Next Door to the Promised Land : SOLOMON GURSKY WAS HERE <i> by Mordecai Richler (Alfred A. Knopf: $19.95; 448 pp.) </i>

We have waited 10 years for Mordecai Richler’s new novel, “Solomon Gursky Was Here.”

It was worth the wait.

“Solomon Gursky” is a big book, a multigenerational saga that boils up out of the teeming streets of 19th-Century London and the barren stretches of the Arctic wilderness, and flashes forward to the bedrooms and the boardrooms of Montreal in the anxiety-ridden ‘80s.

Richler’s cast of characters includes Arctic explorers, self-styled messianic prophets, Hasidic survivalists, high-stakes poker cheats, and miscellaneous rakes, rum-runners, racketeers and corporate raiders, all of them caught up in a house of mirrors that ultimately shatters in a vast moral apocalypse.

At the heart of Richler’s grand tale is the Gursky family, a collection of tragicomic Karamazovs rendered as Canadian-Jewish parvenus who built their business empire on bootlegging. Ephraim Gursky is the patriarch, a marvelously inventive trickster who carries forward the family name from Minsk to Victoria’s England and then Canada, “the next-door place to the promised land.” The elusive Solomon Gursky is Ephraim’s anointed grandson, founder of the family fortune and inheritor of the patriarch’s instincts for adventure and taste for revenge.

Solomon’s brother (and betrayer) is Mr. Bernard, an earnest seeker after respectability who can’t quite wash the bloodstains from his hands. “The sly, rambunctious reformed bootlegger, worth untold millions now, was still a grobber ,” writes Richler, “a hooligan who rained shame on Jews cut from a finer cloth.”

And then there is Moses Berger, a failed writer whose literary ambitions have burned out but whose conscience and curiosity are still white-hot. Berger, son of one of the Gursky family servitors, has devoted his life to writing a history of the Gursky family, and “Solomon Gursky Was Here” is an account of his persistent search to find out what really happened to Solomon Gursky when he took to the skies in his Gypsy Moth and disappeared over “the barrens.” I suppose that the appropriate psychological term for Berger’s state of mind is “obsession,” but Moses is more nearly haunted by these persistent ghosts of the Gursky family.

“Solomon Gursky” is planted with clues to the enigma that Moses Berger is destined to seek out and, ultimately, to unravel. Did Solomon Gursky really die when his plane crashed into the tundra? Was he a victim of fate or foul play? Who is the mysterious man who appears in the most unlikely places: the Long March, the Watergate hearings, the raid on Entebbe? How did a band of Eskimos come to wear fringed shawls that oddly resemble the tallis of Jewish prayer? Who is the woman with one blue eye and one brown eye?

What is the meaning of the signs and wonders that appear insistently throughout the book: a Hebrew letter carved into an Eskimo sculpture, the sudden descent of a black raven, the early auguries of a new Ice Age? And who is the improbable London multimillionaire, Sir Hyman Kaplansky, a beguiling but maddening figure who draws Moses Berger ever deeper into the mysteries of the Gursky family?

At its most spirited moments, “Solomon Gursky” is a rollicking and ribald tale, a mystery story and an adventure story at the same time, but Richler’s themes are almost literally biblical. (Richler even provides a genealogy of the Gursky family, and playfully recites: “Gideon begat Ephraim . . .”) It’s a novel about a kind of karma that runs in the blood, from generation to generation, as when old Ephraim kidnaps the 12-year-old Solomon and spirits him into the wilderness by dog sled in order to initiate him into the most arcane secrets of the Gursky family.

“Ephraim slid a long knife free of their sled and planted it upright in the snow. He melted honey over the fire and coated the blade with it, the honey freezing immediately. ‘The wolf will come down later, start to lick the honey, and slice his tongue to ribbons. Then the greedy fool will lick the blood off the blade until he bleeds to death. Do you understand?’ ‘Sure I do.’ ‘No you don’t. I’m trying to warn you about Bernard,’ Ephraim said, glaring at him. ‘When the time comes, remember to spread honey on the knife.’ ”

Richler--like his near contemporary, Phillip Roth--is both a chronicler and a critic of the Jewish fates in (North) America. In “Solomon Gursky,” as in his other memorable novels, Richler is preoccupied with the corrosive effects of the New World on Jewish identity and--above all--on Jewish values. Indeed, this is one of the explicit themes of “Solomon Gursky,” as when a contemporary Gursky scion embraces the Hasidic tradition, flees to the far north, takes an Eskimo wife and teaches her to make a proper Shabbes dinner, and arranges for a winter’s supply of foodstuffs to be shipped into the barrens by the Notre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Market of Montreal.

If Richler is a more conventional storyteller than Roth, he is also a far more generous one; his observations of Jewish foibles can be comic and even cutting, but there is an abiding love in Richler’s heart. If he despairs at what has become of the People of the Book in the Land of Plenty, it is only because he expects them to do better. And even at their most craven or corrupt, the Gurskys are audaciously mindful of God: “I’d like to see him face-to-face, like Moses at Sinai,” rails Ephraim, whom we know to be a seducer, a cut-purse, a pimp, a charlatan. “Why not? Tell me why not?”

Finally, “Solomon Gursky” is a book about betrayal and revenge. The weapons are odd and unexpected: a handcrafted cherry-wood table, a restricted resort hotel, a game of poker and a proxy fight all are used to devastate another man’s most cherished dreams or to extract vengeance for having done so. And the incident in which Moses Berger’s father emasculates his son’s literary aspirations--a sort of reverse Oedipal thrust in which the blade is an over-the-transom submission to The New Yorker--is one of the most stunning moments in this or any novel.

Richler already has enriched us with some of the most accomplished and inventive novels of the late 20th Century: “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,” “Joshua Then and Now” and especially “St. Urbain’s Horseman” are masterpieces to which I return again and again. (Of Richler’s earlier novel, “Cocksure,” Anthony Burgess wrote: “I wish I’d written it myself.” I would say the same of “St. Urbain’s Horseman,” a novel of perfect proportions, stinging wit and superb achievement.)

“Solomon Gursky Was Here” is a worthy addition to the oeuvre, a work of a storyteller at the height of his powers who has come to suspect that there is more to the world than meets even the most penetrating eye. When Richler wonders aloud about odd intrusions into the realm of the ordinary--”A raven with an unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures”--he is introducing us to possibilities that the younger Richler did not dare or bother to entertain.

In “St. Urbain’s Horseman,” Richler was tormented by history; in “Solomon Gursky,” he is inspired and redeemed by it. And “Solomon Gursky” shows that Mordecai Richler is a master of the cosmic as well as the comic.