SOURCE: Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Mordecai Richler in the Context of Canadian Jewish Writers' Response to the Holocaust: A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Adele Wiseman.” In Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler's Writing, pp. 167-205. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

In the following essay, Brenner compares Richler's dualistic representation of the Jewish response to the Holocaust in his fiction and nonfiction with the works of A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Adele Wiseman.

Mordecai Richler's representation of the Jewish response to the Holocaust in his fiction and his direct response in his non-novelistic writing vacillate between two opposing points of view. The Jewish individual moves between an obsessive aspiration to be assimilated into the Gentile world and a powerful need to confront the Gentile world with a straightforward accusation of terrible injustice committed against Jews. Paradoxically, he wishes to obliterate...