Free The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler Page A

man without land is nobody.”
    Duddy wanted to be a somebody. Another Boy Wonder maybe. Not a loser, certainly.
    COMMENCEMENT
    They arrived by fives and eights and threes. A surge of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and grandparents to a hot sticky gym. They came with smiles and jokes and embarrassment, the men pulling at their ties and the women choked by their girdles, walking through the halls of learning to see their sons and daughters, the class of ’48, graduate classes one, two, and three from Fletcher’s Field High School to – as Leonard Bush, M.A. (McGill), said each year – the wide world. Here, Max Kravitz said, was the door to the sub-basement where the Boy Wonder had organized a lunchtime crap game. There with the red face goes Feeney, an enemy of our people. Here comes Mendelsohn’s boy, the scholarship winner. There was the exact spot, Benny Rabinovitch pointed out, where Mickey “The Mauler” Shub had KO ’d the sometime principal of F.F.H.S., Dr. Ross McEwen.
    The men mopped their necks with handkerchiefs and the women, wearing too much makeup, fanned themselves with programs that announced GREETING, GRADS ,
from
MORRIE THE TAILOR , and scholarships for a hundred dollars donated by Steinberg’s Groceterias and for fifty dollars in everlasting memory of Mrs. Ida Berg.
    “It goes off the income tax,” Sam Fine said.
    They arrived too soon and thirsty and proud and immediately shamed their sons and daughters by waving and whistling at them.
    “Yoo-hoo.”
    High over the platform loomed the mighty black and green crest with the inscription WORK AND HONOR .
    “Well, well, if it isn’t Tannenbaum in the flesh. You got a son here?”
    “Why not?”
    “Is yours going to a night club afterwards? I gave mine a ten-spot. Aw, what the hell I said to myself. Next week he goes to work in the store.”
    “Mine’s going to McGill to be a lawyer.”
    “The way you operate, Tannenbaum, you’ll need him.” Fanning themselves, they watched as the staff filed in silent and severe and took their places on the platform at last.
    “White men,” Panofsky said sourly.
    “What’sa matter with women teachers that they never have no watermelons?”
    “Sam, please, people can hear you.”
    One chair was empty. Mr. MacPherson wasn’t there.
    “That’s Coldwell, the torturer. Yeah, that one.”
    Mr. Feeney sat next to Mr. Cox. Mr. Gyle, who had failed engineering and decided to become a teacher, sat next to Miss Bradshaw. Mr. Jackson adjusted his hearing aid.
    “Becky!
Be-cky!
No, over
here
. Why does she turn away, Louis?”
    The choir of two hundred boys and girls came marching in according to height, the boys in white shirts and black bow ties and the girls in school tunics.
    “Listen, with the speeches and everything we’ll be lucky to get out of here by two o’clock.”
    “Sh.”
    Ten men went to mow
,
Went to mow a meadow
,
Ten men, nine men, eight men
,
Seven men, six men, five men
,
Four men, three men, two men
,
One man and his dog

Went to mow a meadow
.
    “A Yiddish song they couldn’t sing? It would be against the law?”
    Martin Abromovitch, his Adam’s apple making his black bow tie bobble, strode across the platform to play the
Polonaise
by Chopin.
    “I know that. It was in
A Song to Remember.”
    “Sh.”
    “Oh sh-sh yourself. Pain in the neck!”
    There was some mistaken applause at the end of the first section, more at the end of the second and still more, these decidedly resentful, at the end of the third. When Martin Abromovitch finally finished playing, the wary ones among the audience waited until he stood up and bowed twice before joining in the ovation with warm charitable looks for the uncultured early applauders among their neighbors.
    “So, Abromovitch, are you proud of your grandson?”
    “He played without a hat.”
    “Paw. For Christ’s sake!”
    “It would hurt him to wear a hat?”
    “Have you ever heard of the wheel, Paw? Some damn fool invented this