Mordecai Richler by M G Vassanji

Author:M G Vassanji
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

CHAPTER SIX

The Writer as Family Man

The wedding had been a small affair, with a few close friends in attendance; possibly the irrepressible Lily was present too. Members of the Richler clan, as Orthodox Jews, would not have approved his marrying a shiksa. On top of that, not counting that the bride was eminently pregnant, the groom had negatively characterized the family in a book, including its patriarch, and done more of the same to the Jews of Montreal’s Main in his recent book, Duddy Kravitz. As one of them opined, He drinks, he pisses. None of them, except Mordecai’s parents and Uncle Max, came to pay their respects to the couple. Uncle Max brought a present. Moe, when he came, acted very shy with the stunningly beautiful bride from another culture, who looked so different from an Orthodox Jewish woman. “How does she like being a Jew?” he asked his son. She of course had only formally converted, out of convenience, when she married Stanley Mann. When asked to look at the baby, reluctantly Moe followed Florence, Mordecai walking behind them with an amused look. “A baby is a baby,” was Moe’s simple verdict upon seeing Noah in the cradle. Indeed, just as many others have thought at a similar occasion. But this man of simple tastes and education, who had come from a shtetl in Galicia when he was hardly older than an infant himself, must have wondered, Would the boy be brought up a Jew? It was too much, to be presented not only with a shiksa daughter-in-law but also a grandchild, ready-made, and another one born two days after the wedding. Mordecai had always tested him. He did not believe in the legitimacy of a mixed marriage; he did not think it could work, as he had written before to Mordecai upon his first marriage; he had even sent Mordecai a magazine article explaining why. But then Moe’s own marriage had been a disaster, the unhappiness and shame of which had scarred his son.

IN TORONTO AND MONTREAL, the superstar who was a grandson of a major Hasidic rabbi was invited to give talks at synagogues and felt free to vent his opinions on Judaism. His audiences were confused, offended, infuriated. At one question session he was asked why he had not given Duddy Kravitz, hero of his “so-called novel,” an Italian name, for instance; and, if on St. Urbain they had called the French Canadians “Frogs,” what was the point of telling the world about it?

In a long article he wrote for Maclean’s, titled “We Jews Are Almost as Bad as the Gentiles,” Richler said that after an absence of seven years, he found the changes in the Jewish community “astonishing.” Religion had been “modernized and, in the process, emasculated, shorn of most of its beauty and mystery.” Where there was one ghetto, now there were several wealthy but similarly exclusive enclaves. Where learned men had commanded respect, now it was those with cash. He goes on

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