Growing up communist
Professor recounts life as the son of leftist parents
Quentin Mills-Fenn

James Laxer is an academic now, but it seems as though he’s always enjoyed heavy reading.

Laxer has a photo of himself as a two year old in the 1940s. He’s sitting on his mother’s lap in his little overalls, a curious expression on his face. He’s holding a big book called Poland. If you look closely at the cover of the book, you can see a map of Europe with that troubled nation surrounded by a swastika and a hammer and sickle. Laxer admits that was rather unusual reading for a Canadian toddler but, then again, his parents were card-carrying communists.

Looking back, there was much more to the 1950s than the idealized nostalgia of Happy Days and mom at home baking apple pie. The USSR, an ally during WW II, was now the enemy. The Cold War was heating up. Joseph McCarthy was hunting Reds, real or otherwise, and destroying careers.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the United States for espionage.

And Josef Stalin had murdered millions.

In Canada, the Communist Party was outlawed. Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis railed against “the vile cocaine of communism.”

Meanwhile, Laxer’s parents, the son of a rabbi and the daughter of a Methodist minister, were struggling to overthrow capitalism. His father was a party official while his mother stood on street corners handing out leaflets. Political meetings were a common occurrence at the family home. Such an environment made for a bewildering childhood, Laxer says in his memoir, Red Diaper Baby (Douglas & McIntyre).

Both of Laxer’s parents came to communism because they recognized the unfairness in the world and thought they had found a better way. They were true believers.

Laxer writes that he and his family divided their lives into discrete compartments, all of which came with a constant need for secrecy — a situation aggravated by his mixed heritage. A simple question such as “What does your dad do for a living?” often called for subterfuge.

Life wasn’t all politics, however. Laxer, now a professor of political science at York University, writes about vacations at Muskoka with his mother’s WASP family as well as other summers at Camp Naivelt, a hotspot for Toronto’s large left-wing Jewish community. Laxer writes movingly about one particular morning when his father came into his bedroom as young Jim was just waking up and told him that Stalin was dead. Stalin had been the Communist Party’s guiding light for two decades, and Laxer’s father was profoundly affected.

The author writes: “Each time I unearthed more of the truth about Stalin, the conversation with my father that morning in March 1953 came back to me. How could my father have revered such a monster? And what really afflicts me is that I can still call up my own sadness at Stalin’s death.”

Red Diaper Baby is a slim book but it addresses the question of how well-meaning people can be so wrong. It’s also a fond tribute to two people who must have passed some of their values and their concern for the betterment of the world on to their son.