The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

Understanding NA Jews via Richler

 

I read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler when I was attending a prep school in NJ. I do not know his work particularly well, and I have tended to view Richler as a sort of Canadian Philip Roth. This particular book may provide some insights into the thinking and behavior of NA Zionists -- especially the leaders and intelligentsia.

 

The May 1981 Bantam Paperback Edition contains an introduction from A. R. Bevan of Dalhousie University. He writes:

It is difficult to feel very much sympathy for Duddy until perhaps the end of the novel; he is just too aware of the enormity of his own actions to pass for an innocent, and he causes the destruction of too many people to be seen only as a victim of his unfortunate environment. From one point of view we are presented to Duddy as a poor little neglected underprivileged boy from the slums and therefore one who cannot be blamed for trying to improve his lot even by slippery tactics. But the Duddy that we usually see is the one described as "a cretinous little money-grubber," as "a little Jew-boy on the make," as "as busy, conniving little Yid," and as a "scheming little bastard." It is true that his Uncle Benjy, who is one of the "lousy intelligent people!" (to use Duddy's description of him) realizes just before his own death that there might be something else about his nephew: "Your're two people... The scheming little bastard I saw so easily and the fine intelligent boy underneath that your grandfather, bless him, saw." He goes to tell Duddy that "a boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others." Richler obviously presents Uncle Benjy as one of the spokesmen for the minority view, a sort of chorus figure commenting on the central character and indirectly on society at large. We are prepared by the author to accept Uncle Benjy's reading of Duddy's character and we see Duddy as he saw him, and at the end of the novel we see that all the other potential people present in the boy have been murdered by the scheming little bastard. He has become another Boy Wonder!

 

The original Boy Wonder, Jerry Dingleman, is an important character in the novel. As Max [Duddy's father] describes the exploits of the Boy Wonder in words and tone suited to an epic hero, Dingleman the racketeer becomes to Duddy the living symbol of success. He has money, power and girls, and he made it all himself: "And from what? Streetcar transfers at three cents apiece. Streetcar transfers, that's all. I mean can you beat that?" Not even Duddy can, but he tries hard. When we actually meet the Boy Wonder as presented directly by Richler and not through the gullible eyes of Max, we immediately recognize him as an unscrupulous, predatory, and successful crook. His physical appearance, changed greatly for the worse by his "personal troubles" (polio), is to the reader clearly indicative of his moral corruption, another personal trouble that has had at least as much effect upon the impression he makes upon others. It takes poor Duddy a long, long time to recognize his hero for what he really is, a "two-bit, dope-smuggling cripple."

Over the last 60 years the NA American Jewish community has similarly been murdering all but the most particularist, rapacious, murderous, and unsympathetic paths for its social-political development or growth, and neither the NA Jewish Zionist oligarchy nor intelligentsia has even a shred of the awareness that Duddy Kravitz evinced.

 

While I usually mistrust Wikipedia entries, Richler's page is quite interesting, and it contains the following noteworthy information about Duddy Kravitz as well as about an unfortunate experience Richler had with the Canadian Zionist intelligentsia:

The 1974 movie version [of Duddy Kravitz] was directed by Richler's friend Ted Kotcheff and starred Richard Dreyfuss in his first leading role. Richler and Lionel Chetwynd co-wrote the screenplay.

 

....

 

In The Atlantic Monthly, around the time of the first election of the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1976, Richler linked the PQ to Nazism, by asserting that the theme song of the 1976 PQ campaign "À partir d'aujourd'hui, demain nous appartient" was a Nazi song, "Tomorrow belongs to me..." the chilling Hitler Youth song from Cabaret.^[8] Neither the remainder of the text, nor the music, are related. Furthermore, the Cabaret song, never sung in Nazi Germany, was written in the 1960s by John Kander, a Jewish American lyricist and composer, not German fascists. "À partir d'aujourd'hui" was written by well-known songwriter Stéphane Venne when he was asked to compose a song for an advertisement of the Caisses populaires Desjardins credit union. In Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!, Richler acknowledges the error, blaming himself for having "cribbed" the information from an article by Irwin Cotler and Ruth Wisse for the Jewish American magazine Commentary.^[9] Co-writer of the Commentary article Cotler eventually issued a written apology to Lévesque. Richler also apologized for the incident and called it an "embarrassing gaffe".^[10]

I have written about Wisse previously at Honoring Wisse, Insulting Walt and Wisse Kokht Kugl mit Khazershmaltz! I have met Cotler at BC. He is an extremist Zionist and definitely deserves a blog entry if only to reply to The Double Nakba. I have mentioned Cotler in Economics of Intangibles, Zatzman, ul-Islam.

 

 

 

 

 

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