the apprenticeship of duddy kravitz novel

His trajectory leaves him owner of the land for his dream resort, “Kravitzvill,” but also completely isolated.

In his desperate pursuit to own a large lake and parcel of land in the Laurentian Mountains, Duddy Kravitz descends into duplicity, fraud, and betrayal.

But it is Duddy, played so dynamically by Richard Dreyfuss (AMERICAN GRAFFITI), who complicates and transcends cheap stereotype by revealing compassion, family loyalty, and a curious lonely vulnerability. At times he envisions Duddy and the Jewish subculture in Montreal as harshly venal, crass, and materialistic. Richter has been accused of anti-Semitism in this film. It’s is an incisive and often unforgiving account of nineteen year-old Duddy Kravitz-hustler, con artist, betrayer. His screenplay of THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ closely parallels his 1959 novel of the same title. Mordecai Richter is a Canadian Jew whose fiction consistently focuses on cultural assimilation’s pains and prices. Salinger, Budd Schulberg, and many others. Loss of faith, a strong sense of cultural disaffection, and what another of Bellow’s characters aptly calls the “nightmare isolation of the self”-these elements have become both mood and motif for such writers such as Mike Gold, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Clifford Odets, Philip Roth, J.D. Most Jewish authors have found themselves at odds not only with the dominant external culture, but with Jews themselves. This process of Americanization has not been an entirely satisfactory one.

In so doing, they have created a literature that often documents a movement from isolation to social accommodation. But when it comes to cultural self-satire and self-hatred, Jews are, to borrow a line from the title character of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, “What Gary, Indiana, is to smoke-the world’s biggest operation.”Įver since Abraham Cahan explored assimilation’s ethical price in The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Jewish-American writers have assiduously dissected their national character. Pio Baroja and Luis Buñuel attack their Spanish orthodoxy in all its pious hypocrisy. George Grosz, Gunter Grass, and Fritz Lang dwell on a German psyche obsessed with violence and perverse decadence. Munch and Ibsen painfully expose the icy bankruptcy of spirit and human compassion in their native Norway. “It’s cretins, little money grubbers like Kravitz that cause anti-Semitism, you know.”-Irwin Schubert in THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZĮvery ethnic community has its cultural tattletales, artists and writers who go around revealing the family’s dirty little secrets to the outside world, the “white men” as Duddy Kravitz learns to call them in THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ. I'm a Jew! A Jew!-Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell I am a Jew and whenever anything Jewish is mentioned I find it necessary to say that I am a Jew.

The apprenticeship of duddy kravitz novel