A Good Voice in Canada

With the death of David Lewis in May 1981, democratic socialism in Canada lost one of its most dynamic leaders. In this volume of political memoirs Lewis records the intelligence and decency of a Russian-Jewish family that emigrated to Montreal in 1921. Young David, who at the age of 12 had to sit in class with six-year-olds because he did not speak English, was at Oxford 11 years later as a Rhodes scholar.

In Svisloch, a shtetl that became part of Poland at the end of World War...