Word: montreal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this has done nothing to discourage Novelist Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now). His 14th book, aptly subtitled My Canadian Album, is a mordant, witty brief for the defense of his homeland. As evidence, the Montreal native offers a series of diverse impressions of Canada's past imperfect and present tense. He lunches with Pierre Trudeau, and remembers an earlier Prime Minister, the gnomic William Lyon Mackenzie King, who "nightly for 22 years sat by his crystal ball, beneath an illuminated portrait of his mum, and rapped with her spirit, seeking guidance...
Sometimes the author suspects that the whole nation is a theater of the absurd. In the battle between Quebec's French separatists and its anglophone minority, violent verbal gestures are made. The provincial government forbids the use of the English word hamburger; "hambourgeois" is the meat substitute. In Montreal, police become provincial celebrities not by seizing heroin but by impounding 15,000 Dunkin' Donut bags because the printing is not bilingual...
Throughout his travelogue, Richler illuminates general truths with local anecdotes. A grieving memoir reveals the dark side of the immigrant experience and the author's love for his father: the lifelong failure who "came to Montreal as an in fant, his father fleeing Galicia. Pogroms. Rampaging Cossacks. But, striptease shows aside, the only theater my father relished, an annual outing for the two of us, was the appearance of the Don Cossack Choir at the St. Denis Theater. My father would stamp his feet to their lusty marching and drinking songs; his eyes would light up to see those...
...Montreal 4, N. Y. Islanders 2 (New York leads series...
...York 2, Montreal I (11 innings...