The Raven Breaks the Vessels: Reclaimed Traditions and Cultural Interplay in Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here

Abstract:

Mordecai Richler frequently came under criticism as both insufficiently Jewish and insufficiently Canadian. Such claims were often backed up by emphasizing the satirical edge of his social comedy. Elements of the Jewish tradition, while abundant in his novels, were often seen as measuring the distance which the writer travelled from his deeply religious Montreal background towards a secular space, where he could safely mock religious zeal and old-fashioned practices. It was also not uncommon to regard his writing as unpatriotically escapist, inadequate to pressing national concerns, or else contrarian and inflammatory.

I argue, first of all, against Ruth Wisse’s dismissal of Richler’s contribution to literature as reflecting an “antipathy for Jewish society and Judaism” and an inability “to imagine the value of perpetuating Jewish life”. In contrast to Wisse’s choice of Richler’s early and most famous work, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), my example is one of Richler’s final novels, Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989). Containing elements of historiographic metafiction and magical realism, the text opens itself up to postcolonial vistas, engaging with the Jewish tradition to a much greater extent than in his early breakthrough novel. The Judaic folklore and mystical tradition – which had also formed the backbone of St. Urbain’s Horseman – are here set against First Nations’ myths and legends. Through the imagery of the raven, at once the trickster of indigenous North American tales and the “bird that failed Noah”, Richler constructs a Jewish-Canadian identity far more complex than that suggested in his early work.