Fight for Life': Dave Kashtan's Memories of Depression-Era Communist Youth Work (Note AND DOCUMENT‪)‬

BEFORE HIS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY Dave Kashtan became a Communist and so, in some respects, his partial and posthumous memoir is unsurprising. Public demonstrations and state repression, organization and strikes, time spent in a Soviet school and in a Quebec prison, Party meetings and police informants--all these Kashtan remembers, but only as part of a larger story: about growing up in a diverse and working-class Montreal; about workers' sports and left-wing culture; about the friendships and fellowship of social activism; and about the ideals shared by many Canadian youth in the 1930s that superseded political, ethnic, and religious differences. Kashtan readily admits that his political commitments were exceptional, but his experience, in its totality, had much in common with many young Canadians radicalized in the years of Depression and war. What Kashtan has here brought together, disciplinary specialization will quickly tear asunder. Historians of Canadian immigrants, Jews, childhood, sports, labour, youth movements, the penal system, and the Canadian left will all find different passages to note, to interrogate, and to incorporate into their many narratives of Canadian life in the first half of the 20th century. This dissection, however, may obscure the larger point the memoir seeks to convey. Kashtan contends that though his experiences were various, they were not incongruous; that his cultural, political, social, religious, and athletic involvements and commitments were not compartmentalized, but were knit together in the broader life of the working class and the left.