Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Richler, Mordecai (Vol. 185) - David Rieff (review date 30 October 1994)

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David Rieff (review date 30 October 1994)

SOURCE: Rieff, David. “A Special Relationship.” Washington Post Book World 24, no. 44 (30 October 1994): 11.

[In the following review, Rieff commends Richler's complex and poignant characterizations in This Year in Jerusalem but faults the work for its excessive political commentary and cursory travel narrative.]

It seems that for the young Mordecai Richler, growing up Canadian and Jewish in Montreal in the 1940s, the three great consuming passions were baseball, girls and Zionism. He was raised, he writes, “in homes where the pushke, the blue-and-white coin-collection boxes for the Jewish National Fund to buy land in … Israel, squatted on the kitchen table.” But outside the closed immigrant world of his St. Urbain neighborhood, of Hebrew school and Yiddishkeit, another world beckoned—the secular, cosmopolitan one in which the adult Richler would choose to make his...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Rachel Feldhay Brenner (essay date 1989)
   2. Robert Fulford (review date 21 June 1992)
   3. Rick Marin (review date 6 July 1992)
   4. Harold M. Waller (review date 13 July 1992)
   5. Paul Delany (review date 20 August 1992)
   6. Andro Linklater (review date 26 September 1992)
   7. Barry Cooper (review date December 1992)
   8. Ada Craniford (essay date 1992)
   9. David Rieff (review date 30 October 1994)
   10. J. B. Kelly (review date 19 December 1994)
   11. Edward Alexander (review date January 1995)
   12. Geoffrey Wheatcroft (review date 22 January 1995)
   13. Norman Ravvin (review date winter 1996)
   14. D. J. Enright (review date 5 September 1997)
   15. Francis King (review date 4 October 1997)
   16. John Bemrose (review date 13 October 1997)
   17. Mark Schechner (review date 29 December 1997)
   18. Kerry McSweeney (review date winter 1998)
   19. Gene Lichtenstein (review date 25 January 1998)
   20. Mark Steyn (review date February 1998)
   21. Thomas R. Edwards (review date 5 March 1998)
   22. Meredith Dellandrea (review date fall 1998)
   23. Mordecai Richler and Robyn Gillam (interview date 1998)
   24. Steve Brzezinski (review date winter 1999)
   25. Branko Gorjup (review date winter 1999)
   26. Angela Robbeson (essay date winter 2001)
   27. Anthony Wilson-Smith (essay date 16 July 2001)
   28. Benoit Aubin (essay date 16 July 2001)
   29. Mark Steyn (essay date September 2001)
   30. Brian Bethune (review date 24 June 2002)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright