North End Memories

After Roland Penner left the Communist Party, he was attorney general of Manitoba (the RCMP kept their file on him open). Then he became dean of law at the University of Manitoba. Along the way, he was a soldier, actor, concert promoter, bookstore manager and poverty lawyer. Now well into his eighties, Penner tells us about this life in an agreeable memoir, A Glowing Dream (the title comes from the labour movement song “The Commonwealth of Toil”).

The most interesting part of A Glowing Dream is Penner’s account of his parents, Jacob and Rose, and of growing up “red” in Winnipeg’s North End. Jacob Penner, a Mennonite, came to Winnipeg from Latvia in 1904. Rose, Jewish by birth, arrived from Russia about three years later. Penner tells us: “As a young candy factory worker in Odessa, my mother joined the 1905 Russian-wide general strike and came out with thousands of others to the Odessa docks to express solidarity with the mutinous sailors from the...