Margaret Atwood’s pronouncements do guarantee headlines, but nobody could amuse, arouse, and antagonize like Mordecai Richler. He offended everybody: Jews, cultural nationalists, and sovereignists — not to mention his family of origin — for his unrelenting and hilarious pricking of pretensions and hypocrisies and his refusal to cater to special pleading, whatever the cause or the aspiration. Richler was driven not by rudeness but by an unbending moral code. He hated special pleading, double standards, and prejudice, and nobody was exempt from his merciless arbitration. As early as 1960 he wrote an article in Maclean’s magazine complaining, from the perspective of a Jew returning to Canada from abroad, that the community, which had come to this country fleeing persecution, had forgotten its traditional respect for “the ethical, the spiritual, and the intellectual” and had grown “flabby, money driven, and prejudiced.” Sure, there was anti-Semitism in Canada and yes, the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was unforgiveable, but that didn’t give Jews the right to ignore the sufferings of others.
What do You think about Working The Dead Beat (2012)?
