Novel
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mordecai Richler · 1959
Synopsis
Montreal, rue Saint-Urbain, in 1947. Duddy Kravitz, a schoolboy, son of a taxi driver who also works as a pimp, has retained from his grandfather that a man without land is nothing. The summer he spends as a waiter in a hotel in Sainte-Agathe, in the Laurentians, Yvette, a young French Canadian, shows him an isolated lake. He decides to buy all the land around it. A minor, and Jewish before sellers who do not want Jews, he has the deeds put in Yvette's name and throws himself into anything that might pay.
Context
The author's fourth novel, published in London in 1959, it is set in the Jewish neighbourhood of Rue Saint-Urbain. Part of the city's Jewish community took offence at it, and some critics called it antisemitic. Ted Kotcheff, who was his friend, had made a British television play from it in 1961; in 1974 he made it into a film, from a screenplay by the writer and Lionel Chetwynd, which received the Golden Bear at Berlin.
Who it is for
A satirical novel, funny and cruel, whose hero is a young man on the make; the 2016 French translation is available in paperback.
Prizes and reception
The best known of its author's novels, the one that established him abroad and aroused a wider interest in Canadian letters.
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