bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1992) — Spring 1992 // Printemps 1992, pp. 42–44
Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Story by
Cameron Smith, Toronto: Summerhill Press
Limited, 1989, 606 pages, $28.95.
Through its long association with the CCF and the NDP, the Lewis family has had a profound and enduring influence on Canadian political life. In Unfinished Journey, Cameron Smith, a former managing editor of the Globe and Mail, recounts with obvious enthusiasm the engaging story of this family through three generations. Beginning with David’s father, Maishe Losz (who changed his name upon immigrating to Canada in 1921 to Lewis) Smith traces the family’s eventual transition from a 19th-century East European Jewish ghetto to Stephen’s term as Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Along the way, the author provides the reader with fascinating glimpses into the collective personality of one of Canada’s prominent families.
Born in the Russian town of Svisloch in 1888, during a period of intellectual and political ferment in that country, Maishe Lewis casts a long shadow over the subsequent course of the family’s history. Caught up in the Jewish enlightenment that swept the isolated world of the shtetl during the late 19th century, Maishe abandoned his rabbinical studies to embrace a secular Marxism. He eventually emerged as a prominent activist in the local Jewish Labour Bund, whose socialist and Yiddish ideals he diligently pursued until forced into hiding by Bolshevik authorities in 1920. The following year, he decided to flee to Canada with his wife, Rose, and their three children, David, Charlie and Doris.
With the family’s immigration to Canada, twelve-year-old David increasingly looms as the central figure around whom Smith constructs his narrative. An intense and precocious youth, who taught himself English by reading Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, David emerged quickly as a prominent figure in Montreal’s socialist circles during the 1920s before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1932. There, he left his mark on both the Oxford Labour Party and the Oxford Debating Union, becoming in 1934 the first Canadian president of this prestigious organization. Returning to Canada in 1934, he became the first National Secretary of the CCF. David’s early work with the party is briefly described before Smith begins a detailed examination of David’s role in the CCF’s battles to gain control of communist-led unions in the 1940s and 1950s, a necessary stage in the transformation of the CCF into the NDP and the maturation of labour politics in Canada.
Interspersed with the discussion of David’s political career are glimpses into the lives led by other members of the family, and into the troubled relations between David and his wife Sophie, and between David and his eldest son, Stephen. With his father away on party business much of the time, Stephen matured quickly on his own, a youth increasingly resentful of his father’s absences, and conscious of his inherited duty to promote Canadian socialism. As Stephen assumes the central role, Smith’s hitherto uncritical perspective gives way to one that borders on the sycophantic. In caring detail, the author traces the emergence of Stephen as a leading party organizer while still a university student.
30, he had become the leader of the Ontario NDP. Stephen’s struggle to defeat the NDP Waffle Group during the early 1970s, and his agonizing years spent as Leader of the Opposition in Ontario, constitute the focus of the work’s final chapters. Smith brings the Lewis story to a close with a glib and superficial examination of Stephen’s experiences as Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In a brief epilogue, he surveys the aspirations of the family’s next generation.
The varied lives of Maishe, David and Stephen nationally provide the work with its narrative structure. Smith’s two central themes, however, provide a more fundamental sense of unity and coherence. First, and perhaps most interesting, is its treatment that Smith accords the long-standing socialist problem of balancing the ideals of the movement against the pragmatic compromises necessary to achieve electoral success. Smith, in rooting the Lewis family in the tradition of the Jewish Labour Bund, usefully locates one source of Canadian socialism’s programmatic flexibility. “It is better to go along with the masse,” a traditional Bundist epigram notes, “in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist.” In focusing on this aspect, Smith effectively corrects the popular impression that David Lewis’ socialism and political pragmatism were inherited from the British Labour Party to which he was exposed at Oxford.
Smith’s treatment of his second central theme, the Lewis family’s virulent anticommunism, is more problematic. This attitude, he implies, was single-handedly brought by David Lewis into the CCF/NDP and led to the vehement character of the party’s struggles against the Communists in the late 1940s and 1950s, and against the Waffle Group in the 1970s. The CCF/NDP’s anti-communism, however, owes far less to the Lewis family than Smith implies. Under its founder, J.S. Woodsworth, the CCF vigorously opposed Canadian communists in Ontario during the 1930s, even to the point of destroying the party’s provincial organization in one early purge. In addition, this emphasis on a sustained anti-communist tradition distorts David Lewis’ own ambiguous attitude toward the Communist party during the 1930s, when, in the face of economic depression and European fascism, he flirted with the idea of a united CCF-communist front.
Unfortunately, these two challenging themes are frequently obscured by Smith’s undisciplined prose style and unchecked passion for the trivial. Where one word would do, he routinely uses a dozen or so, piling adjective upon adjective and metaphor upon metaphor. Much of the detail used in describing the historical context, whether in Russia or in Canada, is wholly unnecessary. Adding to the work’s excessive length also is Smith’s tendency to describe in gushing prose the elegant restaurants and lavish houses that, perhaps ironically, seem to play so large a role in the lives of the colleagues and acquaintances of Canada’s preeminent socialist family.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1992) — Spring 1992 // Printemps 1992, pp. 42–44. Read the rest of this issue →
