Mordecai Richler: Personal Affront

Jewish Community Centre Dept: The Author's Note in Son of a Smaller Hero is so overwrought in its disavowal of the novel's autobiographical content that one wonders how Richler's publisher could have missed it as a red flag in need of toning down: "Although all the streets described in this book are real streets, and the seasons, tempers and moods are those of Montreal as I remember them, all the characters portrayed are works of the imagination and all the situations they find themselves in are fictional. Any reader approaching this book in a search for 'real people' is completely on the wrong track, and what's more, has misunderstood my whole purpose. Son of a Smaller Hero is a novel, not an autobiography.", according to Montreal Gazette. In his Richler biography, Leaving St Urbain, Reinhold Kramer quotes a Richler uncle who recalls that "Montreal Jews recognized the people in the book . and the family hated Richler for that." This manner of reading Richler's fiction for its autobiographical underpinnings took on a certain momentum, and not just in Montreal. In faraway Vancouver, following a 1956 "Fighting Words" Program mounted by the Jewish Community Centre, the Jewish Western Bulletin reported that one attendee viewed Son of a Smaller Hero as "a personal affront." It was "despicable" that a "Jewish author should incite anti-Semitism in this way." For all the displeasure Richler caused, one fact was clear: his novel had entered public discussion in a way that most writers could only dream of and it all started with a slim novel, released in London in 1955, titled Son of a Smaller Hero. In it, 24-year-old Mordecai Richler made his first successful effort at mapping what he called the Jewish "ghetto of Montreal . streets named St Urbain, St Dominique, Rachel" and, of course, "St Lawrence Boulevard, or Main Street," which was "a frenzy of poor Jews, who gather there to buy groceries, furniture, clothing, and meat." Son of a Smaller Hero contained no shortage of familiar material for the home crowd to argue about: a pair of Old World grandfathers, one otherworldly and religious, the other a brute who oversees a scrapyard. The youthful narrator, called Noah Adler, has a lighthearted loser of a father and is a fitful student at "Wellington College," Richler's fictional stand-in for Sir George Williams, his own alma mater. The author's mother, whose English name was Lily, is present in shadowy ways, too, through the narrator's long-suffering mother Leah. How much more could the young man offer to signal to his hometown readers that his second novel combined dark nostalgia for childhood streets with a ripely satiric kiss-off ? In the mid-1950s there was not much in the way of homegrown Canadian fiction, never mind Jewish Canadian novels, and Son of a Smaller Hero attracted attention and readers. The response it received in certain Jewish circles was one of anger and embarrassment. The novel appeared just as big-city Canadian Jews were moving en masse from their immigrant neighbourhoods to the suburbs, so a portrait of the Jewish Main proved provocative and timely. Inadvertently, it offered an edgy, ethnographic and elegiac portrait of a dying neighbourhood. As reported in the news.
@t son of a smaller hero, montreal gazette