The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

4 ideas

1. Duddy buys the lake through betrayal

   Duddy Kravitz, a poor Jewish boy from Montreal's St Urbain Street, finds a Laurentian lake while waiting tables at a resort. He secures the land parcel by parcel in the name of his French-Canadian girlfriend Yvette. He hires Virgil, an epileptic friend, to drive a truck despite the danger, and Virgil is paralyzed in a crash; Duddy then forges a cheque from Virgil's account to buy the last lot. He gets the lake but loses Yvette, Virgil and his grandfather Simcha's respect, and the book ends with him gleeful that a waiter will let him sign for his meal on credit.

2. Inherited maxims get stripped of their ethics

   Simcha's saying that 'a man without land is nobody' carried an older ethic of patience, dignity and rootedness. Duddy takes the conclusion and throws away the ethic that made it wise, treating land as a scoreboard to be won by any means. When Simcha refuses to live on land acquired this way, the novel shows that obeying the letter of an elder's advice can be the deepest betrayal of it.

3. Ethnic outsiders reading status through local mythology

   On St Urbain Street, status is measured against the neighbourhood's own heroes. Duddy's father Max worships Jerry Dingleman, the 'Boy Wonder' who got out of the ghetto through gambling and smuggling. Seen through this lens, Duddy's ruthlessness is less a personal defect than a rational copy of the only visible model of escape his community celebrates.

4. The hustler as both admirable and monstrous

   Richler refuses to let the reader settle on a verdict: Duddy's energy, nerve and loyalty to family are genuinely attractive, and they are the very qualities that make him cruel. The same drive that builds a bar-mitzvah film business from nothing also forges a crippled friend's signature. The novel suggests that relentless striving can't be split into a good part and a bad part, because they come from one source.

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