Red Diaper Baby: A Boyhood in the Age of McCarthyism

by James Laxer

Book by James Laxer

184 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

James Laxer was a Canadian political economist and professor at York University.

Reviews

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sitting at one of those Catalogue computer terminals at my local library, searching up any last resources I could take home that could help me tie up some loose ends for a project I was working on. The project was an audio piece on the Missinihe (the Credit River) that I was completing for a podcasting workshop. There was one last angle I was hoping to include, but never got around to, which was Camp Naivelt the lefty Jewish summer camp in Brampton that sat along the Missinihe, north of Mississauga. Entering ‘Camp Naivelt’ into the Library Catalogue system turned up two or three results, and this book by James Laxer was one of them. One of the chapters of this book is about Camp Naivelt (it turned out to be my favourite in the book). However, the library’s copy of Red Diaper Baby was not at this particular location that day. So I just noted down the book’s name for future interest.

The following summer, after the podcasting workshop was over, I took a visit to the former location of Montgomery’s Tavern at Yonge and Eglington. The place is now called Montgomery Square and at the time of my visit, it was being turned into a luxury rental apartment. However, there’s a small public space adjoining Yonge Street with various abstract art sculptures in tribute to William Lyon Mackenzie’s 1837 uprising, and plastered on the various blocks around the site are fragments of speeches from Mackenzie about freedom and liberation. Mackenzie is even mentioned glowingly by the Communist Party of Canada as a shining example of the insurrectionary spirit that has existed in Canadian history, and Stanley Ryerson’s history of the 1837 uprising is part of the party’s recommended reading list. Anyway, after visiting the spot, I ducked into a nearby BMV bookstore to see if I could satiate my terrible addiction to buying books, one of my worst character flaws as a human being. To my delight, Laxer’s Red Diaper Baby was in stock, in very good condition for $7. Granted $7 is a fairly high price for the average book purchases that I make from BMV. I usually try to keep to things below $5, and $3 is my real target – but I was so fascinated by this Laxer book that I decided to add it to a small pile I had amounted before checking out.

I actually read this book over a number of months, but enjoyed the entire thing. Laxer’s humour is infectious, and the book reads like a bunch of stories told over a coffee table while lounging on sofas in somebody’s living room. It’s tremendously fun stuff. One example I wanted to provide of Laxer’s humour is from Chapter Five when he describes the Student Christian Movement, which his mom was involved in. Laxer writes:

“You might imagine that young Christians in the 1930s would be well inoculated against atheistic Bolshevism, but there you would be wrong. The Student Christian Movement (SCM), active on many university campuses, was a hotbed of radicalism. For SCMers, the holy grail was pursued by demystifying Christianity to discover the real man who had been Jesus and to analyze the revolutionary social movement he led. Members spent time studying the scriptural records that helped piece together the story of Christ and his early followers. The irony of the SCM is that it produced as many atheistic Communists as it did Christians.”

That type of humour is laced throughout the entire book. It’s very fun to read. I myself encountered SCM online, and while they were never active at the campuses I was on (at the time I was on them), the Ecumenical Campus Ministry (ECM) in Guelph which I was a part of, was run by someone who had done stuff with SCM, and occasionally ECM would go on retreats with SCM groups that were active at other schools. ECM at Guelph also tried to keep good relations with the campus OPIRG, which was one of the main leftist organizing hubs on campus. The ECM Chaplain who was running things when I first arrived at Guelph also had a good-speaking relation with Guelph’s Communist Party candidate. (The Canadian Communist Party was actually started in Guelph, illegally at the time). Granted ECM is fairly liberal, it is not in the business of turning people into communists. SCM today certainly does have communists in it, but their sanctioned reading lists are closer to Tolstoyan anarchism and non-violence. But that old ‘united front’ strategy still holds in left-leaning religious circles, which is why I think I’m so sympathetic to left unity over sectarianism.

Laxer was a member of the radical Waffle faction within the NDP that got sidelined by party leaders like Stephen Lewis. The Waffle faction was associated with the New Left, and fostering nationalization efforts to gain democratic control over key segments of the economy. They are often compared to today’s NDP Socialist Caucus (a sort of entryist initiative still being carried out by various Trotskyists in Canada). Laxer doesn’t really go into this history though. He focuses on telling the story of his childhood, growing up in a communist family at the time it was illegal to be a member of the Communist Party of Canada.

There are fascinating details of his father born to an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and butcher in Montreal, and Laxer is so good at drawing connections between communism and religious faith – sometimes in very humorous ways. He described his communist childhood like this: “They [his parents] also gave me the idea that we were more important than other families, more truly knowing. It was as though we were early Christians surrounded on all sides by pagans.”

I loved reading about the tense dynamics between his father’s side of the family, who were largely Jewish (and many of the communists his family rubbed shoulders with were also Jewish) and the WASP-y maternal side of his family that turned their nose at everything. There are also fascinating glimpses into Canada’s past. I’m excited to take a walk around some of the places he talks about in Toronto, because I love doing my own walking tours through various parts of the GTA.

The book’s afterword is very critical of his father’s Stalinist years and talks about his family eventually leaving the party after Khrushchev’s secret speech and the tanks that rolled into Hungary. He talks about his father moving his energies into academic pursuits afterwards, but eventually re-entering politics via the New Left. This is the part of leftist history that is a bit vague for me, and there’s a lot of debate over it now. Either way, it’s very interesting to read such an intimate history of Canadian communism from the perspective of childhood. I enjoyed this book a lot.

[Denton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book would simply be a charming growing-up memoir, if not for the remarkable situation of the author's father - a prominent Communist in Canada. The book doesn't seek to comment too specifically about politics, but if there's a lesson here, it's that there's no political philosophy which is more important than a loving family - a family which is eventually shocked by the true nature of Joseph Stalin.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

A standard memoir about growing up with a family quirk

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here.