Writer Nancy Richler
Reflects on coming home to Montreal and the role the city plays in her work.
Nancy Richler admits it’s weird being back in Montreal. The novelist last lived here 3½ decades ago, having left home for Brandeis University outside Boston at 18. Settling in Vancouver after a stay in Colorado, she and her partner moved back east to care for Richler’s elderly parents. The couple is now living in Westmount, where Richler, for the first time in her career, is enjoying serious professional success and recognition as a writer on the heels of her 2012 Gillernominated novel, The Imposter Bride. The book begins in postwar Montreal, a time and place still vivid from Richler’s childhood. But, she says, what strikes her most about being back full time after such a long absence is what hasn’t changed.
“I really did not expect language to be as much of an issue as it is. I was taken by surprise. I thought, when I left, ‘Bill 101 came in, all the people younger than I am speak French fluently, and I don’t experience any tension on the street, everyone seems to switch back and forth.’ So it surprised me when this government came in and it was all this stuff I remembered from when I left.”
That she remembers the mid-’70s so well doesn’t come as a surprise to her. She says she was able to evoke postwar Montreal easily thanks to a sharp and detailed long-term memory. It’s also a time and place well-recorded in her second cousin Mordecai’s novels.
But she grew in Côte-StLuc, a far cry from St-Urbain — and, with its suburban comforts, far less colourful, by her own admission. “CôteSt-Luc, let’s face it, it’s not exactly evocative,” she says. “I remember speaking to my brother and saying, ‘My editor wants more of a sense of place,’ and he said, ‘Has she been to Côte-St-Luc?’ It’s not like you say, ‘Oh my God, Côte-St-Luc is so distinctive.”
But the novel, though similar in backdrop to the other Richler’s novels, is based on very different themes. Rather than poking Montreal’s Jewish community, The Imposter Bride looks at the effect the Holocaust had on it. The story opens in 1947, with the arrival of a young European Jewish woman in Montreal, where she is to enter an arranged marriage. She soon flees her husband and young daughter Ruth, and the mysteries of her past and identity form the novel’s central tension.
“To me, it was never a Montreal book,” she says. “It wasn’t Montreal I was trying to capture so much as the first postwar generation of Jews, where so many of the adults in our community were people who had come over either just before or just after a war that destroyed their entire culture and community and most of the people. But it became a Montreal book because I set it here, but that wasn’t what I set out to do — it’s about that psychology of people who have come through that kind of trauma and how it manifested itself in my community.”
She says she could easily have set the book in suburban Toronto, or any other city with a large concentration of Jews. But the theme of trauma and recovery is sadly and widely shared among any number of communities.
“So many Canadians, and so many all over the world, are one generation away from a very shattering trauma, so it seems to have resonated beyond the Jewish community. Which, of course, I’m very pleased about.”
Her previous novel, 2002’s Your Mouth is Lovely, is also centred on a Jewish family, this one living in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her community, she says, is a very big part of her — not that she’s enthusiastic to share her thoughts openly.
“The thing about Jewish is, you’re always going to offend somebody,” she says, smiling. “I have my parents, I have my right-wing friends, I have my left-wing friends … so I’m just going to shut my mouth.” Then she laughs out loud.
She also identifies herself as an LGBT writer. She was married in her 20s, but came out after the marriage collapsed. “Being Jewish and being a lesbian, I have some sense of outsider-ness that is just structural, and it gives me a perspective that I wouldn’t have otherwise. But (her sexuality) hasn’t been the focus of any of my writing since my first novel (Throwaway Angels), but it certainly informs my writing.”
Nancy Richler’s The Impos
ter Bride, as adapted for the stage by Alexandria Haber, will be presented Saturday at 9 p.m. at Salle Godin of Hotel 10, 10 Sherbrooke St. W., as part of the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival, followed by a Q & A. Tickets cost $10 and are available via bluemetropolis.org.