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Duddy Kravitz is a motherless, prankish teenager in a high school in which most of the students come from Montreal’s St. Urbain Jewish ghetto. Duddy is the leader of a school gang, the Warriors, who bully other children, especially the students at the neighboring yeshiva, a Jewish religious school. He also is the instigator of a campaign of telephone harassment of the school’s goy, or non-Jewish, instructors, especially John MacPherson, an ineffectual teacher and an alcoholic who despises the boy. Duddy causes the death of Macpherson’s disabled wife when she leaves her bed to answer one of Duddy’s harassing phone calls. Duddy is perpetually haunted by guilt and remorse.

In the late winter of 1940, Canadians are emerging from the effects of the Great Depression and now face the outbreak of World War II. One young woman, Florentine Lacasse, helps support her family by working as a waitress at the lunch counter in a five-and-dime store in Montreal’s St. Henri slum district. The lunch area’s flashy decor, which appeals to Florentine’s shallow taste, stirs her ambition to escape the dreary poverty that entraps her family.