Mordecai Richler - Reception

Reception

Many critics distinguished between Richler the author from Richler the polemicist. Richler frequently said his goal was to be an honest witness to his time and place, and to write at least one book that would be read after his death. His work was championed by journalists Robert Fulford and Peter Gzowski, among others. Admirers praised Richler for daring to tell uncomfortable truths, and he has been described in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature as "one of the foremost writers of his generation". Michael Posner's oral biography of Richler was entitled The Last Honest Man (2004).

Critics noted his propensity for recycling material, including incorporating elements of his journalism into later novels. Some critics thought Richler more adept at sketching striking scenes than crafting coherent narratives. Richler's ambivalent attitude toward Montreal's Jewish community was captured in Mordecai and Me (2003), a book by Joel Yanofsky.

Richler's most frequent conflicts were with the Jewish community, English Canadian nationalists, and French Quebec nationalists. He wrote and spoke English, and criticized laws requiring the use of French in Quebec. Richler's long-running dispute with Quebec nationalists was fueled by magazine articles he published in American publications between the late 1970s and mid 1990s, in which he criticized Quebec's language laws, and the rise of separatism. Critics took particular exception to Richler's allegations of anti-semitism in Quebec.

Soon after the first election of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1976, Richler published an article in the Atlantic Monthly that linked the PQ to Nazism. He said that their theme song: "À partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous appartient," was a Nazi song, "Tomorrow belongs to me...," the Hitler Youth song featured in the American musical Cabaret.;

He was incorrect in most aspects. Neither the remainder of the text, nor the music, are related to any Nazi song. Never sung in Germany, the Cabaret song was written in the 1960s by John Kander, a Jewish-American lyricist and composer. "À partir d'aujourd'hui" was written by the well-known songwriter Stéphane Venne when he was asked to compose a song for an advertisement of the Caisses populaires Desjardins credit union.

Richler's essay, "OH! CANADA! Lament for a divided country," created a stir at the time, and again when released as part of his collection by almost the same name in 1992. In Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country, Richler had commented approvingly on Esther Delisle's history, The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-Wing Nationalism in French Canada from 1929-1939 (1992), about Canada and particularly Quebec attitudes in the decade before the start of World War II.

Richler acknowledged his 1977 error on the PQ song, blaming himself for having "cribbed" the information from an article by Irwin Cotler and Ruth Wisse published in the American magazine, Commentary. Cotler eventually issued a written apology to Lévesque of the PQ. Richler also apologized for the incident and called it an "embarrassing gaffe".

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! was strongly criticized by some French speakers in Quebec and to some degree also among Anglophone Canadians. His detractors maintained that Richler had an outdated and stereotyped view of Quebec society, and that he risked polarizing relations between francophone and anglophone Quebecers. Pierrette Venne called for the book to be banned. (He later was elected as a Bloc Québécois MP. Daniel Latouche compared the book to Mein Kampf.

Nadia Khouri believes that there was a discriminatory undertone in the reaction to Richler, noting that some of his critics characterized him as "not one of us" or that he was not a "real Quebecer". She found that some critics had misquoted his work; for instance, a section in which he said that Quebec women were treated like "sows" was misinterpreted to suggest that Richler thought they were sows. Québécois writers who thought critics had overreacted included Jean-Hugues Roy, Étienne Gignac, Serge-Henri Vicière, and Dorval Brunelle. His defenders asserted that Mordecai Richler may have been wrong on certain specific points, but was certainly not racist or anti-Québécois. Nadia Khouri acclaimed Richler for his courage and for attacking the orthodoxies of Quebec society. He has been described as "the most prominent defender of the rights of Quebec's anglophones."

Some commentators were alarmed about the strong controversy over Richler's book, saying that it suggested the persistence of antisemitism among sections of the Quebec population. Richler received death threats and letters with swastikas drawn on them; an anti-semitic Francophone journalist yelled at one of his sons, "f your father was here, I'd make him relive the holocaust right now!" An editorial cartoon in L'actualité compared him to Hitler.

One critic claimed that he had been paid by Jewish groups to write his critical essay on Quebec. His defenders believed this was evoking old stereotypes of Jews. When leaders of the Jewish community were asked to dissociate themselves from Richler, the journalist Frances Kraft said that indicated that they did not consider Richler as part of the Quebec "tribe" because he was Anglo-speaking and Jewish. When voting on the 1995 referendum about Quebec independence ended with its defeat, Jacques Parizeau attributed the loss to "money and the ethnic vote."

About the same time, Richler announced he had founded the "Impure Wool Society," to grant the Prix Parizeau to a distinguished non-Francophone writer of Quebec. The group's name plays on the expression québécois pure laine, typically used to refer to Québécois with extensive French-Canadian ancestry (or "pure wool"). The prize (with an award of $3000) was granted twice: to Benet Davetian in 1996 for The Seventh Circle, and David Manicom in 1997 for Ice In Dark Water.