The Street (17 page)

The photos Mordecai wanted were for the guidance of the set designer of his new television play,
Benny
, based on a story that first appeared in a magazine and is now Chapter Seven
in this book. It was to be produced in London in January and, Mordecai wrote, “I’m anxious for this play to come off well.”

After getting his letter, I bought two rolls of film for my ancient Rolliecord camera and set out for St. Urbain Street, pleased to think that I would be helping the British public visualize a very exotic corner of the Empire. Now they would be able to see, albeit in a stylized way, what they had first read about four years earlier in
Son of a Smaller Hero
, Mordecai’s second novel. In its review of that book, the
Times Literary Supplement hed
said: “Mr. Richler’s admirable novel recreates the teeming streets … of Montreal’s Jewish Quarter … the stiflingly rich background of sex, religion, and food from which [the characters] emerge.” Note the phrase “Jewish Quarter.” Not neighbourhood, not district, but “Quarter.” For the British reviewer, this was a corner of the colonies as exotic as, say, the Turkish Quarter of Nicosia.

With the publication of
The Street
in 1969, Mordecai consolidated his suzerainty over his domain, not that there had been any doubt about it since the publication of
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
ten years earlier. And
Duddy
, he wrote to a friend, would be the first book in a trilogy about the people of St. Urbain Street. “I’m staking out a claim to Montreal Jew-ville,” he wrote, “in the tradition of H. de Balzac and Big Bill Faulkner.” St. Urbain and the four adjacent ghetto streets would be for Richler what that unpronounceable county was for Faulkner, except that St. Urbain was real while Yoknapatawpha was imaginary.

In later years, interviewers would sometimes ask Mordecai what he wanted to achieve in his writings and he would answer that he wanted to be a witness to his time and his place, and that he wanted to “get it right.” Any reader of
The Street
who is familiar with its time and place can attest to the fact that this author got it absolutely right, or at least 99 per cent right.

“I was raised to manhood in a hairier, more earthy Montreal,” he writes, and who could put it more succinctly? Who could match this evocation of a special kind of childhood: “Kids like myself were dragged along on shopping expeditions to carry parcels. Old men gave us snuff, at the delicatessens we were allowed salami butts, card players pushed candies on us for luck, and everywhere we were poked and pinched by the mothers.”

Mordecai’s rapier is at its most devastating when he tells of life on the beach at Prévost, where St. Urbainites had summer cottages: “Plump, middle-aged ladies, their flesh boiled pink, spread out blankets and squatted in their bras and bloomers, playing poker, smoking and sipping Cokes. The vacationing cutters and pressers seldom wore bathing suits either. They didn’t swim. They set up card tables and chairs and played pinochle solemnly, sucking foul cigars and cursing the sun.”

When passages like this first appeared in magazines, most Montreal Jews were either furious or, at least, not amused. Was this Richler a self-hating Jew, or what? But as the decades passed, the sons and daughters of those cutters and pressers, now doctors and university professors, could read Richler with amusement and pride, finding not insult but warmth and nostalgia in that world of his.

When it comes to dialogue, these stories again get it right as they resound with utterances of that bygone time and place: “Married six weeks and he’s already got one in the oven. A quick worker, I’ll tell you.” … “Aw, those guys. You think the cockroaches know what an artist’s struggle is?” … “When it comes to choosing a bedroom set you can’t go wrong with my son-in-law Lou.”

A line of dialogue from this book – “Hey, big writer. Lard-ass. How many periods in a bottle of ink?” – has found its way into the
Oxford English Dictionary
in a citation for the phrase
lard-ass
. There are forty-three other phrases of Mordecai’s
immortalized in the great dictionary, taken from his various novels and short stories and duly credited to him. Among the salty words that are cited are
loudmouth, whang, schmaltz
, and
piker
.

For Montreal readers there is a truly great line voiced by a Jewish housewife bargaining with a French Canadian farmer: “So
fiel
, Monsieur, for dis
kleine
chicken?
Vous
crazy?” This is trilingualism at its most practical.

Mordecai’s observations about the relations between Jews and French Canadians are particularly trenchant. There were street fights between boys of both groups, but, Mordecai writes, “the French Canadians, who were our enemies, were not entirely unloved. Like us, they were poor and coarse with large families and spoke English badly.… Actually it was only the
WASP
s who were truly hated and feared. ‘Among them,’ I heard it said, ‘with those porridge faces, who can tell what they’re thinking?’ It was, we felt, their country, and given sufficient liquor who knew when they would make trouble?”

“Quel portrait saisissant!”
the Montreal daily
La Presse
wrote in a long and enthusiastic review of
The Street
, when it first appeared in 1969.
“Grâce à lui, un quartier qui n’est plus … et une époque déjà oubliée revivent.”
Calling Richler a brilliant author, the review urged all francophones who could read English to read this book.

But in later years, during the 1990s, the Richler name was anathema among most Quebec francophones, particularly the intellectuals. They were infuriated by Mordecai’s long article in
The New Yorker
about Quebec’s draconian, undemocratic language laws. Denunciations of ultra-nationalism in Quebec could be ignored by Quebec ultra-nationalists when they appeared in Canadian media, but it was deeply embarrassing for them to see the bizarre extremes of the Parti Québécois language laws revealed to Americans and elsewhere in the Western world. Torrents of abuse were heaped on Mordecai’s head for
his detailing of the historic anti-Semitism of French Quebec and its kinship with the growth of nationalism.

Separatists equate being anti-separatist with being “anti-Québec,” and this label was affixed to Mordecai throughout the 1990s in countless journalistic diatribes, none of which could dispute the facts that he cited in his article and in the book that followed,
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
As for being anti-Quebec, Mordecai responded to that charge by pointing out that he had chosen to make his home in Quebec and that he had written, years before, that “the most gracious, cultivated and innovative people in this country are French Canadians.” Separatism, however, was a deplorable aberration.

Even in the months after his death, there were Quebec writers who came forth with snide things to say about Mordecai. But in December of 2001 there was an event in Montreal that suggested that the Richler name was on the road to rehabilitation. It was at the official launch of construction of the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec, the province’s huge new “national” library. Present at the ceremony was Lise Bissonnette, president of the library, who sought to reassure anglophones that its shelves would house not only books in Quebec’s official language – French – but also books in English. “Books by Mordecai Richler will be among the greatest of them,” she said. This was the same Lise Bissonnette who, as editor of
Le Devoir
a decade earlier, had written some of the most vicious of the editorials denouncing Mordecai.

That Mordecai is “among the greatest of them” is indisputable. His literary reputation derives largely from his landmark novels. But this slim volume,
The Street
, so much less known than the novels, ranks – in my opinion – very high among the best of his works.

ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports
(1968)
Shovelling Trouble
(1972)
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others
(1974)
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays
(1978)
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album
(1984)
Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions
(1990)
Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions
(1998)

FICTION
The Acrobats
(1954)
Son of a Smaller Hero
(1955)
A Choice of Enemies
(1957)
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
(1959)
The Incomparable Atuk
(1963)
Cocksure
(1968)
The Street
(1969)
St. Urbain’s Horseman
(1971)
Joshua Then and Now
(1980)
Solomon Gursky Was Here
(1989)
Barney’s Version
(1997)

FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
(1975)
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
(1987)
Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case
(1995)

HISTORY
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country
(1992)
This Year in Jerusalem
(1994)

SPORTS
On Snooker
(2001)
Dispatches from the Sporting Life
(2002)

TRAVEL
Images of Spain
(1977)

Most of these stories and memoirs first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in
The New Statesman, Commentary
, the
Kenyon Review
, the
London Magazine, Canadian Literature
and
Maclean’s
, and I would like to thank the editors for permission to reprint them here. “The Other Beach” is an excerpt from
Son of a Smaller Hero
.

M.R.