Little Comrades

Front Cover
The Porcupine's Quill, 2011 - Biography & Autobiography - 216 pages

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.

 

Selected pages

Contents

A Way with Secrets
11
Pink
14
Learning to Lie
17
Finders Keepers
22
Losers Weepers
26
Becoming a Secretary
31
My Father and Lillian Gish
38
Jello
41
Waiting for John Garfield
113
Herald Square
118
Little ItalyGreenwich Village
126
East Eighteenth Street
132
Gand Street at Night
140
Catherine StreetKnickerbocker Village
144
Sheridan SquareThe Williamsburg Bridge
153
Central Park WestSeventysecond Street
156

Going Underground
43
The Little Comrades
45
Sneakers
50
Running Away
51
Not Really Confessing
57
Lumpen
59
Payday
61
The Moral Quandary
63
Getting through the War on the Home Front
66
Milk
76
Andy Runs Away to Sea
79
Sweet Tooth and Sour Grapes
81
You Belong to My Heart
90
None But the Lonely Heart
99
PART TWO RUNNING AWAY FOR GOOD
111
East Eleventh Street
159
Fifth AvenueSeventyfifth Street
161
Up the Hudson River
164
Mulberry Street
171
West 103rd Street
176
You Cant Go Home Again
185
East Ninth Street
190
Grand Central Again
197
Hunter College and the Toystore
200
Closer and Closer and Farther Away
206
Midtown Manhattan
208
Acknowledgments
213
About Laurie Lewis
215
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

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.