In Son of a Smaller Hero, Mordecai Richler evokes the seasons, tempers, and moods of the Jewish ghetto of Montreal with an earnest realism unsurpassed in his later fiction.

Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the ghetto’s prodigal son. Finding tradition in league with self-delusion, he attempts to shatter the ghetto’s illusory walls by entering the foreign territory of the goyim. But here, freedom and self-determination continue to elude him. Painfully, Noah comes to recognize “justice and safety and a kind of felicity” in a world he cannot – entirely – leave behind.

Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, and startlingly comic, study of the nature of belonging.