MORDECAI RICHLER: LAST OF THE WILD JEWS

19th Portland Jewish Film Festival

MORDECAI RICHLER: LAST OF THE WILD JEWS
DIRECTOR: FRANCINE PELLETIER
CANADA, 2010

Scripted by Richler biographer Charlie Foran in collaboration with Pelletier, this film looks at Mordecai Richler, the man and the writer, as one of a generation of gifted, angry Jewish writers and intellectuals who dominated much of North American culture in the late 20th century. Best known for “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “Barney’s Version,” Richler was born to immigrant parents and raised on a heady mix of Talmudic teachings and comic book superheroes. Richler was a natural agitator and provocateur and, like his famous American counterparts Saul Bellow, Irving Layton, Lenny Bruce, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, possessed the courage to rattle the complacent and the sacred. (52 mins.)

FOLLOWED BY

AHEAD OF TIME
DIRECTOR: ROBERT RICHMAN
US, 2009
Ruth Gruber, 97, was a journalist, photographer, and author for more than 70 years, witnessing some of the most critical junctures in contemporary world and Jewish history. She was, at age 20, the youngest person in the world to earn a Ph.D. and the first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic in 1935. During World War II, she escorted 1,000 Holocaust refugees to Oswego, New York, for the Interior Department and, after the war, covered the Nuremberg trials and the Exodus for The New York Herald Tribune. Weaving rare archival footage with sharp remembrances, Richman emerges with a fascinating portrait of an iconic woman. (73 mins.)

Sponsored by Portland Chapter of Hadassah