In 1989 I attended Toronto Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors, where Mordecai Richler launched Solomon Gursky Was Here. After reading, perched on a chair behind a table stacked high with hardcovers, Richler put up with me, along with a few hundred others, telling him something wry aimed at opening conversation as he wrote his name on the novel’s title page. I made some stumbling comment about the raven pictured on the dustcover and my own last name, to which the author offered, appropriately, a blank stare. I had entered a Richler cliché: the naïf looking for acknowledgement and receiving not a thing in return. In Charles Foran’s biography, Mordecai: The Life & Times, the same scenario pops up at a book signing for Barney’s Version at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall. There, Foran tells us, a woman informed Richler, “I read your last novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here. It took me two years. WHAT A STRUGGLE!” Since...
Norman Ravvin’s recent novel is The Joyful Child (Gaspereau Press, 2011). Previous books include a story collection, Sex, Skyscrapers and Standard Yiddish (Paperplates Books, 1997), and a volume of essays entitled A House of Words: Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). He lives in Montreal.
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