SOURCE: Rieff, David. “A Special Relationship.” Washington Post Book World 24, no. 44 (30 October 1994): 11.

In the following review, Rieff commends Richler's complex and poignant characterizations in This Year in Jerusalem but faults the work for its excessive political commentary and cursory travel narrative.

It seems that for the young Mordecai Richler, growing up Canadian and Jewish in Montreal in the 1940s, the three great consuming passions were baseball, girls and Zionism. He was raised, he writes, “in homes where the pushke, the blue-and-white coin-collection boxes for the Jewish National Fund to buy land in … Israel, squatted on the kitchen table.” But outside the closed immigrant world of his St. Urbain neighborhood, of Hebrew school and Yiddishkeit, another world beckoned—the secular, cosmopolitan one in which the adult Richler would choose to make his home and pursue the life of a writer.

But, as Richler makes clear in his appealing but...