‘It was, we felt, their country’ : childhood elsewhere in Mordecai Richler’s The Street

Abstract

Since the Industrial revolution, historians and critics agree, concepts of time and space have become inappropriate to describe contemporary society: it is a shifting, moving, liquid world, and progresses in technologies only contribute to people’s feeling of being always “elsewhere”. Instantaneity and movement are the constituent referents of our post-modern era, where the loss of certainties leaves human beings with little self-confidence and beliefs. To be foreign in one’s own country is daily routine; but it can also be an incitement to produce stories of condemnation. This article seeks to show how Jewish-Canadian author Mordecai Richler uses his powerful and striking irony to denounce Jews condition in 1940s’ Montreal ghetto, and how the stories collected in The Street describe the “elsewhereness” his community was forced to experience. Nevertheless, the paper will analyse how Richler challenges stereotypes and prejudices, focusing on the spaces of otherness he had experienced in his childhood years and which have made him one of the greatest Canadian voices of 20th century.