David Losz was born in the Russian Empire sometime after Svisloch's first snowfall in October 1909 to Moishe Losz and his wife Rose (née Lazarovitch).
His official birth date of June 23 was the one he gave the immigration officer when he arrived in Canada.
1920
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.
Moishe (or Moshe) Losz was Svisloch's Bund Chairman.
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 both as a political party and labour movement.
Lewis spent his formative years immersed in its culture and philosophy.
The Bund's membership, although mostly ethnically Jewish, was secular humanist in practice.
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."
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.
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.
When the Polish army recaptured Svisloch on August 25, 1920, they executed five Jewish citizens as "spies".
1921
Lewis's political activism began in the shtetl he lived in until 1921.
Svisloch was located in the Pale of Settlement, the westernmost region of the Russian Empire, in what is now Belarus.
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.
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.
1936
He was national secretary of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) from 1936 to 1950 and one of the key architects of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961.
1956
His involvement with the USW also led to a central role in the creation of the Canadian Labour Congress in 1956.
1962
In 1962, he was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP), in the House of Commons of Canada, for the York South electoral district.
1970
The Lewis family has been active in socialist politics since the turn of the twentieth century, starting with David Lewis's father's involvement in the Bund in Russia, continuing with David, and followed by his eldest son, Stephen Lewis, who led the Ontario NDP from 1970 until 1978.
David did not actively take part in a religious service again until his granddaughter Ilana's Bat Mitzvah in the late 1970s.
1971
While an MP, he was elected the NDP's national leader and served from 1971 until 1975.
When David was elected the NDP's national leader in 1971, he and Stephen became one of the first father-and-son-teams to simultaneously head Canadian political parties.
1974
After his defeat in the 1974 federal election, he stepped down as leader and retired from politics.
He spent his last years as a university professor at Carleton University, and as a travel correspondent for the Toronto Star.
In retirement, he was named to the Order of Canada for his political service.
1981
David Lewis (born David Losz; June 23 or October 1909 – May 23, 1981) was a Canadian labour lawyer and social democratic politician.
After suffering from cancer for a long time, he died in Ottawa in 1981.
Lewis's politics were heavily influenced by the Jewish Labour Bund, which contributed to his support of parliamentary democracy.
He was an avowed anti-communist, and while a Rhodes Scholar prevented communist domination of the Oxford University Labour Club.
In Canada, he played a major role in removing communist influence from the labour movement.
In the CCF, he took the role of disciplinarian and dealt with internal organizational problems.
He helped draft the Winnipeg Declaration, which moderated the CCF's economic policies to include acceptance of capitalism, albeit subject to stringent government regulation.
As the United Steelworkers of America (USW)'s legal counsel in Canada, he helped them take over the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill).
