Born in Montreal to Moses Isaac and Lily Rosenberg Richler, Mordecai Richler grew up in a community dominated by the first large wave of Jewish immigrants to Canada, those who fled Russia during the pogroms that followed the Russo-Japanese War. (His mother, as Leah Rosenberg, wrote The Errand Runner: Reflections of a Rabbi's Daughter , an autobiographical memoir on the early Montreal years.) As a child, Richler received a traditional Jewish upbringing, with his maternal grandfather, something of a Hassidic scholar, held up to him as an ideal and a model. In his teens, however, he abandoned Orthodox customs, gradually becoming more interested both in a wider world and in writing. In 1949 he entered Sir George Williams University, dropping out two years later in the belief that academia would distort and exhaust creative talent. Richler cashed in an insurance policy and, in 1951, sailed on the S.S. Franconia from Quebec City to Liverpool. He settled for a time in Paris, where even the second generation of moderns--Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller--had become faint ghosts, tried free-lancing, and associated mainly with other young North American writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, and Mavis Gallant. Back in Montreal briefly, in 1952 Richler worked at odd jobs and in the CBC newsroom.
This is a free page. This page contains 194 words. This
biography contains 5,112 words (approx. 17 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Mordecai Richler Access Pass.
