The Four Blocks Mordecai Richler Wrote: A Companion to the Mile End Walk

The Mile End history walk has four stops and a single subject: Mordecai Richler grew up in these blocks, wrote four novels about them, and outlived almost everything he described except a schoolyard and two bakeries. The walk is short because the world it recovers is small, a few streets just east of the Main, and because the surviving pieces are close together. What makes it work is that the literary map and the food map turn out to be the same map.

The neighborhood before it was a scene

Mile End today is a byword for creative Montreal. Before that, it was the northern reach of the Jewish immigrant corridor that ran up Boulevard Saint-Laurent. The wave was countable: greater Montreal held about 7,000 Jewish residents in 1901 and roughly 60,000 by 1931, per Louis Rosenberg's Canadian Jewish Population Studies. In the 1931 census, 99.6 percent of Montreal Jews reported Yiddish as their mother tongue. The blocks this walk covers were the heart of that world. To see how it fits the whole island, read how to read Montreal along the Main.

Richler House and Baron Byng: the literary spine

The walk opens at 5257 Saint-Urbain Street, where Richler grew up, and moves to Baron Byng High School, which he attended and later fictionalized as Fletcher's Field High in his novels. These two stops are the spine of the literary map. Richler did not write about all of Montreal. He wrote, obsessively, about the four blocks around his own childhood, and he wrote them so well that the neighborhood became internationally legible through his books, above all The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1959.

The honest thing the walk does is date the fiction against the ground. Baron Byng is real and still standing. Much of the world Richler described is gone. The walk does not pretend otherwise, and that discipline is what makes the surviving pieces land.

Wilensky's and the bagel: the archaeology

The last two stops are food, and they are where the neighborhood's vanished economy survives as working businesses. Wilensky's Light Lunch, founded by Moe Wilensky in 1932, still serves the same fried bologna-and-salami Special it did in the 1930s, under the same painted "no substitutions" rule that Richler put into Duddy Kravitz. The walk is careful with the chronology: the current storefront at Fairmount and Clark opened in 1952, after Richler had already left for Europe, so the Wilensky's of his teenage years was an earlier version two blocks east. What survived the move is the menu.

The closer is Saint-Viateur Bagel, opened on the twenty-first of May, 1957, by Myer Lewkowicz, a Holocaust survivor from a shtetl near Krakow. The wood-fired oven has run continuously since. Four blocks south, Fairmount Bagel runs the same way, hand-rolled, boiled in honey water, baked on wooden boards over wood fire, family-run since 1919. The rivalry between them is the surviving twentieth-century version of the corridor's Jewish trade economy. The bagel is the last thing standing, and it is still warm.

The full food story, the deli versus the bagel and what each one preserves, is the subject of our companion Montreal deli and bagel food map. And Richler's story rhymes with Leonard Cohen's just south of here, the subject of our Plateau walk companion.

Why the walk is short on purpose

Four stops is not a limitation. It is the argument. Richler's Mile End was never large. It was four blocks, a school, a deli and a bakery, and the point of the walk is to stand you inside that exact footprint rather than a generalized "Jewish Montreal." You finish where the smell of the oven is, having read a whole vanished world out of the few institutions stubborn enough to outlast it.

Compare it with the other five routes in the best walking tours in Montreal overview.