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Mordecai Richler Quotes

Mordecai Richler, CC was a Canadian writer. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Barney's Version . His 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's fantasy series.

In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about Canadian and Quebec nationalism. Arriving as immigrants in Canada when English was the country's predominant official language, the Jewish communities in Montreal usually acquired English, not French, as a second language after Yiddish. This later put them at odds with the Quebec nationalist movement, which argued for French as the province's only official language. Richler's Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! , a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-Semitism, generated considerable controversy.

✵ 27. January 1931 – 3. July 2001   •   Other names مردکای ریچلر, モルデカイ・リッチラー
Mordecai Richler photo

Works

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Barney's Version
Barney's Version
Mordecai Richler
Mordecai Richler: 6   quotes 0   likes

Famous Mordecai Richler Quotes

“This is an age of scientific wonders. You miss somebody so you pick up the phone to say hello. Three minutes for sixty-five cents. Nobody goes broke.”

Mordecai Richler book The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

“So far as one can generalize, the most gracious, cultivated, and innovative people in this country are French Canadians. Certainly they have given us the most exciting politicians of our time: Trudeau, Lévesque. Without them, Canada would be an exceedingly boring and greatly diminished place.”

Mordecai Richler

Reported in Donald Smith, D'une nation à l'autre: des deux solitudes à la cohabitation (Montreal: Éditions Alain Stanké, 1997), p. 61.
Other

“Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other.”

Mordecai Richler

Reported in Mark Steyn, "Mordecai Richler, 1931-2001", New Criterion (September 2001), Vol. 20, Issue 1, pp. 123–128.
Other

“I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you took that as evidence of my quality.”

Mordecai Richler book Barney's Version

Barney's Version (1997)

“My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round my neck, he would have complained about how humiliating it was for him to spring the trapdoor. And then, once I was swinging in the wind, he would blame my ghost for having obliged him to murder, thereby imposing a guilt trip on a sweet, self-effacing, downtrodden Francophone.”

Mordecai Richler

Reported in Donald Smith, D'une nation à l'autre: des deux solitudes à la cohabitation (Montreal: Éditions Alain Stanké, 1997), p. 61.
Other

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