his pilgrimage to Paris.

  Israel for Richler was not a simple issue. It had its contradictions and it raised troubling questions, as it did for many Jews. Would one rather live in Israel, the Jewish homeland, or in Canada (or the United States)? What indeed is a homeland? This Year in Jerusalem has two epigraphs, one a quote from a 1947 resolution of Habonim, which concludes: