Little ComradesLaurie 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. |
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 |