The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler

Each month he collected the cards and gave the boy who had earned the most of them the afternoon off from school. MacPherson tried giving out merit cards to his students for such virtues as exceptionally high examination results, good behavior, and neat writing. MacPherson's most celebrated former student - Jerry Dingleman, the Boy Wonder - liked to tell the one about the merit cards.

and, consequently, had studied history out of The World's Progress (Revised) with John Alexander MacPherson and every old graduate had an anecdote to tell about him.

At the time, however, most Jewish boys in Montreal who had been to high school had gone to F.F.H.S. would no longer be the Jewish high school. MacPherson hesitated on a scalp of glittering white ice, there were already three Gentiles in the school (that is to say, Anglo-Saxons for Ukrainians, Poles, and Yugoslavs, with funny names and customs of their own, did not count as true Gentiles), and ten years hence F.F.H.S. to buy their own duplexes in the tree-lined streets of Outremont.

For making their way in the world his first students had also graduated from the streets of cold-water flats that surrounded F.F.H.S. The sons of his first students would not attend Fletcher's Field High School, either. MacPherson's earliest students had, indeed, gone on to make their reputations in medicine, politics, and business, but there were no nostalgic gatherings at his home. Since he had first come to the school in 1927 - a tight-lipped young Scot with a red fussy face - many of Mr. He couldn't describe it or tell you how to get there any more than he could forget that Shelley's Ode to the West Wind was on page 89 of Highroads to Reading, the central idea being the poet's dedication to a free and natural spirit. MacPherson had felt nothing about the building. He had daydreamed about the potential heritage of his later years, former students - now lawyers or doctors or M.P.'s - gathering in his parlor on Sunday evenings to lament the lost hockey games of twenty years ago. When he had first seen that building some twenty years ago, he had shut his eyes and asked that his work as a schoolmaster be blessed with charity and achievement. Because it was early and he wanted to avoid the Masters' Room, he paused for an instant in the snow. Dominique Street to within sight of the school. What with his wife so ill these past few weeks and the prospect of three more days of teaching before the weekend break, Mr.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler