Mordecai Richler’s Imperfect Search for Moral Values by Shana Rosenblatt Mauer (review)

Reviewed by: Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values by Shana Rosenblatt Mauer Ira Robinson Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, Mordecai Richler's Imperfect Search for Moral Values. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022. 232 pp. The celebrated Jewish Canadian writer Mordecai Richler (1931–2001), whose novels have led both readers and critics on a merry chase during his lifetime and in the more than two decades since his death as well, remains very much an enigma. In particular, Richler's writing has spurred many scholars in multiple books and articles to attempt to unravel the puzzles and contradictions that abound in his life story as well as in his oeuvre. The many enigmatic elements of Richler's creativity have deeply engaged many of his readers — both positively and negatively — and have without doubt affected the multiple ways in which his work has been received by critics and by the public at large. Shana Rosenblatt Mauer, a scholar of modern Jewish literature and a faculty member at Herzog College in Israel, is the latest academic critic to take on the Richler challenge. She has written an illuminating scholarly work that attempts to probe and evaluate Mordecai Richler's broad and biting satire that often infuriates its readers — prominent among them Montreal Jews, French Canadians, and the politically correct in all their guises. Mauer's book attempts to present its reader with what she calls a "holistic reading" of Richler and his career. This "holistic" strategy, she argues, has not been completely achieved in the work of her predecessors. Her holistic approach spurred Mauer to try to make her base of evidence as complete as possible. Beyond including Richler's standard works of fiction and nonfiction within her purview, she incorporates the script adaptations he wrote for television programs (52). Among the major goals of her book is an effort to refute widespread charges by both critics and the public at large, particularly members of Montreal's Jewish community, that "Richler's fiction suffers from anti-Semitic, or even self-hating overtones and makes a mockery of most Jewish concerns," and that, therefore, Richler is a prime example of a "self-hating" Jew (184). In dealing with this sensitive issue, it is quite evident to Mauer that the primary key to a full, contextual understanding of Richler is through his biography, which strongly influences his fictional work. Understanding where Richler came from, in terms both of his family background and his multiple Montreal Jewish community connections, helps her in her task of elucidating his reactions to a multiplicity of people, institutions, and situations. [End Page 203] Equally key to Mauer's attempt to understand Richler is what she refers to as the sustained search for an adequate moral standard to live by that is to be found in his writing. This element in understanding Richler's work is much more subtle than the more overt details of Richler's biography because, as Mauer points out, Richler, unlike "classic" satirists, has structured his novels in such a way as to veil his underlying search for moral purpose (9). Rising to this challenge, Mauer cites a Richler interview in which he stated that he is "groping for . . . a code of honour . . . as a way to live" (9). She thus detects in Richler's work a "value system . . . grounded in the limitations of reality." In this particular value system, Richler's novelistic heroes "figure as the embodiment of moral imperatives . . . [espousing] a distinct moral vision that is, in many ways, a counterbalance to much of modern life's moral relativism" (24). For Mauer, this discovery is of great significance. It means that Richler had been attempting to convey in his fiction a value system she characterizes as "a just and plausible Jewish outlook for the twentieth century . . . alternative to the complacent . . . and often hypocritical Jewish code of living" often espoused by Richlerian characters who are members of the Montreal Jewish "establishment" (25). Mauer's problem, however, is that Richler's "ordinary Jewish values" are not easy to discern clearly because they are "seldom articulated directly" (25, 75). What does this unwritten code of "ordinary" Jewish values in Richler's work include? It certainly includes...

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