Volume 27, Number 12 · July 17, 1980
Kvetchy But Unbowed
By James Wolcott
Joshua Then and Now
by Mordecai Richler
Knopf, 435 pp., $11.95
Mordecai Richler's characters could never be convicted of loitering. After scuffling away their boyhoods on Montreal's St. Urbain Street—scratching obscenities into the walls of drugstore phone booths, lusting after girls who shoot by, cradling schoolbooks against their pert breasts—Richler's working-class Jews are catapulted into a sea of hostile goys, who dip and dart like sharks. 'Our world was rigidly circumscribed,' writes Richler in his collection of reminiscences, The Street. 'Outside, where they ate wormy pork, beat the wives for openers, didn't care a little finger if the children grew up to be doctors, we seldom ventured, and then only fearfully.' Fear turns to envy and resentment once the St. Urbain irregulars compete in college and conference rooms with these cool, lean, crisply dressed Gentiles. 'A plague on all the goyim, that's my motto,' a scrap-yard owner tells Duddy Kravitz in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, drawing a finger across his throat to indicate his attitude toward even his best customer. So after Duddy screws everyone in his path to hit it rich, he still isn't able to relax; he gloats, schemes, always suspects the worst. He's even unfaithful to his adoring wife, explaining that she's bound to be unfaithful to him eventually—'This way I get my licks in first.' It's this air of hustle and betrayal that gives Richler's fiction its nervous, horny hum.
Review, 2008 words
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