The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

The sharp, driven poor boy Duddy Kravitz claws his way up in 1940s Montreal, convinced by his grandfather that a man without land is nobody, and schemes to buy a Laurentian lake by any means. Richler maps his own city: the Jewish immigrant streets around Saint-Urbain and the Main, the downtown clubs where the gangster Duddy idolises holds court, and the Laurentian resort of Ste-Agathe and the hidden lake to the north on which the whole book turns.

Duddy Kravitz

Saint-Urbain Street and the Main

Part 1

On Saint-Urbain Street, among the tailors, hustlers and dreamers of immigrant Montreal, Duddy soaks up his grandfather's creed that a man without land is nobody. The crowded, striving neighbourhood, its schoolyards and back lanes, forms the fierce, unscrupulous energy that drives him.

Part 1

explicit Duddy grows up in the Jewish working-class streets around Saint-Urbain and the Main (Boulevard Saint-Laurent) in Montreal, the real immigrant neighbourhood Richler drew from his own childhood.

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