Mordecai & Me

Book excerpt: ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards Bronze Award - Autobiography/Memoir Quebec Writer's Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction Winner (2004) Canadian Jewish Book of the Year Award Winner (2004) Canadian Jewish Book Award for Memoir/Biography Drainie Taylor Biography Prize Nomination Alberta Trade Nonfiction Book of the Year Nomination Mordecai and Me: An Appreciation of a Kind is the story of one writer's obsession with another. In this "really unauthorized biography," Joel Yanofsky, a veteran Montreal book reviewer, literary journalist and novelist, tracks the elusive legend of Mordecai Richler in the year following his death. This insightful and quirky quest leads Yanofsky to consult - though pester may be more like it - a rabbi, a shrink and a dream analyst. What starts out as a literary appreciation turns into a literary stalking, propelled as much by envy as admiration, irreverence as affection, confession as critical judgment. A Montrealer himself and a journalist by trade, Joel Yanofsky has covered the Canadian literary scene, interviewing and reviewing Richler, while taking the measure of the city that he believes was destroyed culturally by the reign of separatist governments. Yanofsky cuts through the recent public adoration, as well as through Richler's own carefully protected persona, to reveal the depth and contradictions hidden beneath.