Overview

Little Comrades tells the story of a girl growing up in a dysfunctional left-wing family in the Canadian West during the Depression, then moving, alone with her mother, to New York City during America's fervently anti-Communist postwar years. With wit and honesty, Laurie Lewis describes an unusual childhood and an adventurous adolescence.

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The stories in this collection are affecting and beautifully crafted. One of them was a runner-up in the CBC Literary Contest. My personal favourite is 'My Father and Lillian Gish,' a disturbing portrait of an abusive, troubled man. In describing the family he came from, she writes, 'He was the smartest of the lot too, which he interpreted darkly, wondering where his sharp mind had come from. He suspected his mother of everything but that. Adultery, yes, but not intelligence, never that.'Little Comrades may be Laurie's first book, but it won't be her last. -- Merilyn Simonds Kingston Whig-Standard This book is very personal and could not havebeen easy to write. The story is told with a deftness of language that reveals the pathos and joys of an unusual life. As Laurie charts the family's moves from place to place (too many moves to track) and recounts later experiences -- she is older, but still a child -- the narrative becomes a series of cautionary tales each carrying consequences and in this case a way forward. 'I knew what a hole would do to a person, how you would never get out, but spend your whole life wetly in the echoing dark ... I discovered a power in knowing something secret ... and in that space of not telling, I found a person that might be me.'Little Comrades truly is worth reading for itspoetic language and its story. These are the truthful, intimate memoirs of an incredible growing-up during the Depression Era, World War II, and McCarthyism.A unique view! -- Carolyn Owen Holden Vista: July 2011 'This is what old age can look like if you do Tai Chi (her secret ), eat well and laugh, even if you don't have a lot of money. [Laurie Lewis] owns her house but lives frugally. 'My car is 16 years old ... it doesn't really cost much if you don't buy stuff. At night, she loves to put music on and dance by herself. Living alone is not wonderful but it's doable, and more doable now with Facebook.' -- Sarah Hampson The Globe and Mail Lewis was indeed different, and while it caused her no end of strife it makes a great story. Between the beatings, poverty, Party meetings and politics, Lewis' childhood is like few you've heard about before. -- Mike Landry Telegraph-Journal If you've ever despaired that your life is passing you by, that you'll likely never accomplish the things you thought you might, meet Laurie Lewis.She just published her first book at 80. I didn't feel the need to nor did I have the time, confides the slim, pretty author, whose memoir, Little Comrades, was released this summer. I was always scrambling for money. As a writer, you can scramble for money all your life if you're alone, but when you have children, you can't. She also didn't feel free enough in spirit. I was really quite frozen, she continues, leaning over a table in a downtown Toronto cafe. Girlish is how one might describe her, the easy manner and quickness of laughter, the bright sparkle of her blue eyes. It's astonishing, amazing, she says with a giggle about her new status as a writer.In the acknowledgments of her book, she writes that the day her publisher, Tim Inkster of The Porcupine's Quill, said yes to her manuscript was the beginning of a new life for me .Does she feel liberated by the fact that so many people from her past are dead? Oh, yes, that helps, she says with a broad smile. -- Sarah Hampson The Globe and Mail Music is also everywhere in New York on these exhilarating postwar days and nights, arias from operas and jazz pouring from open windows as Laurie begins to distance herself from her close bond with her mother. Which makes the collision of the personal and the political that occurs at the end of this remarkable memoir so grand and electric. -- Elisabeth Harvor The Globe and Mail

The stories in this collection are affecting and beautifully crafted. One of them was a runner-up in the CBC Literary Contest. My personal favourite is 'My Father and Lillian Gish,' a disturbing portrait of an abusive, troubled man. In describing the family he came from, she writes, 'He was the smartest of the lot too, which he interpreted darkly, wondering where his sharp mind had come from. He suspected his mother of everything but that. Adultery, yes, but not intelligence, never that.'Little Comrades may be Laurie's first book, but it won't be her last. -- Merilyn Simonds Kingston Whig-Standard This book is very personal and could not havebeen easy to write. The story is told with a deftness of language that reveals the pathos and joys of an unusual life. As Laurie charts the family's moves from place to place (too many moves to track) and recounts later experiences -- she is older, but still a child -- the narrative becomes a series of cautionary tales each carrying consequences and in this case a way forward. 'I knew what a hole would do to a person, how you would never get out, but spend your whole life wetly in the echoing dark ... I discovered a power in knowing something secret ... and in that space of not telling, I found a person that might be me.'Little Comrades truly is worth reading for itspoetic language and its story. These are the truthful, intimate memoirs of an incredible growing-up during the Depression Era, World War II, and McCarthyism.A unique view! -- Carolyn Owen Holden Vista: July 2011 'This is what old age can look like if you do Tai Chi (her secret ), eat well and laugh, even if you don't have a lot of money. [Laurie Lewis] owns her house but lives frugally. 'My car is 16 years old ... it doesn't really cost much if you don't buy stuff. At night, she loves to put music on and dance by herself. Living alone is not wonderful but it's doable, and more doable now with Facebook.' -- Sarah Hampson The Globe and Mail Lewis was indeed different, and while it caused her no end of strife it makes a great story. Between the beatings, poverty, Party meetings and politics, Lewis' childhood is like few you've heard about before. -- Mike Landry Telegraph-Journal If you've ever despaired that your life is passing you by, that you'll likely never accomplish the things you thought you might, meet Laurie Lewis.She just published her first book at 80. I didn't feel the need to nor did I have the time, confides the slim, pretty author, whose memoir, Little Comrades, was released this summer. I was always scrambling for money. As a writer, you can scramble for money all your life if you're alone, but when you have children, you can't. She also didn't feel free enough in spirit. I was really quite frozen, she continues, leaning over a table in a downtown Toronto cafe. Girlish is how one might describe her, the easy manner and quickness of laughter, the bright sparkle of her blue eyes. It's astonishing, amazing, she says with a giggle about her new status as a writer.In the acknowledgments of her book, she writes that the day her publisher, Tim Inkster of The Porcupine's Quill, said yes to her manuscript was the beginning of a new life for me .Does she feel liberated by the fact that so many people from her past are dead? Oh, yes, that helps, she says with a broad smile. -- Sarah Hampson The Globe and Mail Music is also everywhere in New York on these exhilarating postwar days and nights, arias from operas and jazz pouring from open windows as Laurie begins to distance herself from her close bond with her mother. Which makes the collision of the personal and the political that occurs at the end of this remarkable memoir so grand and electric. -- Elisabeth Harvor The Globe and Mail 'Gertrude Stein said, Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood . In Little Comrades, the author doesn't fancy she had an unhappy childhood; she did. From birth, Laurie Lewis and her older brother were thrust into Communism because their father was a high-ranking official. She was fearful and confused amidst the burgeoning movement in Canada during the 1930s, and lived in a chaotic household fueled by her father's alcoholism. Unknowingly participating in illegal party activities, and subjected to a nomadic lifestyle, Lewis survived the sometimes abusive childhood created by her parents, Ellen and Lawrence.'Her memoir is divided into two parts: the first focuses on her life in Canada, and the second chronicles her move, at sixteen, with her mother to New York City. In the first part, Lewis' early memories are dispensed in fragmented paragraphs that establish a disjointed narrative; they're frank, but nonlinear, which detracts from the emotional impact of her story. Once she and her mother arrive in New York, the narrative becomes much more concise. Ultimately, their relationship takes priority over the theme of Communism in the book, engaging the reader on a deeper level.'Although the time line is confusing, Lewis ably presents the hypocritical aspects of having Communist parents. For instance, the kids address their parents on a first-name basis and regularly converse with adult comrades. But they also have to obey their parents' decisions without question, only to suffer punishment for any perceived failure. Expected to be an adult and a child simultaneously shapes Lewis into a young adult before she is ready and sets up a bizarre sexual relationship with the male comrades she meets, including her mother's lover.'The fact that the family moves constantly initially prohibits Lewis from making many female friends, so her mother becomes her confidante. Their life together in New York is fascinating, filled with politics and brushes with celebrity. This is also where Lewis finally grows into herself. She is allowed to take advantage of her own intelligence and develop friendships outside of her mother's circle.'Little Comrades is a unique contribution to the crowded field of memoirs and offers a truly interesting version of an unusual childhood. It details the universally complicated ties between mother and daughter and the power of resilience amid the less well-known daily life of a Communist family in the West.' -- Monica Carter ForeWord Reviews 'I'm glad [Lewis] captured some of her life stories in this memoir, which adds to the growing number of stories revealing women's lives in Canada. If only I could have read it when I was studying history in university ... reading about real women's experience was sadly lacking in my studies... An original read.' -- The Indextrious Reader 'Lewis's smart, concise and humourous writing makes this account of her unique upbringing a pleasure to read.' -- Patty Osborne Geist

Author Information

Laurie Lewis is a Fellow of the Graphic Designers of Canada and is Editor Emeritus of Vista, the publication of the Seniors Association in Kingston, Ontario, and director of Artful Codger Press. Laurie began her career in publishing with Doubleday in New York in 1961. She returned to Canada in 1963 to join University of Toronto Press, where she worked in production and design of UTP publications, becoming Head of Design at U of T Press. During her thirty years in publishing, she also taught book design in Guyana, the Philippines and at Ryerson University in Toronto. She moved to Kingston, Ontario in 1991, where she founded Artful Codger Press. Her written work has been featured on CBC and has been published around and about, including Contemporary Verse 2, Queen's Feminist Review and Kingston Poets' Gallery.A chapter from an early draft of her first book Little Comrades was shortlisted for the 2007 CBC Literary Awards in Creative Non-Fiction.

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