Solomon Gursky Was Here

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“I am thrice homeless,” wrote Gustav Mahler, “as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” A similar construction could be applied to Mordecai Richler: an anglophone in Quebec, a Jew in Canada, a Canadian throughout the world. But whereas Mahler felt the need—however conflicted—to assimilate, Richler wore his homelessness like a badge and built his career around it. All his books incorporate one or another of these identities—often all three. (Actually, a fourth and equally important identity, that of the writer, also factors into the equation.) And when I think about Richler’s work I think of the novels in which he gives voice to the sum of his preoccupations: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain’s Horseman, Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney’s Version. It was in these, his mature Montreal books, that Richler defined his style and his subject matter, and they constitute the core of his legacy. He once said: “I do feel forever rooted in St. Urbain Street. That was my time, my place, and I have elected myself to get it right.” Over the course of his career Richler not only acquainted readers—Canadian and otherwise—with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants, but he progressively asserted his little neighbourhood’s place in the grander scheme of Canada’s history and culture.

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