Mordecai Richler's Books

The Street

By: Mordecai Richler

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In this beguiling collection of short stories and memoirs, first published in 1969, Mordecai Richler looks back on his childhood in Montreal, recapturing the lively panorama of St. Urbain Street: the refugees from Europe with their unexpected sophistication and snobbery; the catastrophic day when there was an article about St. Urbain Street in Time; Tansky’s Cigar and Soda with its “beat-up brown phonebooth” used for “private calls”; and tips on sex from Duddy Kravitz. Overflowing with humour, nostalgia, and wisdom, The Street is a brilliant introduction to Richler’s lifelong love-affair with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants.

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Page Count

154

Publisher

New Canadian Library

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995662

ISBN 13

9781551995663

This Year In Jerusalem

By: Mordecai Richler

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This Year In Jerusalem

By: Mordecai Richler

In 1944, I was aware of three youth groups committed to the compelling idea of an independent Jewish state: Hashomer Hatza'ir (The Young Guard), Young Judaea, and Habonim (The Builders). Hashomer Hatza'ir was resolutely Marxist. According to intriguing reports I had heard, it was the custom, on their kibbutzim already established in Palestine, for boys and girls under the age of eighteen to shower together. Hashomer Hatza'ir members in Montreal included a boy I shall call Shloime Schneiderman, a high-school classmate of mine. In 1944, when we were still in eighth grade, Schloime enjoyed a brief celebrity after his photo appeared on the front page of the Montreal Herald. Following a two-cent rise in the price of chocolate bars, he had been a leader in a demonstration, holding high a placard that read: down with the 7cents chocolate bar. Hashomer Hatza'ir members wore uniforms at their meetings: blue shirts and neckerchiefs. "They had real court martials," wrote Marion Magid in a memoir about her days in Habonim in the Bronx in the early fifties, "group analysis, the girls were not allowed to wear lipstick." Whereas, in my experience, the sweetly scented girls who belonged to Young Judaea favored pearls and cashmere twinsets. They lived on leafy streets in the suburb of Outremont, in detached cottages that had heated towel racks, basement playrooms, and a plaque hanging on the wall behind the wet bar testifying to the number of trees their parents had paid to have planted in Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. I joined Habonim—the youth group of a Zionist political party, rooted in socialist doctrine—shortly after my bar mitzvah, during my first year at Baron Byng High School. I had been recruited by a Room 41 classmate whom I shall call Jerry Greenfeld...

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Page Count

302

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307367282

ISBN 13

9780307367280

On Snooker

By: Mordecai Richler

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On Snooker

By: Mordecai Richler

From his first days as a poolroom hustler playing truant from Baron Byng High School at the Rachel Pool Hall, Mordecai Richler has remained a snooker devotee. In his inimitable style, he delves into the fascinating world of snooker with pith and perception. But On Snooker is not just a lifelong fan's memoir. It is a brilliantly entertaining history of the game and an account of snooker's bad boy champions, including Alex (The Hurricane) Higgins, Cliff (The Grinder) Thorburn—both Canadian and interviewed for this book—with a chapter devoted to their special exploits and drug escapades. There are other colourful types: Ronnie (The Rocket) O'Sullivan, whose dad ("Ron's the name, porn's the game") is serving a life sentence for murder. Finally there is Stephen Hendry, the greatest player ever, who has won the world championship a record seven times. Mordecai Richler also makes clear why many great writers have been fascinated by sports and why snooker and literary readers go together, including Hemingway, Shulberg, Mailer, Roth, Plimpton, Martin Amis, and others. Very funny, passionate, and thoroughly researched on snooker tables from Montreal's The Main to Dublin, On Snooker is a book lovers of Richler and of great sports writing will cherish.

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173

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

030737100X

ISBN 13

9780307371003

A Choice of Enemies

By: Mordecai Richler

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A Choice of Enemies

By: Mordecai Richler

A colony of Canadian and American writers and filmmakers, exiled by McCarthyist witch-hunts at home, find themselves in London, England, where they evolve a society every bit as merciless, destructive, and close-minded as that from which they have fled. The bonds of the group are strained when Norman Price, an academic turned hack writer, befriends an enigmatic German refugee. Ostracized by his colleagues, Norman soon perceives how easily conviction devolves into tyranny. Believing that “all alliances are discredited,” he enters a moral nightmare in which his choice of enemies is no longer clear. With relentless irony and biting accuracy, Mordecai Richler maps out a surreal territory of doubt, describing not only one man’s personal dilemma but the moral condition of modern society.

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Page Count

262

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995581

ISBN 13

9781551995588

St. Urbain's Horseman

By: Mordecai Richler

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St. Urbain's Horseman

By: Mordecai Richler

St. Urbain’s Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt—guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in disgrace. His alter ego is his cousin Joey, a legend in their childhood neighbourhood in Montreal. Nazi-hunter, adventurer, and hero of the Spanish Civil War, Joey is the avenging horseman of Jake’s impotent dreams. When Jake becomes embroiled in a scandalous trial in London, England, he puts his own unadventurous life on trial as well, finding it desperately wanting as he steadfastly longs for the Horseman’s glorious return. Irreverent, deeply felt, as scathing in its critique of social mores as it is uproariously funny, St. Urbain’s Horseman confirms Mordecai Richler’s reputation as a pre-eminent observer of the hypocrisies and absurdities of modern life.

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Page Count

516

Publisher

McClelland & Stewart

Published Date

ISBN 10

155199562X

ISBN 13

9781551995625

Barney's Version

By: Mordecai Richler

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Barney's Version

By: Mordecai Richler

Charged with comic energy and a steely disregard for any pieties whatsoever, Barney's Version is a major Richler novel, the most personal and feeling book of a long and distinguished career. Told in the first person, it gives us the life (and what a life!) of Barney Panofsky--whose trashy TV company, Totally Useless Productions, has made him a small fortune; whose three wives include a martyred feminist icon, a quintessential JCP (Jewish-Canadian Princess), and the incomparable Miriam, the perfect wife, lover, and mother--alas, now married to another man; who recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early fifties, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens; who either did or didn't murder his best friend, Boogie, after discovering him in bed with The Second Mrs. Panofsky; whose satirical eye for the idiocies of today's Quebec separatists (as well as for every other kind of political correctness) manages to offend his entire acquaintanceship (and will soon be offending readers everywhere); and whose memory--though not his bile--is, in his sixty-seventh year, definitely slipping . . .

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517

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307813479

ISBN 13

9780307813473

Son of a Smaller Hero

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

By: Mordecai Richler

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Son of a Smaller Hero

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

By: Mordecai Richler

Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the prodigal son of Montreal’ s Jewish ghetto. Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim. But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Eventually, Noah comes to recognize “justice and safety and a kind of felicity” in a world he cannot—entirely—leave behind. Richler’s superb account of Noah’s struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic satire. Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, penetrating account of the nature of belonging, told with the savage realism for which Mordecai Richler’s fiction is celebrated.

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Page Count

210

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771073372

ISBN 13

9780771073373

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

By: Mordecai Richler

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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

By: Mordecai Richler

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the novel that established Mordecai Richler as one of the world’s best comic writers. Growing up in the heart of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, Duddy Kravitz is obsessed with his grandfather’s saying, “A man without land is nothing.” In his relentless pursuit of property and his drive to become a somebody, he will wheel and deal, he will swindle and forge, he will even try making movies. And in spite of the setbacks he suffers, the sacrifices he must make along the way, Duddy never loses faith that his dream is worth the price he must pay. This blistering satire traces the eventful coming-of-age of a cynical dreamer. Amoral, inventive, ruthless, and scheming, Duddy Kravitz is one of the most magnetic anti-heroes in literature, a man who learns the hard way that dreams are never exactly what they seem, even when they do come true.

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Page Count

378

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995646

ISBN 13

9781551995649

The Incomparable Atuk

By: Mordecai Richler

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The Incomparable Atuk

By: Mordecai Richler

Transplanted to Toronto from his native Baffin Island, Atuk the poet is an unlikely overnight success. Eagerly adapting to a society steeped in pretension, bigotry, and greed, Atuk soon abandons the literary life in favour of more lucrative—and hazardous—schemes. Richler’s hilarious and devastating satire lampoons the self-deceptions of “the Canadian identity” and derides the hypocrisy of a nation that seeks cultural independence by slavishly pursuing the American dream.

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Page Count

193

Publisher

New Canadian Library

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995654

ISBN 13

9781551995656

Joshua Then and Now

By: Mordecai Richler

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Joshua Then and Now

By: Mordecai Richler

Joshua Then and Now is about Joshua Shapiro today, and the Joshua he was. His father a boxer turned honest crook, his mother an erotic dancer whose greatest performance was at Joshua’s bar mitzvah, Joshua has overcome his inauspicious beginnings in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal to become a celebrated television writer and a successful journalist. But Joshua, now middle-aged, is not a happy man. Incapacitated by a freak accident, anguished by the disappearance of his WASP wife, and caught up in a sex scandal, Joshua is besieged by the press and tormented by the ghosts of his youth. Set in Montreal, the novel chronicles the rocky journey we all make between the countries of the past and the present. Raucous, opinionated, tender, Joshua Then and Now is a memorable excursion into Mordecai Richler's comic universe.

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Page Count

498

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995603

ISBN 13

9781551995601

The Acrobats

By: Mordecai Richler

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The Acrobats

By: Mordecai Richler

Living in a rat-infested hotel in Franco’s post-war Spain, André Bennett, a Canadian painter, loves Toni, his girl friend, who wants him to return home. Roger Kraus, a Nazi on the run, shadows the young artist day and night. They meet on a bridge during the last night of the fiesta, and as the sky is shredded by exploding fireworks, the story draws to its violent climax. Originally published in 1954, The Acrobats marks Mordecai Richler’s stunning debut as a novelist.

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Page Count

242

Publisher

New Canadian Library

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995638

ISBN 13

9781551995632

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!

Requiem for a Divided Country

By: Mordecai Richler

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Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!

Requiem for a Divided Country

By: Mordecai Richler

Humorous account of Quebec's language obsessed separatist movement.

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308

Published Date

ISBN 10

0140168176

ISBN 13

9780140168174

On Snooker

By: Mordecai Richler

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On Snooker

By: Mordecai Richler

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173

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

030737100X

ISBN 13

9780307371003

The Incomparable Atuk

By: Mordecai Richler

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The Incomparable Atuk

By: Mordecai Richler

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193

Publisher

New Canadian Library

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551995654

ISBN 13

9781551995656

Dispatches from the Sporting Life

By: Mordecai Richler

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Dispatches from the Sporting Life

By: Mordecai Richler

The first book to be set in the new Richler typeface, commissioned by Random House of Canada Limited and Jack Rabinovitch in memory of Mordecai. Mordecai Richler’s final book pays homage to his personal heroes and celebrates a writer’s love of sport with his trademark irascibility, humour and acuity. Even while writing his bestselling novels, Mordecai Richler nurtured his obsession with sports, writing brilliantly on ice hockey, baseball, salmon fishing, bodybuilding, and wrestling for such publications as GQ, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Inside Sports, Commentary, and The New York Review of Books. Mordecai himself chose the pieces to include in Dispatches from the Sporting Life, and together they give us an intimate portrait of a man who admired the players and prized the struggle of sport -- as much as he enjoyed skewering those who made a mockery of its principles. His encounters with Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe (“Mr. Elbows…the big guy with the ginger-ale bottle shoulders”) are by turns bizarre, moving and uproarious. Richler travelled with Guy LaFleur’s Montreal Canadiens (“Les Canadiens sont là!”), but also with the “far-from-incomparable” Trail Smoke Eaters to Stockholm for the world hockey championships, where Canadians are “widely known, and widely disliked.” There are wonderful pieces here about Ring Lardner, George Plimpton, Hank Greenberg and lady umpires, and a marvellous essay on his unlimited enthusiasm for the all-inclusive Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports, which includes among its champions Sandy Koufax, “who may well be the greatest pitcher of all time, regardless of race, colour or creed,” as well as one Steve Allan Hertz, an infielder who played five total games in Houston in 1964 and had a batting average of .000.

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Page Count

285

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307371018

ISBN 13

9780307371010

Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

By: Mordecai Richler

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Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang

By: Mordecai Richler

Poor Jacob Two-Two, only two plus two plus two years old and already a prisoner of The Hooded Fang. What had he done to deserve such terrible punishment? Why, the worst crime of all – insulting a grown-up.

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Tundra Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

088776925X

ISBN 13

9780887769252

Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case

By: Mordecai Richler

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Jacob Two-Two's First Spy Case

By: Mordecai Richler

Just as Jacob Two-Two settles into his new life in Canada, things are turned upside down! First, Jacob gets a new neighbor, who does double duty as a spy; then he gets a new principal, who turns out to be mean and nasty; and then, unknowingly, he makes an enemy – but who could it be? Jacob Two-Two returns in this new adventure that takes him into the fascinating world of spycraft!

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Page Count

170

Publisher

Tundra Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

0887769276

ISBN 13

9780887769276

Barney's Version

By: Mordecai Richler

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Barney's Version

By: Mordecai Richler

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517

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307813479

ISBN 13

9780307813473

The Acrobats

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

By: Mordecai Richler

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The Acrobats

Penguin Modern Classics Edition

By: Mordecai Richler

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Page Count

221

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771073348

ISBN 13

9780771073342

The Street

By: Mordecai Richler

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The Street

By: Mordecai Richler

Among the wonders of St. Urbain, our St. Urbain, there was a man who ran for alderman on a one-plank platform - provincial speed cops were anti-Semites. There was a semi-pro whore, Cross-Eyed Yetta, and a gifted cripple, Pomerantz, who had a poem published in "transition" before he shriveled and died at the age of twenty-seven. A boxer who once made the "Ring" magazine ratings. Lazar of Best Grade Fruit who raked in twenty-five hundred dollars for being knocked down by a No. 43 streetcar. A woman who actually called herself a divorcee. A man, A.D.'s father, who was bad luck to have in your house. And more, many more.

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