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Mordecai Richler is a Scriptwriter and Additional Dialogue Canadien born on 27 january 1931 at Montreal (Canada)

Mordecai Richler

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Nationality Canada
Birth 27 january 1931 at Montreal (Canada)
Death 3 july 2001 (at 70 years) at Montreal (Canada)
Awards Order of Canada, Governor General's Awards, Companion of the Order of Canada

Mordecai Richler, CC (January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001) was a Canadian author, screenwriter and essayist. A leading critic called him "the great shining star of his Canadian literary generation" and a pivotal figure in the country's history. His best known works are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997); his 1989 novel Solomon Gursky Was Here was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for the Jacob Two-Two children's stories.

In addition to his fiction, Richler wrote numerous essays about the Jewish community in Canada, and about nationalism as practised by Canadian anglophones and the francophone Québécois. Arriving as immigrants in Canada when English was the country's sole official language (long before English-French bilingualism became an official federal policy), the Jewish communities in Montreal - a city in the francophone province of Québec - largely acquired English, not French, as a second language after Yiddish. This later put them at odds with some in the Québec nationalist movement, which argued for French as the official language of Québec. His Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country (1992), a collection of essays about nationalism and anti-semitism, generated considerable controversy.

Biography

Early life and education
The son of Lily (née Rosenberg) and Moses Isaac Richler, a Jewish scrap yard dealer, Richler was born in 1931 and raised on St. Urbain Street in the Mile End area of Montreal. He learned Yiddish and English, and graduated from Baron Byng High School. Richler enrolled in Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) to study English but dropped out before completing his degree. Years later, Richler's mother published an autobiography, The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter (1981), which discusses Mordecai's birth and upbringing, and the sometimes difficult relationship between them.

Richler moved to Paris at age nineteen, intent on following in the footsteps of a previous generation of literary exiles, the so-called Lost Generation of the 1920s, many of whom were from the United States.

Career
Richler returned to Montreal in 1952, working briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, then moved to London in 1954. He published seven of his ten novels while living in London, as well as considerable journalism.

Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", Richler returned to Montreal in 1972. He wrote repeatedly about the Jewish community of Montreal and especially about his former neighborhood, portraying it in multiple novels.

Marriage and family
In England, in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, a French-Canadian divorcee nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met and was smitten by Florence Mann (née Wood), a young married woman.

Some years later Richler and Mann both divorced and married each other. He adopted her son Daniel. The couple had five children together: Daniel, Jacob, Noah, Martha and Emma. These events inspired his novel Barney's Version.

Richler died of cancer at the age of 70.

He was also a second cousin of novelist Nancy Richler.