[troutman]

I select in the Canadian Lit category, The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz, by Mordecai Richler (1959):



Duddy Kravitz is a brash Jewish kid from Montreal who is determined to "make it": whatever "it" is, and whatever "it" takes. Taking to heart his grandfather's maxim that "a man without land is nothing", Kravitz schemes and dreams and hits on his idea: a lakeshore property in the Laurentian mountains. To become successful, he often betrays the people who have loved and helped him. He finally gains the land he wants, but loses love and friendship.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_App..._Kravitz_(book)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordecai_Richler

Richler's career took off with the publication of his fourth novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1959. The book featured a frequent Richler theme: Jewish life in the 1930s and 40s in the neighbourhood of Montreal east of Mount Royal Park on and about St. Urbain Street and the Main (Boul. St. Laurent). Richler wrote poignantly of the neighbourhood and its people, chronicling the hardships and disabilities they faced as a Jewish minority.

To a middle-class stranger, it is true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here a prized lot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there.[2]

The 1974 movie version 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.

We gave a class-mate in Law School the nick-name "Duddy", because he was always cooking-up some kind of money-making scheme.