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Mordecai Richler was here

Éditorial - A satirist needs to be brave. Mordecai Richler was brave. He took aim at hypocrisy wherever he found it. He had the courage to offend, and then to withstand the howls of condemnation, reload and let loose once more. A Quebecker by birth and inclination, he was denounced as hateful toward francophones for his essays; a Jew, he was called anti-Semitic for his portrayals of his co-religionists; and somewhere along the way even his mother stopped talking to him.

But in the end, he was loved by readers in Canada and abroad. And he attained international rank as a novelist for works such as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Cocksure (Governor-General's Award, 1968, which also honoured his essay collection Hunting Tigers Under Glass), St. Urbain's Horseman (Governor-General's Award, 1971), Solomon Gursky Was Here and Barney's Version (Giller Prize, 1997).

Satire is a subversive art, aimed at challenging, through ridicule, ways of living or thinking or governing. Its practitioners must be ruthless. They expose by exaggeration. But satire can be drudgery, a cake that doesn't rise, unless its characters are human and recognizable and evoke emotion. And it should be funny, not merely clever or witty. Mr. Richler, who died yesterday, was belly-laugh funny. He did not write screeds; he wrote stories. Who can forget the Jewish Inuit in Solomon Gursky? Who can forget the surreal bar mitzvah film in Duddy Kravitz?

Like many young Canadian artists of his generation, he moved away from Canada, then perceived to be a cultural backwater, and settled in Paris in 1951, and later London. "To be a Canadian and a Jew," he would write, "is to emerge from the ghetto twice."

If he was hoping for detachment, he achieved it. In an early novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, published when he was 24, he explored hypocrisy in a Jewish family. In Duddy Kravitz, his unsympathetic hero, a Jew shaped by his childhood in the ghetto of St. Urbain Street and grasping at a way out, confirmed Mr. Richler's early promise even as his critics derided the author for daring to give life to a stereotype.

The expatriate returned after 20 years away, and a country desperate for international acceptance took the prodigal's return as a sign it had arrived. His craft demanded that he come back, and maybe his soul demanded it, too. "This is my home and I care deeply about what is happening here," he said of Quebec.

Not everyone cared to hear him. When he challenged Quebec's language laws in a long piece for The New Yorker in 1991, and reminded readers of the anti-Semitic "patron saint" of the separatists, l'AbbÈ Lionel Groulx, the resulting furor took on the character of a public egging.

He kept writing nearly to the end, which appropriately enough came shortly after Canada Day. Mordecai Richler, the irascible son of a working-class family one generation removed from Poland, was as Canadian as they come.