Mordecai Richler, who died on July 2nd aged 70, was a Canadian novelist; even the Canadian novelist as some good critics would have said until Margaret Atwood came on to the scene.
He was also a Jew, and being Jewish in Montreal shaped his political feelings and his mordant journalism and fiction.
A cavalryman in one of his novels extravagantly explains to his lover that he will be court-martialled by three generals if he overstays his time with her. She asks if this only happens to Jews. "When a Jew is on a horse," he replies, "he is no longer a Jew."
Mordecai Richler was a third-generation Canadian. His grandfather, whose name was Reichler, came from the Polish ghettoes so magnificently described by the greatest ofNorth American Jewish writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer. He fled to Canada to escape the eastern European pogroms at the turn of the century.
His father, Moses Isaac Richler (the "e" had been inadvertently dropped by an immigration official), was a scrap metal merchant. Mordecai Richler was born on July 2nd, 1931, and went to a run-down school in the poor St Urbain Street district, which was the setting for the novel that established his reputation, The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz (1959), and which gave its name to the title of another, St Urbain's Horseman (1971).
He went from high school to Sir George Williams College, was bitten by the literature bug, and left at the age of 19 without taking a degree to live in Paris, which, as aspiring North Americans artists knew at that time, was the font of all creative wisdom.
In Paris, he wrote his first novel, The Acrobats (Hemingwayesque, almost inevitably), and on his way back to Canada dropped it in to a literary agent in London. AndrΘ Deutsch accepted it for publication in 1954.
The Acrobats and his next book, Son Of A Smaller Hero (1955), were rites of passage, apprentice novels about the tribulations involved in being an expatriate writer; but The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz was anything but an apprentice novel. This picaresque story was published to critical acclaim; in terms of sales, it was a sleeper, but within 10 years it was a prescribed college text in Canada and its sales had reached 35,000 a year.
The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz was the first novel in which the hero is not a projection of the writer himself: it draws on his experience, but Kravitz is a fully-realised character in his own right. In 1974, Mordecai Richler wrote the screenplay for a film of the book starring Richard Dreyfuss and directed by a fellow Canadian, Ted Kotcheff.
He had shared a flat with Kotcheff during No Love For Johnnie (1961), taken from Wilfred Fienburgh's parliamentary novel; John Braine's Room At The Top (1959) - for which he did not receive a credit - its sequel Life At The Top (1959), directed by Kotcheff, and an adaptation of a John Le CarrΘ novel, The Looking Glass War (1970). He was nominated for an Oscar for his Kravitz screenplay and the film won the Golden Bear at that year's Berlin Film Festival.
Scriptwriting, for television and film as well as journalism, filled the years between Kravitz and St Urbain's Horseman, a powerfully satirical view of a permissive but hypocritical Britain going to hell in a handcart. Kravitz turns up again as an old St Urbain's acquaintance of the hero, Jacob Hersh, rich now and drinking Veuve Cliquot and eating a double portion of caviare with a side order of chopped onion and egg to kill the taste of the caviare.
He had been in London for nearly 20 years when this novel was published, but, just as James Joyce lived imaginatively in Dublin throughout his Paris and Trieste years, Mordecai Richler never lost touch with Montreal. Between Duddy Kravitz and the Horseman he had published a couple of short novels, including the randy success, Cocksure (1968), which was banned in Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand).
"No matter how long I live abroad," Mordecai Richler said, "I do feel rooted in St Urbain Street. That was my time, my place, and I have elected myself to get it right."
But by 1972, getting it right involved returning to live in Montreal. He woke up one day in London and "found that other expatriate Commonwealth writers who had luxuriated too long in London, writers whom I respected, had been driven to composing novels set in the biblical past or on imaginary planets."
In Montreal, novels followed more slowly, but showed no decline in his powers. Joshua Then And Now (1980) was also made into a Ted Kotcheff-directed film; Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) was, like St Urbain's Horseman, nominated for the Booker Prize, and in 1997 Barney's Version was published. There were also two volumes of autobiographical writing and a couple of children's books.
Mordecai Richler is survived by his wife, Florence Wood, and children.
Mordecai Richler: born 1931; died, July 2001