The Bund and Jewish life in the Pale

The Bund and Jewish life in the Pale

David Losz was born sometime after Svisloch's first snowfall in October 1909 to Moishe Losz and his wife Rose (née Lazarovitch).Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag; see the help page^[1] Lewis's political activism began in the shtetl he lived in from 1909 until 1921.^[2] Svisloch was located in the Pale of Settlement, the western-most region of the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus. After World War I it became a Polish border town, occasionally occupied by the Soviet Union during the Polish-Soviet War of the early 1920s. Jewish people were in the majority, numbering 3,500 out of Svisloch's 4,500 residents. Unlike many of the other shtetls in the Pale, it had an industrial economy based on tanning. Its semi-urban industrial population was receptive to social democratic politics and the labour movement, as embodied by the Jewish Labour Bund.^[2]

Moishe (or Moshe) Losz was Svisloch's Bund Chairman.^[3] The Bund was an outlawed socialist party that called for overthrowing the Tsar, equality for all, and national rights for the Jewish community; it functioned as both political party and labour movement.^[4] Lewis spent his formative years immersed in its culture and philosophy.^[4] The Bund's membership, although mostly ethnically Jewish, was secular humanist in practice.^[4]
Moishe and David were influenced by the Bund's political pragmatism, embodied in its maxim that "It is better to go along with the masses in a not totally correct direction than to separate oneself from them and remain a purist."^[5] David would bring this philosophy to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and New Democratic Party (NDP); in clashes between the parties' "ideological missionaries and the power pragmatists when internal debates raged about policy or action", he was in the latter camp.^[5]
When the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War were at their fiercest, in the summer of 1920, Poland invaded, and the Red Russian Bolshevik army counter-attacked. The Bolsheviks reached the Svisloch border in July 1920. Moishe Losz openly opposed the Bolsheviks and would later be jailed by them for his opposition.^[6] When the Polish army recaptured Svisloch on August 25, 1920, they executed five Jewish citizens as "spies".^[7] Unsafe under either regime and with his family's future prospects bleak, Moishe left for Canada in May 1921, to work in his brother-in-law's Montreal clothing factory. By August, he saved enough money to send for his family, including David and his siblings, Charlie and Doris.^[8]
David Lewis was a secular Jew, as was Moishe. However, his maternal grandfather, Usher Lazarovitch, was religious and, in the brief period between May and August 1921 before David emigrated, gave his grandson the only real religious training he would ever receive.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag; see the help page In practice, the Lewis family, including David, his wife Sophie, and their children Janet, Stephen, and Michael, were atheists.^[9]