Chicken Soup and the Jewish Novel

...When his grandfather finds out about this...

...Duddy loses him, too...

...Granit's self-indulgent and self-conscious mannerisms make it embarrassingly clear that he honestly thinks all these people are a bunch of lovably fabulous "characters," it all becomes boring and irritating...

...If this doesn't seem to be saying anything very special about Richler's book except that it is extremely skillful and has a rambunctious vitality not often encountered in novels about any world these days, one has only to read it side by side with The Time of the Peaches, Arthur Granit's account of his childhood in Brooklyn's Brownsville...

...searching, powerfully insistent look one is given at Duddy Kravitz and his family, a novel in which nothing is simplified, everything is ventured, and a memorable fictional complexity is gained...

...Refusing to believe in cant, but knowing why people like Duddy and his father have to rely on it, Richler can understand both the wonder and cruelty of family feeling without underestimating either...

...Where this novel leaps way out beyond Schulberg's class is in the unflinching comprehension Richler brings to his portrayal—at once sardonic, tender, harsh and sad—of a family, and of all the enigmatic and inexorable cross-strains of duty and love and hatred and resentment that course through members of a family in their feelings and acts toward one another...

...By the end of Duddy's apprenticeship, one knows his frenzied, demoniacally ambitious, pathetic, generous, awkward, brash, vulgarly overweening, devoted and at the same time traitorous soul as no sequel could possibly improve upon...

...You've got to take them to your heart no matter what...

...With the instinct blood endows, the one human being Duddy really cared to impress is the one who hurts him the most—perhaps because only this person can know where to aim and how to hit most woundingly...

...Some of this franticness also makes for some of Richler's more wildly inspired and hilarious comic writing—notably his account of Duddy's venture into private moviemaking—of bar-mitzvahs and weddings—with an alcoholic English documentary-film man who turns out the arty-cinema experiment in claptrap surrealism to finish off that genre once and for all...

...In some ways, Duddy is a blood-brother to Budd Schulberg's Sammy Glick—but with some important differences...

...has taken on a kind of slick-magazine haze of sentimental "niceness...

...I'm going to be somebody...

...Everybody is ferociously cute and folksy, like Method actors who've been forced to take jobs on Second Avenue stages, and everybody is called Blickstein the Butcher and Podolsky the Landlord and Grossman the Grocer, and people are poor (but so plucky underneath) and wives scream at their husbands and are always making chicken soup or tea and the kids are real little rascals who are all going to grow up and go to City College and become professors...

...They're the family, remember...

...Perhaps because his mother died when he was a kid, Duddy never can escape what his father and Uncle Benjy and his beloved grandfather keep telling him—"You've got to love them, Duddel...

...But the recklessness of Duddy's furious thrust to buv up his land before someone else can get it also leads to the permanent crippling of an innocent and pathetic friend, and to the loss of his girl Yvette, and to his committing the final unforgivable swindling sin against the one person who trusts him most and has least reason to trust him at all...

...But Richler, like Saul Bellow before him, is more concerned with being a novelist than a Nice Jewish Boy, and he has a great deal to feel and say and evoke about his at once appalling and appealing roughneck Duddy Kravitz, who certainly is Jewish but, just as certainly, isn't nice and doesn't give a damn who knows it...

...The summer he gets out of high school, Duddy lands a job as the fastest waiter at Rubin's Hotel in Ste...

...Though many of these writers are blessed with very acute ears and definite memories...

...but the brevity of the time span doesn't matter...

...But to assume that Richler is thus trying to show what a sweet boy Duddy really is would be to miss his point—he is interested in a reality about people more difficult to confront and to write about than easy answers can ever cope with...

...If it was his grandfather who instilled in Duddy his fierce vision of how to "be somebody," it is his grandfather, finally, who turns his grandson's crass victory into a rejection that robs it of all triumph...

...What Duddy does for his family is part of what he helplessly, entirely is, almost despite himself, and not because a sudden "niceness" has bloomed in a formerly black heart...

...And when Mr...

...When his rich Uncle Benjy, who always treated him like dirt and lavished his favors on Lennie, is dying, Duddy is the one who has to bring his giddy and foolish aunt back to her husband's deathbed...

...When he was seven, his stern and inflexibly proud grandfather Simcha, who persisted in worrying the earth in the yard back of his shoemaker's shop though the vegetables always came up scrawny and stunted, had said to his grandson, "A man without land is nobody...

...what does is the unsparing...

...Given the temperament he reveals in this book, he makes his first serious, his greatest mistake in trying to recapture his Brownsville past through quasi-poetic chanting and arch, thin lyric sing-song, and his second through very feeble imitation of Sho-lem Aleichem...

...It is a sharp reminder that writing by and about the sons and daughters of Russian immigrant Jews, in the last 10 years or so...

...No matter how cold-bloodedly Duddy cheats and hurts and double-crosses whomever he can, Duddy is the one who has to take time out from his frenzied conniving, and get his medical-student brother Lennie out of really serious trouble...

...Yet if Richler had been aiming for just another portrait of a monumentally self-seeking scoundrel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz would be a lesser book than it is, and only another variation on the theme of Sammy Glick...

...Duddy, like Sammy, is certainly one possessed, and his hunger to succeed is nothing if not rampageous, but Duddy has a vision that goes beyond himself...

...What's more basically at fault with all this lifeless hurly-burly Granit pretends is the essence of his Brownsville childhood is that memory, alas, no matter how accurate, will never he a substitute for thinking and feeling and originality, and the fact that the memories are Jewish doesn't mean they aren't also cliche...

...Memories, as Granit deals with them, turn out to have as little substance as all-day lollipops...

...It is an enormously impressive achievement...

...Arthur Granit's novel belongs to a class of writing about Jewish life in America which the late Isaac Rosen-feld, in an exasperated review of S. N. Behrman's The Worcester Account, called "delicious"—a word he used not to praise such writing but to bury it...

...What made Sammy run— at least, Schulberg was content to leave it at that—was a meanhearted, ruthless, brutal greed for power, for the fleshpots that go with power, and the women who go with the fleshpots...

...3.95...

...That same summer, like a bush-league Columbus, Duddy stumbles on the land he wants, on an idyllic lake in the Laurentians...

...they have settled for creating a phony "sweet" folklore for its own sake— as though the fact that a writer had grown up in this immigrant world could make up for the fact that at bottom he had absolutely nothing to say about it...

...Fifteen years old when we first encounter him, a skinny, narrow-chested punk bullying his teachers into early straitj ackets at Fletcher's Field High School, Duddy is not quite 20 when the author lets him go...

...In high school, he starts marauding his feverish way toward that vision, first with a black market in American comic books, scarce in Canada during the war, then by making some fast bucks, just this side of being caught by the police, with a brisk trade in pornographic Dick Tracys and Gasoline Alleys...

...Reviewed by Pearl Kazin Contributor, "New Yorker" and Commentary" MORDECAI RICHLER'S The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a tough, raucously funny, boldly unsentimental novel about still another Jewish immigrant world—that of Montreal, rather than the more literally familiar one of Chicago, Brooklyn or the Bronx...

...The delight and futility and bitterness and love that members of a family can inflict on each other give an almost intolerable dramatic force to the end of the novel...

...Duddel...

...Remember that...

...The speech and the frantic tug of war between generations, as well as the potato latkes, appear to turn out pretty much the same on either side of the border...

...Land was the spur that drove Duddy after that —to own land was the measure of "being somebody," and over and again Duddy keeps saying to himself...

...and has relied too much on a neat and tidy pastiche of "colorful" detail and lovable old picturesque types talking a tiresomely cute Yiddish-English...

...From this point, only one thing really matters—somehow, anyhow, getting the money to buy up that dream...

...Unfortunately, not one person in The Time of the Peaches ever shows even a flicker of convincing life...

...The Time of the Peaches, unfortunately, is full of cant posing as poetry...

...254 pp...

...He hurls himself, sparing neither himself nor any scruples that might be lurking inside him, into a dozen money-making schemes at once...

...The result is neither poetry nor lyricism nor Sholem Aleichem—nor, in fact, Brownsville...

...Agathe, Montreal's borscht belt, and his dreams of glory start taking more practical shape...