Media : Novelist’s Stinging Sendup Stirs Hornet’s Nest in Quebec : It’s all the buzz in Canada. Some fear Mordecai Richler’s latest book could prove one controversy too many for the demoralized nation.

In ordinary times, novelist Mordecai Richler delights his fellow Canadians--to say nothing of many other literate North Americans--with his deft coming-of-age tales set in the Jewish Montreal of his youth.

But these aren’t ordinary times in Canada. Quebec’s Francophone nationalists have pressed their provincial government to hold a referendum on sovereignty this fall. Outside Quebec, Canadian Anglophones are watching in dismay as their elected representatives prostrate themselves before Quebec, offering deal after unwieldy deal in a seemingly hopeless effort to keep the country together.

And now comes Richler’s latest book--not a novel, but a wicked sendup of what he calls “the Western world’s goofiest and most unnecessary political crisis.” It is also an unfunny retelling of some of the ugliest episodes of anti-Semitism in Quebec’s history--a J’accuse for the 1990s.

Some Canadians fear the book--”Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country”--could be one controversy too many for this drifting, demoralized nation in its make-or-break year.

“This book will become the bible for French-haters in the rest of Canada,” warns Quebec journalist and author Jean-Francois Lisee.

Before the slim volume had even gone on sale in Quebec--certainly before Francophone politicians had had the chance to read it--demands were flying in the House of Commons that it be banned under provisions of a Canadian statute that proscribes “hate literature.”

One member of the separatist Bloc Quebecois called the esteemed Richler--author of such celebrated works as “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “St. Urbain’s Horseman”--a “consummate racist with a totally decayed mind.”

Newspapers in Quebec have been grinding out such ad hominem stuff at an impressive clip. Le Devoir, for instance, Montreal’s normally cool and thoughtful daily, calls Richler’s work a “delirium.”

In English-speaking Canada, a reviewer for Toronto’s Globe and Mail has likened Richler’s new book to Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.”

And when Richler recently agreed to let the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. film him at his rural Quebec home, he insisted it not reveal the name of the town where he lives (even though it is named in his book), the better to foil potential vandals and cranks.

Richler, a rumpled, customarily even-tempered sort, professes to be surprised at the to-do. “The Francophone reaction to this is so virulent and angry,” he said in an interview. “They say I’m a racist, I’m an imbecile. There’s so much rage there. I don’t know where it stems from.”

That may be a bit disingenuous. Richler, a Quebecer by birth, is well-acquainted with those he is writing about--the leading lights of Quebec’s political classes--and he cannot have expected them to be happy about his portrayal of them as simpletons from the word allez .

“On a perfect summer day in Montreal, local raspberries in season, two tickets to that night’s ballgame riding in my breast pocket, I went to meet some friends at a downtown bar,” the new book begins. “As I arrived, a solemn middle-aged man was taking photographs of the blackboard mounted on the outside steps. He was intent on a notice scrawled in chalk on the board: Today’s Special. Ploughman’s Lunch.”

Quebec has banned all outdoor commercial signs in any language but French. The solemn man hovering over the pestilential words “ploughman’s lunch” was one of the province’s “tongue troopers,” activists Richler paints as ridiculous “self-appointed vigilantes” who devote their leisure hours to ferreting out English-language signs and filing complaints against them with Quebec’s Commission for the Protection of the French Language.

Richler doesn’t like tongue troopers. And he reviles the thinking that drives them. While acknowledging that Quebecers have ancient grievances against Canada’s English-speakers, he argues that they by now have more than overcome the linguistic discrimination of days gone by.

“Locked in a time warp, Francophones are still doggedly fighting against injustices that no longer exist,” he writes.

Thus having few real issues to rally round, he goes on, Quebec nationalists wallow in pettiness. A sampler from Richler’s embattled book:

* Cash for babies: Just as the descendants of the Aztecs still get even for the conquest of Mexico with Montezuma’s revenge, Quebecers pay back les anglais for conquering French Canada with the “revenge of the cradle.” In hopes of swelling the ranks of Francophones in North America, the Quebec government pays the province’s mothers $435 for a first child, $870 for a second and $5,220 each for any more babies they have after that.

* The “twice as much” law: When Quebec banned outdoor signs in any language but French, it agreed to let Anglo shopkeepers go on hanging bilingual signs indoors--as long as there is twice as much French lettering as English. Richler sneers that he and his drinking buddies have formed the Twice as Much Society in response. It will lobby for French to be spoken twice as loudly as English; for hockey fans to cheer Francophone players twice as hard as English-speaking ones; for restaurants to serve twice as much food to patrons who order in French, and so on.

* Stop-sign eradication: Even though Montreal has the highest rate of urban poverty in all Canada and presumably has urgent matters of social welfare competing for scant public funds, the city has allocated about $522,000 to uproot all 11,000 bilingual “stop / arret “ signs in town and replace them with signs that say arret only.

* Undercover language cops: One Conseil de la Langue Francaise plan would have sent undercover shoppers to Quebec stores, where they were to listen in on sales-counter conversations to find out whether clerks were greeting customers in French or English. The Conseil also wanted to know whether, if customers asked the clerks point-blank to speak French, the clerks turned “curt or disagreeable.” The plan was scrapped after it was leaked to Montreal’s English-language Gazette and ridiculed.

* The “candy crisis”: Despite Quebec’s efforts to ban bilingual signs, Canada is officially bilingual at the federal level. The government requires manufacturers everywhere to label their products in both English and French. Recently, federal food inspectors found imported English jelly beans and fruit pastilles, labeled in English only, on the shelves of a Toronto shop specializing in British wares. The inspectors created an uproar by ordering the sweets off the shelves.

* Immigrant woes: In hopes of increasing the population of French-speakers in North America, Quebec attracts sizable numbers of immigrants from such French-influenced countries as Vietnam, Haiti and Morocco. Alas for the linguistic engineers, though, the immigrants tend to switch to English soon after they arrive. Their offspring are particularly prone to do this. To stop them, the school board responsible for French education in Montreal has called for banning all non-French chatter on school playgrounds.

None of this makes Quebec policy-makers look like the most sensible people on Earth. But it isn’t Richler’s catalogue of linguistic foolishness that has roused Francophone opinion-makers.

The focus of their wrath, instead, has been Richler’s argument that Quebec’s sovereignty movement is profoundly tainted by a history of anti-Semitism.

Richler amasses disturbing evidence for his assertion. The late Abbe Lionel Groulx, patron saint of the sovereignty advocates, is revealed as an admirer of Mussolini who wrote in 1954 that Jews have “a natural passion for money” and could “be found behind all businesses, all shady enterprises, all the pornography operations. . . .”

Henri Bourassa, another French-Canadian patriot, is shown to have once told the House of Commons that “Jews are the most undesirable class of people any country can have. . . .”

Le Devoir, Quebec’s leading intellectual newspaper, turns out to have spent much of the 1930s editorializing against Canadian citizenship and voting rights for Jewish immigrants and urging Montrealers to steer clear of Jewish shopkeepers, who had “corruption in their bloodstream.”

Le Devoir’s editor, Richler says, participated with other Quebec intellectuals in a 1941 rally calling for rapprochement with Franco, Mussolini, Salazar of Portugal, and Vichy France’s Marshal Petain.

And so on.

Horrified Quebecers say Richler isn’t telling them anything new. There have been other works on Quebec’s flirtation with the Axis Powers in the 1930s and 1940s. But they say that Richler’s replay of the province’s ugliest moments in a work published in Canada, England and the United States unfairly brands all of them as anti-Semites, even to this day.

(An abbreviated version of “Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!” appeared in the New Yorker magazine last fall. The book itself will be published in the United States this spring by Alfred A. Knopf Inc.)

Further, Quebecers say that they are no more guilty of anti-Semitism than anybody else, although various survey data leave this assertion open to debate.

“As an Anglophone Jew who has lived all her life in Quebec . . . I feel I must at least publicly disavow the words of this profoundly anti-Quebecois man,” said Montreal community worker Nancy Neamtam, one of many Quebec Anglophones to join the Richler debate.

After a conspicuous silence, the Canadian Jewish Congress stepped away from Richler’s portrait of Quebec. And Patricia Smart, an author and instructor at Ottawa’s Carleton University, has persuaded 24 well-known academics and opinion-makers to sign a letter saying Richler’s book risks “creating misunderstandings that could have grave consequences at this critical time in Canada’s history.”

Asked for his response to those who say he is rubbing salt in Canada’s wounds at a time when he should be binding them up, Richler rolled his eyes and said, “Look, I’m not the International Red Cross.”

RICHLER’S RIPOSTE

What’s the fuss about Canadian author Mordecai Richler and his latest work, “Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country”? Here are excerpts from the wicked political parody, which has many in Quebec steaming:

On the need for Quebec to be “liberated” from Canada:

‘If I thought for a moment that Francophone Quebecers were oppressed in Canada, I would be out there in the streets demonstrating with them. The truth is, I happen to believe the contrary. I believe that when Quebecers, as they are often inclined to do, compare their plight to the blacks in the United States, or less frequently, to Zionists, it is revealing of their unquenchable thirst for self-pity and not, happily for them, a measure of their historical experience.’

On Canada’s relations with the United States:

‘Sometimes it appears to me that Canada, even an intact Canada, is not so much a country as a continental suburb, where Little Leaguers govern ineffectually, desperate for American approval. (Prime Minister) Brian Mulroney is a case in point. Going into the 1988 election he assured Canadians that, unlike his opponent John Turner, he knew George Bush personally . He had actually been a guest at Kennebunkport.’

On the viability of an independent Quebec:

‘Following an initial decade of economic sorrows, I have no doubt that a combination of Francophone ingenuity and imagination could make Quebec a viable little country. Its citizens would find it a decent place to live, provided they were French-speaking . But, without the rest of Canada acting as an increasingly bilingual buffer, it would become even more isolated from the North American mainstream, its standard of living diminished. Eventually, I suspect, it would revert to being a folkloric society. A place that people come from. Ireland without that country’s genius.’

On Canadian macroeconomic management:

‘For the most part Canadians, a notoriously lazy bunch, still live off the riches we were fortunate enough to stumble on here in the first place. . . . We are grateful for the (U.S.-Canadian) Auto Pact, which guarantees us work producing American cars and, more recently, assembling some for the Koreans . . . under the supervision of Korean foremen. This has led to some sour comment from one of the wags who used to frequent Woody’s Pub. “Possibly,” he said, “in the near future--and of course providing our profligate governments fling millions at them--possibly then the Moroccans will be sufficiently thoughtful to ship us their oranges and lemons to crate for the American market. Our future, I think, is as the Third World’s Third World.”’

On Canadian scenery:

‘Canadians, blessed with a natural landscape of incredible beauty and variety, have managed to entrench ugliness just about everywhere they have built. Our cities tend to be functional but nondescript, anchored against the wind, with nothing to please the eye. Quebec City is an exception and so was Montreal, until (former) Mayor Jean Drapeau, hungering for a larger tax base, untroubled by any appreciation for aesthetics, turned the vandals loose. In their indecent haste to make money out of parking lots, they were allowed . . . to destroy one old building after the other, some of the demolitions positively criminal.’