Description
In this beguiling collection of short stories and memoirs, first published in 1969, Mordecai Richler looks back on his childhood in Montreal, recapturing the lively panorama of St. Urbain Street: the refugees from Europe with their unexpected sophistication and snobbery; the catastrophic day when there was an article about St. Urbain Street in Time; Tansky’s Cigar and Soda with its “beat-up brown phonebooth” used for “private calls”; and tips on sex from Duddy Kravitz.
Overflowing with humour, nostalgia, and wisdom, The Street is a brilliant introduction to Richler’s lifelong love-affair with St. Urbain Street and its inhabitants.
About the Author
Working-class Jewish background based novels, which includeThe Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz(1959) andSaint Urbain's Horseman(1971), of Canadian writerMordecai Richler.People best knowBarney's Version(1997) among works of this author, screenwriter, and essayist; people shortlisted his novelSolomon Gursky Was Here(1989) for the Man Booker Prize in 1990. He was also well known for theJacob Two-twostories of children.A scrap yard dealer reared this son on street in the mile end area of Montréal. 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 before completing his degree.Years later,Leah Rosenberg, mother of Richler, published an autobiography,The Errand Runner: Memoirs of a Rabbi's Daughter(1981), which discusses birth and upbringing of Mordecai and the sometime difficult relationship.Richler, intent on following in the footsteps of many of a previous "lost generation" of literary exiles of the 1920s from the United States, moved to Paris at age of 19 years in 1950.Richler returned to Montréal in 1952, worked briefly at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and then moved to London in 1954. He, living in London meanwhile, published seven of his ten novels as well as considerable journalism.Worrying "about being so long away from the roots of my discontent", Richler returned to Montréal in 1972. He wrote repeatedly about the Jewish community of Montréal and especially portraying his former neighborhood in multiple novels.In England in 1954, Richler married Catherine Boudreau, a French-Canadian divorcée nine years his senior. On the eve of their wedding, he met Florence Wood Mann, a young married woman, who smited him.Some years later, Richler and Mann divorced and married each other. He adopted Daniel Mann, her son. The couple had five children together: Daniel, Jacob, Noah, Martha and Emma. These events inspired his novel Barney's Version.Richler died of cancer.
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