May 2026

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz - Mordecai Richler, 1959

Reading classic novels is like eating kale - it’s never first on your list but you’re happy to know that you’ve done it. I’m trying to reframe in my mind how I feel about Canadian literary classics to make it feel less like a homework assignment and more like a discovery.

Mordecai Richler is arguably one of the most famous writers in our country yet out of his ten novels I’ve not read any of them. I did see the 90s movie adaptation of Barney’s Version but that feels like cheating.

I could have picked any of them to start with but I kept coming back to Duddy Kravitz because it seemed like a lot of the themes from this 1950s book were relevant at the moment. The coming of age story that explores ambition, greed, corruption, capitalism, antisemitism, and the Hollywood blacklisting of a filmmaker for communist ties which seems like a tale worth revisiting with seven decades of hindsight.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the novel that established Mordecai Richler as one of the world’s best comic writers. Growing up in the heart of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, Duddy Kravitz is obsessed with his grandfather’s saying, “A man without land is nothing.” In his relentless pursuit of property and his drive to become a somebody, he will wheel and deal, he will swindle and forge, he will even try making movies. And in spite of the setbacks he suffers, the sacrifices he must make along the way, Duddy never loses faith that his dream is worth the price he must pay. This blistering satire traces the eventful coming-of-age of a cynical dreamer. Amoral, inventive, ruthless, and scheming, Duddy Kravitz is one of the most magnetic anti-heroes in literature, a man who learns the hard way that dreams are never exactly what they seem, even when they do come true.