A Mensch for All Seasons

Last December, after the film version of Barney’s Version came out, I noticed that the chatter on my Facebook page about the movie and the Mordecai Richler novel it was based on had taken a familiar turn. One FB “friend” wondered, without going into detail, whether anyone else was disturbed by the anti-Semitism in the story. This led to a thread focusing on Richler’s own so-called self-hating inclinations. Comments ranged from “I never read the guy” to “Come on, he hated everyone.” Of course, whichever side you ultimately come down on, it is hard to ignore the fact that this discussion reveals a truth about Jewish audiences and readers that predates Facebook—predates the Old Testament, come to think of it: we are never satisfied. Jewish writers, from Kafka to Richler, have all eventually faced the same essentially unliterary but nevertheless insistent complaint about their work: is it good for the Jews?

So far Toronto writer Michael Wex has managed to...