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Zusatztext Alfred Kazin It comes off brilliantly. Informationen zum Autor Mordecai Richler was born in Montreal in 1931. Among his most successful novels are The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (made into an acclaimed film starring Richard Dreyfuss), St. Urbain's Horseman, Solomon Gursky Was Here, and Barney's Version. He divides his time between Canada (Montreal and Lake Memphremagog) and London. Klappentext From Mordecai Richler, one of our greatest satirists, comes one of literature's most delightful characters, Duddy Kravitz -- in a novel that belongs in the pantheon of seminal twentieth century books.Duddy -- the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal -- is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and totally hilarious. From his street days tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand plan to "be somebody, " Duddy learns about living -- and the lesson is an outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy. As Richler turns his blistering commentary on love, money, and politics, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ becomes a lesson for us all...in laughter and in life. Leseprobe CHAPTER ONE What with his wife so ill these past few weeks and the prospect of three more days of teaching before the weekend break, Mr. MacPherson felt unusually glum. He trudged along St. Dominique Street to within sight of the school. Because it was early and he wanted to avoid the Masters' Room, he paused for an instant in the snow. When he had first seen that building some twenty years ago, he had shut his eyes and asked that his work as a schoolmaster be blessed with charity and achievement. He had daydreamed about the potential heritage of his later years, former students -- now lawyers or doctors or M.P.'s -- gathering in his parlor on Sunday evenings to lament the lost hockey games of twenty years ago. But for some time now Mr. MacPherson had felt nothing about the building. He couldn't describe it or tell you how to get there any more than he could forget that Shelley's Ode to the West Wind was on page 89 of Highroads to Reading, the central idea being the poet's dedication to a free and natural spirit. Since he had first come to the school in 1927 -- a tight-lipped young Scot with a red fussy face -- many of Mr. MacPherson's earliest students had, indeed, gone on to make their reputations in medicine, politics, and business, but there were no nostalgic gatherings at his home. The sons of his first students would not attend Fletcher's Field High School, either. For making their way in the world his first students had also graduated from the streets of cold-water flats that surrounded F.F.H.S. to buy their own duplexes in the tree-lined streets of Outremont. In fact, that morning, as Mr. MacPherson hesitated on a scalp of glittering white ice, there were already three Gentiles in the school (that is to say, Anglo-Saxons; for Ukrainians, Poles, and Yugoslavs, with funny names and customs of their own, did not count as true Gentiles), and ten years hence F.F.H.S. would no longer be the Jewish high school. At the time, however, most Jewish boys in Montreal who had been to high school had gone to F.F.H.S. and, consequently, had studied history out of The World's Progress (Revised) with John Alexander MacPherson; and every old graduate had an anecdote to tell about him. Mr. MacPherson's most celebrated former student -- Jerry Dingleman, the Boy Wonder -- liked to tell the one about the merit cards. Once Mr. MacPherson tried giving out merit cards to his students for such virtues as exceptionally high examination results, good behavior, and neat writing. Each month he collected the cards and gave the boy who had earned the most of them the afternoon off from school. But at the end of the third month it was Jerry Dingleman who stood up to claim and, on demand, p...
