Mordecai Richler: leaving St Urbain

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

master of prose and polemics, for nearly five decades Mordecai Richler was one of Canada's most magnetic writers. Though Richler insisted that his private life was not important to his work, Reinhold Kramer contends that Richler's Jewishness, his Canadianness, and his secularism were central to both.Based on never-before published material from the Richler archives and interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain shows how Richler consistently mined his remarkable life for material for his novels. Beginning with Richler's early clashes with his grandfather over Orthodox Judaism, and exposing the reasons behind his life-long quarrel with his mother, Kramer then follows him as he flees to Ibiza and Paris, where he counted himself among the avant-garde who ushered in the 1960s. His successes abroad gave him the opportunity to remain in England and leave novel-writing behind; he did neither.More than a biography, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain is the story of a Jewish culture finding its place within a larger stream, a literary culture moving into the colloquial, and a Canada torn between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.