Review of A Glowing Dream: A Memoir

by Roland Penner (J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing, 2008)

Literary Review of Canada, Vol. 16, No. 3

April, 2008

North End Memories: One of Winnipeg’s great citizens recalls the social energy of earlier times.

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 battleship Potemkin.”  Jacob and Rose met in 1908 at a meeting of the anarchist branch of the Winnipeg Radical Club, a meeting addressed by Emma Goldman, described by J. Edgar Hoover as the “most dangerous woman in the world.” Roland’s parents married in 1912. Their son calls it “a form of marriage” – there was no religious component to the ceremony, the Penners being committed atheists.

In 1921, Jacob Penner was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Canada. He ran repeatedly for alderman and mayor in Winnipeg civic elections, and in provincial general elections, and finally was elected alderman in 1933. His son writes that Jacob had “an inner calm that came from his steadfast conviction in the justice of the struggle for that better world that, he was sure, communism would bring.”  Jacob Penner was interned from June 1940 until July 1942 under the Defence of Canada Regulations. Sixty years later, the City of Winnipeg named a park after this “dangerous person.”

Winnipeg’s remarkable North End, where the “Red Penners” lived much of the time (they moved a lot, mostly for financial reasons), was the crucible for all this. What a place! Roland Penner describes it as “the famous immigrant-populated North End of the city, where Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Jews, Latvians, Russians and, even ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ as we called them… settled and went about the business of trying to build a new and better life for themselves and, particularly, their children.” The North End was suffused with radical politics, and artistic and intellectual striving.

“Central to an understanding of the otherwise almost indefinable mystique of Winnipeg’s North End in pre-war days,” writes Penner, “was its principal high school, St. John’s Technical High School… it was the most important marketplace of ideas…”  This was true, I think, even in the 1950s, when I was a student at Kelvin Technical High School, the architectural twin and bitter rival, particularly in football, of St. John’s. Kelvin was across the river (the Red River) and – as Penner would have it – also on the other side of the tracks. Kelvin students, he says, were “richnicks.” (Who knew?)  One can only be nostalgic for a time when the high school was a neighbourhood’s most important marketplace for ideas.

What made the North End such a special place? Perhaps it was the way all those working-class immigrants defined the “better life” that they were energetically pursuing. For them, a better life wasn’t just greater prosperity, although, of course, that was part of it. You had a better life when the society you lived in exemplified justice and fairness. The North End’s immigrants from Europe brought with them intellectual, political and social ferment, including the desire to fight against dictatorship and privilege. Writes Penner: “A seminal event in the political development of my father (and, subsequently, in my political development) was the Russian Revolution of 1917…” 

Shortly after his father was released from internment in 1942, Roland Penner, aged nineteen, joined the army. The air force had already turned him down; “we don’t allow communists in the air force” he was told. On July 9, 1944, Penner landed in France and came under enemy fire. “My war diary, let me confess,” writes Penner, “does carry a number of brief notations, such as ‘am really scared’ and ‘was and am pretty scared.’”  Back in Canada in 1946, he enrolled in an arts programme at the University of Manitoba, graduating in 1949. Between 1949 and 1957, when he started law school, his activities were “exceptionally varied.” They included attending the Communist National Training Camp at a farm north of Sudbury, and marrying Addie, his first wife.

In 1961, Penner became a law partner of Joe Zuken, another product of the North End, member of Manitoba’s Communist Party (led by William Ross, Zuken’s brother), and a City of Winnipeg alderman.  “We were, it has been said, both a poverty law and an impoverished law firm.”  But something strange happened that same year, given all that had gone before. Penner left the Communist Party. He offers no substantial explanation for this political metamorphosis. “…I simply stopped being a member of the Party. …I simply resigned.” Penner’s commitment to the Party had survived the 1940 Soviet-German alliance, the 1956 Khrushchev revelations about Stalinist atrocities, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, but, for whatever reason, survived no longer. All he can say is “I never stopped believing in the socialist ideal.” This political metamorphosis is the mystery of his career, and it is a pity that his autobiography does not explain it properly.

In 1981, Penner became an NDP member of the Manitoba legislature in an election that brought the NDP to power. A few days after the election, the one-time communist from the North End became Manitoba’s Attorney General. But old habits die hard:  Penner writes, “my proudest moment came around midnight on July 16, 1987, when after an all-night debate, a packed gallery burst into applause as Bill 47, the new Manitoba Human Rights Code passed the third and final reading…”  No doubt representatives of the RCMP were in the gallery crowd that night, watching Penner’s every dangerous move and making notes for his file.