Street wise

Q: Your roots go back to St. Urbain. But you are “next generation.”  Your parents moved to a “better” part of the city. Compare your Montreal to the city Richler made famous.

A: The streets Richler and my mother felt desperate to escape are now gentrified. Ironically, my sister and I used to go to St. Urbain when we were in high school to party. It’s hip now. Schwartz’s, the old deli on Saint-Laurent, is packed with tourists. To get what St. Urbain used to look like [our film company] had to go east, to Garnier, a French neighbourhood where they still have spiral staircases and narrow streets. As for the racial troubles Richler wrote about, my mother told me there were “No Jews” signs in the Laurentians when she grew up. Street fights between Jews and French were common. But I didn’t experience any of that.

Q: What does your mother think of Richler’s work?

A: My mother’s family escaped from Poland to Russia before the war, eventually arriving in Montreal. It was a hard voyage, but she made it. When I was a kid she proudly drove me around St. Urbain, showing me her high school and the Jewish community centres. She loved Richler because he captured her time and place, what was good, what was bad, forever.

Q: What did it feel like to dress up in period attire and sit in a Montreal tenement, surveying a bustling street scene?

A: I felt an incredible lightness. St. Urbain was the land of milk and honey for my mother. Think of where she came from! St. Urbain is why I exist. Sitting there in costume, looking out on what felt like my mother’s neighbourhood… well, it was one of those perfect days.

Q: St. Urbain’s Horseman was presumed unfilmable. Richler tried his hand at a screenplay and gave up. How did the miniseries screenwriters [Gerald Wexler, Howard Wiseman and Joe Wiesenfeld] manage to get the novel onto the screen?

A: The problem was all flashbacks and all the great comic vignettes — the baseball game in London, Jake’s hilarious problems in a washroom — that were fun, but kind of incidental to the main story. I think the writers did what you had to do: get the story in order and eliminate the elements that were not essential. They had to be ruthless. 

Q: St. Urbain’s Horseman does a good job capturing Canada’s pre-Expo’67 insecurity complex. You grew up like Jake Hersh, a Montreal kid who wanted to make a career in show business, albeit a half-century later; did you feel encumbered by your passport?

A: Whenever anyone asks where I’m from, I say Montreal, where Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen come from. Because of them, perhaps, it never occurred to me that being from Montreal, being a Canadian, was an obstacle. By the way, I saw Leonard Cohen in Montreal the other day, walking the Plateau. He was standing straight, smiling. He seemed happy.

Q: How do you explain your character in the mini-series, Jake Hersh?

A: He’s an iconic Canadian immigrant. There is a little Duddy Kravitz in him, fighting to get ahead. But for Jake, maybe the fight is too easy. He’s someone a generation identified with, I suspect. I’m talking about the generation that barely escaped the war. I identify with Jake, too. There was the war, the Holocaust. My country, my people went through all that. And look at everything I have. Why me? There is some guilt there. Everything his parents fought to forget, Jake fights to remember.

Q: What do you make of the enigmatic Joey, the Horseman, a character Richler described  as a “Jewish Batman?”

A: The Horseman is all in Jake’s mind. If Joey didn’t exist, Jake would have to invent the Horseman anyway. It is his way of dealing with the past. He needs to have someone who fights the injustice of six million Jews walking to their death in the gas chambers. Why did they walk? I used to wrestle with that myself. We all want to believe in a hero, a fighter who will right all wrongs, past and present.

Q: Richler never turned from a fight, battling what he considered Quebec’s repressive language laws. He was a hero to many, a villain to some in his province. Did Richler become St. Urbain’s Horseman?

A: When the film Duddy Kravitz came out, there were some in Montreal’s Jewish community who said, “This isn’t good for us; Richler is stirring up old trouble again.” They say the same thing about Joey, the Horseman. Richler made trouble when the Quebec language laws were introduced, saying what many people were afraid to say. You know, I think more people here appreciate him now. The other day, I was talking to Guy Lepage, who has a talk show and a popular TV show in Quebec, Un Gars, Une Fille. He was asking me what I was doing, and I told him about the miniseries. He said, “Richler is someone many people here have a problem with, but there is no doubt he was a great Quebecer.” Richler was an incredible figure, very cantankerous at times, though. A real troublemaker. [Laughs]

Q: You met him?

A: Once, in Toronto, this was the late ’90s, when Barney’s Version came out. I discovered he was doing publicity and needed a driver, so I volunteered. I had this foolish idea I was going to give him a book idea, but it became apparent he didn’t want to talk, so I just drove. Turns out he was going to Bishop Strachan, a private girls’ school. We walk in, Mordecai with his big cigar (they let him smoke). Eventually, we get to this auditorium full of girls. He has a scotch in one hand. All these bright faces are looking up at him. First line he reads is something like, “He lay there on the massage table, naked, having ejaculated all over himself.” I almost died I laughed so hard.

Q: You share one trait with Richler. He thought Toronto was  “a farm team. ” You’ve gone on record as not liking the place. What do you have against Canada’s largest city?

A: Oh God, nothing. I was just in Toronto for the film festival, I quite enjoyed myself. Once, I mouthed off about the city and the quote has followed me everywhere. Right after I said it, my dad phoned me and said, “What are you doing, telling everyone you hate Toronto?” I said, “Geez dad, it was an interview. I was speaking my mind… you know, like Mordecai Richler.”