Young Noah Adler, passionate, ruthlessly idealistic, is the prodigal son
of Montreal's Jewish ghetto. 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. Eventually, Noah comes to
recognize "justice and safety and a kind of felicity" in a world he
cannot--entirely--leave behind. Richler's superb account of Noah's
struggle to scale the walls of the ghetto overflows with rich comic
satire. Son of a Smaller Hero is a compassionate, penetrating account
of the nature of belonging, told with the savage realism for which
Mordecai Richler's fiction is celebrated.