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.

Laurie Lewis’s memoir begins with her child’s-eye understanding of a family life based on love, fear and lies. Her frightening father, who believes his children need to be beaten for their own good, is an important man in the Alberta Communist Party; her mother, a committed Party member, tries to protect her children from his alcoholic rages and maintains the pretence that everything is all right. Laurie watches her brother’s anger, her mother’s unhappiness, and learns to keep secrets–her own and other people’s. For a time she and her brother are sent to live with strangers. They are not told where their parents are, because her father is in hiding from the RCMP (who are looking to arrest Communists). When she is fifteen a new life begins as her mother leaves her marriage and takes Laurie with her to New York City.

Laurie now discovers the delights and difficulties of rundown but cheap apartments in Little Italy and Greenwich Village. Her mother finds work as an editor and writer, meeting many left-wing artists, and there are eye-opening experiences with men — for both mother and daughter. Then at sixteen Laurie spends a summer waiting on tables at a socialist resort, where she finds a serious older boyfriend who is much too bourgeois, according to her politically radical mother.

With wit, pathos and blistering emotional honesty Little Comrades tells the story of a girl growing up in two countries in a bewildering time of transition and new freedom for women.

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What they say about Little Comrades…

My mother’s unique perspective on being the daughter of communists gives a vision of growing up in a world that she believed was flawed, but that her parents, brave souls that they were, were going to fix. But because it is through the eyes of a child, the reader can see the fallacy in the arguments, the hope, the lies and the pain. But children don’t understand the broader context of their experience, so you build the story through the slant of their experiences. It was also a time of family violence and early women’s liberation.

—Amanda Lewis

‘Deftly rendered and simply told, with thoughtful recollection and frequent sparks of humour, this personal narrative is grounded in and propelled throughout by a clear and fierce intelligence.’

—Diane Schoemperlen

Little Comrades is an important personal and political memoir and at the same time a touching, unusual mother-and-daughter story. While the New York chapters are especially engaging, the whole book exudes a real freshness and relevance, reminding us that the past was always modern in its own way.

—Steven Heighton

Table of contents

Part One: No Place Like Home

Part Two: Running Away for Good