Mordecai Richler Was Here : Author: The Canadian’s new novel, ‘Solomon Gursky,’ has won critical acclaim and racked up impressive sales at home.

Leaning on a cane, Canadian firebrand Mordecai Richler hobbled into the lobby of Montreal’s posh Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The 59-year-old writer had taken a spill on the ice outside of his country home on Lac Memphremagog, a resort lake straddling the U.S. border in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

“These winters are punishing,” acknowledged the bruised but otherwise unflappable Montreal native, whose first novel in a decade, “Solomon Gursky Was Here,” was greeted last year by critics in his country as the most significant event in recent Canadian publishing.

By late February, the Canadian edition, published by Penguin Books of Canada, had sold 38,000 copies of a 40,000 print run. The novel was also offered as a Canadian Book of the Month Club selection, requiring the printing of an additional 20,000 copies. In a country of 25 million, a quarter of whom speak French, this was an impressive showing.

“Solomon Gursky” also spent a couple of months on the Toronto Globe and Mail best-seller list, earning Richler a cover review in the prestigious magazine Books in Canada, and frequent citations in the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans, in Saturday Night and in other premium Canadian periodicals.

Richler’s books have rarely done this well, proportionately, in the United States. But they have always been well received critically.

Released this month in the United States by Knopf, “Solomon Gursky” is a 556-page family saga, replete with the usual Richler satire and savagery, about a boozy writer’s lifelong obsession with the doings of a larger-than-life Jewish-Canadian patriarch and his offspring.

In some respects the protagonist is a Richler stand-in. And the family is a fictional model of the formerly bootlegging, now-legitimate Bronfman clan of Montreal, whose doings Canadians regard with almost the same fascination Americans have for Donald Trump.

Descendants of a prosperous Russian-Jewish immigrant, the Bronfman family owns and controls an enormous and diversified financial empire. In the United States, they are best known as the owners of Joseph E. Seagram and Sons.

“The Bronfmans were certainly the trigger,” Richler acknowledged.

“Solomon Gurksy” ranges from Victorian London to the Canadian Arctic, from the Depression years on the Canadian Prairie to present-day New York. For Richler, who has been particular about setting his best books in the Quebec of his youth and, occasionally, in London, this has been a change.

In one of the plot’s many little tricks, Richler depicts the fictionalized patriarch, Ephraim Gursky, as an escaped British convict who survives one of history’s most inane attempts to locate the elusive Northwest Passage. Gursky subsequently converts the native Inuit to his own lusty brand of Orthodox Judaism. The more literal-minded of his adherents, however, are almost driven to extinction while trying to comply with the Jewish prohibition against eating or drinking until the sun goes down on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. In the Arctic, it takes the sun takes half a year to set.

“Solomon Gursky Was Here” has had the added effect of thrusting the acerbic Richler himself back into the literary limelight just as critics had begun to suspect--or in some cases hope--that he might have mellowed.

Bronwyn Drainie, a columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail, recently noted that for Canada’s normally genteel literary community, this truly was “the winter of public discontent.” Few could recall the eruption of so many flaps, spats and hissing matches.

“Why do so many of these controversies seem to center on Richler, especially when he doesn’t go looking for them?” she asked.

On his permafrost-ridden home turf, the prickly Richler is a caustic social critic who makes Southern California’s curmudgeon, Harlan Ellison, seem like Mr. Rogers. If Richler inspires equal degrees of loathing in some circles, suggests Canadian chronicler John Robert Colombo, perhaps the country’s ranking anthologist, it may be because he is too worldly, too openly Jewish, too urban and too outspoken to suit some super-patriots in Canada.

“Although very much engaged in Canadian life and politics,” observed Colombo, “Richler has always been a thorn in the sides of nationalists in both English and French Canada. He is particularly adept at showing the world how absurdly both camps can behave.”

Richler is, in fact, more outspokenly Canadian in outlook today than ever. But he maintains a distinctly Jewish ambivalence toward excessive patriotism--even toward Israeli nationalism--which he regards as narrow, insular and never terribly healthy for minorities. In a country such as Canada, which took 98 years to settle on a flag of its own, overt displays of nationalism are, Richler has observed, even slightly ridiculous.

If he wished to, Richler could spare himself the grueling Quebec winters by joining the million or so other snowbirds and Canadian expatriates in the Southern California sunshine.

During a 20-year self-imposed exile in London (with sojourns in France, Spain and Hollywood and frequent visits home), Richler had achieved a certain degree of success as a screenwriter and novelist. His screenplay for “Life at the Top,” which starred Jean Simmons and the late Lawrence Harvey, was well received. He also worked on “Room at the Top.” The script he adapted from his seminal novel, “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” a few years after returning to Montreal in 1972, was nominated for an Oscar.

Richler learned about the Oscar nomination while visiting Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. In Yellowknife, the temperature outdoors was 42 below zero. But the reception awaiting him at his first Hollywood party was, he would discover, no less chilly.

“To mention the Arctic, where I had just come from,” he recounted in “Home Sweet Home,” a collection of essays published five years ago by Knopf, “was to watch eyes glaze over in boredom, until I finally learned to say not that I had just come down from Yellowknife, but that I had returned from location in Yellowknife.”

“ ‘Oh really? What are they shooting there?’

“ ‘Caribou.’ ”

Despite his cheek, Richler was later called back to work on the film “Fun With Dick and Jane,” a prospect he greeted with ambivalence.

“It was a day like this, lots of snow, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll come down. But I don’t want to meet with any producers, I won’t take meetings, and I want a first-class ticket for my wife.’ They didn’t balk at any of my requests, but they thought the last one was the funniest thing they ever heard--this strange Canadian backwoodsman actually wanted his wife to come with him.”

Richler returned permanently to his homeland in 1972 because he feared his literary vision could not survive the separation from his Canadian roots any longer.

“I couldn’t write novels set in England because I wasn’t brought up there,” said Richler. “I, like (Trinidad-born novelist V. S.) Naipaul, don’t know what an Englishman does when he goes home at night. I saw writers I knew and respected, like Doris Lessing and Dan Jacobson, setting novels in biblical and far-future times. I figured I’d better go home before that happened to me.”

England’s and Hollywood’s loss has become Canada’s gain. John Fraser, the editor of Saturday Night, Canada’s preeminent magazine of politics, art and culture and a frequent publisher of Richler’s journalism, has characterized “Solomon Gursky” as “vintage, mature Richler.”

Most of Richler’s previous novels have been rooted in the people and places of the Montreal Jewish ghetto of his youth. Richler was the child of Jewish immigrants from Russia who quickly steeled themselves against the frigid north winds as well as the equally frosty regard in which they were held by the province’s French-speaking Catholic majority and its almost equally disapproving Anglophone minority.

Richler grew up in the St. Urbain Street Jewish ghetto warmly evoked in his novels, an impoverished, insular world that was not, however, without charm. Many of the places Richler popularized in his book--the Bagel Factory, for instance, and the late Moe Wilensky’s corner sandwich store, where a quarter once bought a “special” and a Cherry Coke--have, because of Richler, become Montreal icons.

In books like “The Street,” “St. Urbain’s Horseman,” “Joshua Then And Now” and “Duddy Kravitz,” Richler has kept the period of his youth--from the start of World War II through the early 1950s--vibrantly alive.

“This was my time, my place,” Richler has said, “and I have elected myself to get it right.” According to one critic, he has brought “his native city of Montreal to life as no writer has been able to do before.”

He has done so, however, often to the intense discomfort of his fellow Jews, who do not always appreciate being reminded--or having Richler remind others--of their humble origins. Indeed, Richler’s relationship with other Montreal Jews has been prickliest of all. Many think Mordecai Richler’s books and pronouncements inspire anti-Semitism.

Richler’s readiness to expound irreverently on matters of grave national portent have won him few friends in government, federal or provincial. His slightest quips tend to make national headlines. Residents of Edmonton, Alberta, may never forgive him for saying theirs was a great town if they ever decided to uncrate it.

In “Solomon Gursky,” a character describes Canada as “a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.”

Passages like this, acknowledges Richler, get cited in the Canadian press and have earned him most of his notoriety. But Richler’s most deadly venom is saved for his native Quebec. He is particularly bitter over what he sees as the emasculation by Quebec of the province’s English-speaking minority, which Richler characterizes--Jew and Gentile alike--as “gutless.”

“For God’s sake, they have grown men in the provincial bureaucracy running around with tape measures, trying to determine whether the few English-language signs permitted in public places use letters that are smaller than those in French.

“Future generations,” Richler says, “will laugh at our obsessions. We are not living through tragedy but farce. If this country flies apart from such matters, at least foreigners will find some comic relief in Canada’s plight.”

Richler believes such comments have earned him the enduring enmity of Quebec premier Robert Bourassa, although Bourassa does not speak publicly about Richler. Richler has not only held Bourassa up to ridicule within Canada, but also has made his government a laughingstock in such prominent American forums as the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly, for which Richler writes regularly.

Ironically, these positions have not earned Richler the love of English Canadians.

“Those guys hate Richler,” said Colombo, “because he championed the free trade deal with the U.S., which most Canadians now regard as a blatant sellout of our sovereignty.”

The agreement with the United States permits, for the first time in Canadian history, the relatively free flow of goods and services. Many Canadians believe that the protectionism had held Canada, despite its intense regional divisiveness, together as a national entity. Without it, Canadians fear the commercial and cultural tug of the American behemoth will prove greater than the bond among the provinces.

Richler has traditionally disparaged Canada’s cultural and economic protectionism as “tiresome.”

“No heritage is worth preserving,” he has written, “unless it can survive the sun, the mixed marriage, or the foreign periodical.”

This position may have been behind Canadian novelist Farley Mowat’s savaging of Richler in a Toronto weekly this year in a manner some have characterized as anti-Semitic. A self-described “chauvinist-nationalist” (who achieved notoriety in the United States in 1985 after U.S. customs officials refused him entry because of his conservationist activities), Mowat called Richler a “non-Canadian” with a Jewish and neighborhood identity but “no sense of Canadian identity at all.” By attacking Richler’s alleged “cosmopolitanism,” as one critic characterized the quality Mowat objects to, Mowat, wittingly or otherwise, used the historical language of anti-Semitism, propagating the canard of an innate Jewish incompatibility with patriotism.

But John Fraser, who once spent three weeks in the bush with the author of “Never Cry Wolf,” does not believe Mowat was intentionally anti-Semitic.

Mowat, notes Fraser, “is a merely another small-town Protestant, who probably holds the usual small-town Protestant view of Jews.” He is also, according to Colombo, a pastoralist who celebrates the virtues of the Canadian wilderness and has fantasized in his writing about staging a heroic last stand of loyal Canadians against encroaching American imperialists at James Bay. Richler, an avowed city slicker and alleged Yank-lover, had populated Mowat’s beloved Arctic with talisman-sporting, Yiddish-singing Eskimos.

The acclaim given Richler’s new book was also apparently too much for the three judges of Canada’s prestigious Governor-General’s Award for Literature. Despite its ample critical and commercial success, “Solomon Gursky” not only didn’t win; it wasn’t even nominated.

“That it didn’t even make the list,” said Fraser, “has more to do with politics and the motivations of the judges than it does with Richler or his book. I’ve had a look at the competitors, and to me this was madness.”

Richler has declined to comment publicly either about the Mowat flap or the snubbing of his book. He is at work on another volume of essays and will soon begin a new novel. Mostly, though, he says he is content to sit by his fire on the frozen shores of Lac Memphremagog, reading quietly and talking with his wife, Florence. Montreal, a city he recognizes as sadly diminished in recent years as much of the money and talent fled west and south, is a place he now visits for a day each week.