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'We will miss him very much'

MONTREAL -- 'Yesterday the world mourned the passing of devastatingly handsome, incomparably talented Mordecai Richler, taken from us in his prime, aged 969."

With those words, spoken to an interviewer in 1994, Mordecai Richler summed up with typical irreverence how he wanted the world to remember him after his death.

Yesterday morning, Mr. Richler -- wit, iconoclast, irascible St. Urbain Street boy and one of the foremost figures in modern literature -- was taken from us in his prime, aged 70. He lost a battle with cancer.

While his five children gathered in Montreal with his widow, Florence, tributes flowed in from across Canada in remembrance of the rumpled, unsparing observer who gave the world such novels as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St. Urbain's Horseman and Solomon Gursky Was Here.

"I thought he was a literary giant," said author Pierre Berton.

"He was quite simply one of the most brilliant, original and celebrated artists in Canadian history," Prime Minister Jean ChrÈtien said in a statement.

"For my generation," Margaret Atwood writes in today's Globe Review, "he was a trailblazer who went on to create and occupy a unique place in our national life and literature, and we will miss him very much."

Born in working-class Montreal, the son of an immigrant scrap-metal dealer, Mr. Richler went on to collect two Governor-General's Literary Awards, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Giller Prize. He was nominated for the Booker Prize and appointed to the Order of Canada.

His only sibling, Avrum, who shared a bedroom with his younger brother in a cold-water flat in Montreal, remembered a precocious and gifted young man who, despite appearances, was "very, very shy."

"At a party, he would just stand in a corner and look. He was taking it all in."

While the public persona was caustic and withering, it hid a private man who could be kind and loving.

"He loved his family, he loved his children and his wife," Avrum Richler said in an interview from his home in St. John's. "He's going to be missed. He was an icon."

Mr. Richler was "the quintessential Canadian man of words," the Prime Minister said. "Today, as his voice fell silent, Canada suffered an immeasurable loss."

Mr. Richler had a kidney removed because of cancer in 1998, and the reappearance of the illness in his remaining kidney seemed to have caught the author by surprise.

Avrum Richler said that when he last spoke to his brother from England in March, he talked about completing a novel and made no mention of illness.

By April, however, he had cut short his annual winter sojourn overseas to return to Montreal for cancer treatment. Friends say he tried to keep up his spirits despite debilitating chemotherapy sessions at Montreal General Hospital. He was a regular lunch companion and could be found little more than a week ago at his usual haunt, Ziggy's Pub in downtown Montreal, enjoying his beloved Macallan single-malt Scotch.

"He was very brave," said friend John Aylen, who had a drink with Mr. Richler two weeks ago. "He said to me, 'I'm losing my hair, but as long as they're taking my tumours too I couldn't give a damn.' "

Mr. Richler's five children -- Daniel, Noah, Emma, Martha and Jacob -- gathered in Montreal yesterday to be with Mrs. Richler, his wife of 40 years. The family asked for privacy and said the funeral service would be for close friends and family at the end of the week. A public memorial service will be announced soon, the family said. The family has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the Canadian Cancer Society.

"We are deeply saddened at the sudden and unexpected death of our wonderful and loving father, Mordecai Richler," the family said in a statement.

They said complications from cancer caused his death.

Once the angry young man of Canadian letters, as he grew older Mr. Richler revelled in his role as a grouchy polemicist with a fondness for Scotch and Davidoff cigars.

Caustic and prickly, he riled many francophone Quebeckers -- who could neither stomach his acid wit nor his shaky grasp of the French language -- with his readiness to expound upon the evils of nationalism.

Yesterday, French-language observers tempered their praise for his literary skills with bitterness over his devastating critiques on Quebec nationalism, many of which were felt to be unfair.

"We won't be crying hot tears here like in the rest of Canada," said Richard Martineau, editor-in-chief of Voir MontrÈal, a cultural weekly.

In the hothouse, ill-tempered political context of the early 1990s, from the death of the Meech Lake accord to the 1995 referendum and its aftermath, Mr. Richler's views earned him dozens of hate letters, some scrawled with swastikas. "Very few people here have actually ever read his novels," Mr. Martineau said in an interview. "So he's remembered as the guy who hurt Quebec, who dragged around our dirty laundry on the international stage."

Mr. Martineau said few Quebeckers realized Mr. Richler was equally withering in his portrayal of other groups, including Jews. "He was a misanthrope, period. He was a free thinker who disliked clans of any type."

Mr. Richerl was born in Montreal on Jan. 27, 1931, the son of Moses Isaac and Lily Richler. He grew up in an observant Jewish household on St. Urbain Street, attended Baron Byng High School and was a member of a Zionist youth group, dreaming of battlefield heroics -- all of which surfaced later in his writings.

His father was a junk dealer who worked from six in the morning to 10 at night; his mother was the daughter of a rabbi, and young Mordecai grew up studying the Talmud three days a week and getting whipped with a leather belt by his Hassidic grandfather for minor infractions of religious laws.

Mr. Richler angered his father by declaring himself an atheist, though they were reconciled before his father's death in 1967. His mother remained estranged.

A self-described unhandsome bookworm, Mr. Richler discovered as a teenager the magic of fiction, reading Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front in 1944.

At 19, after a stint at Sir George Williams University, he escaped to the cafÈs of Paris, armed with a letter of reference from a Montreal newspaper editor calling him "sober, hard-working and honest."

Two years later he was back in Montreal, working the night shift for CBC Radio. However, his first novel, The Acrobats, had been accepted by a London publisher.

From 1954 to 1972, Mr. Richler lived and worked in London, but at the age of 41, he returned to Montreal with Florence and their five British-born children, established as one of Canada's most prolific and respected authors.