Sam Lipshitz (journalist, editor, typesetter, and political activist) was born in Radom, Poland, on 14 February 1910, and was sent by his parents to live with an aunt in Montreal when he was 17 after graduating from high school. He joined the Jewish Cultural Club of Montreal, where several young members promoted communism, based on the belief that the growth of Yiddish literature, schools, and other social institutions in Russia offered new equality for Jews. Sam was drawn to these views by Manya Cantor. Born in 1906 as Margolia Kantorowicz, Manya left Bialystok, Poland, when she was 13 years old and joined the Twelfth Children's Work Commune in Vitesbsk, Russia. She responded to the commune's poverty and food shortages by writing poetry and plays. Life in the commune also fostered Manya's interest in teaching. She entered the Teachers' Seminary in Vitesbsk in 1923. After joining her brothers in Montreal in 1926, she moved to New York in 1928 to finish her course work at the Teachers' Seminary in New York while working as a clerk in the a store and enjoying the city's vibrant cultural life. Likely inspired by Manya's support of communism, Sam joined the Young Communist League in 1928 while working at the Jewish Public Library. The death of 60 Jews in Palestine in 1929 led to a disagreement over the views of Sam's employer and Moscow's interpretation of the incident as a rebellion against British imperialism. When forced to take a stand, Sam sided with the communists and lost his position. He married Manya on 20 January 1930, and they moved to Toronto where Manya began a 25-year career teaching Yiddish and Jewish history at the Morris Winchevsky School, which was operated by the United Jewish Peoples Order (UJPO). Sam found full-time work with the Communist Party of Canada (renamed the Labor-Progressive Party in 1941 after the party was banned the previous year by the federal government), becoming editor of its newspaper, "Der kamf," by 1932. He later edited "Vochenblatt" ("Canadian Jewish weekly"). He was appointed secretary of the party's Anti-Fascist Committee in 1933, became head of the Jewish National Committee soon after, and sat on the party's Central Committee from 1943 to 1946. His prominent role in the illegal party led to a warrant issued for his arrest and life in hiding until the communists supported the war after Germany's invasion of Russia in June 1941, and Sam spent several days in the Don Jail with Tim Buck and 14 other party leaders in 1942. Sam joined the executive of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1943, representing the UJPO along with Joseph Baruch Salsberg. His most important work for the Congress occurred in 1945, when he was sent to Poland with Hanane Meier Caiserman to report on the condition of the Jews who had been liberated from Nazi concentration camps just months earlier, and the fate of those who had not survived the experience. Lipshitz wrote and lectured extensively on this experience. He returned to Poland in 1949 to explore Jewish culture, society, and politics (particularly communism), and he also visited Romania and Israel. International issues significantly affected his work for at least another decade. Lipshitz and Salsberg had worked closely for many years (he served as manager for Salsberg's successful campaigns in the provincial riding of Spadina), but Salsberg's growing concern over the Soviet Union's persecution of Jews led to a falling out by 1954, when Salsberg was expelled from the communist party. Despite Salsberg's return to the fold following the exposure of Soviet brutality and anti-Semitism under Joseph Stalin by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, a bitter rift over the Canadian communist party's response to these admissions led to the resignation of hundreds of Jews in 1957. The Lipshitzs (who had visited the Soviet Union in 1956 and returned deeply troubled by the treatment of Jews under the Soviet regime) and Salsberg were among this group. Resignation from the party also meant an end to employment for the Lipshitzs (Manya as a Jewish teacher, Sam as a political organizer), but Sam found work as a linotype operator. He founded Trade Typesetting in 1964, and did work for many Jewish organizations in Toronto until his retirement in 1975. The dispute carried over to the work of the UJPO, which was led by members of the communist party. Three years of bitter and occasionally violent argument between factions led to approximately 30 percent of the membership, led by Sam Lipshitz and Morris Biderman, leaving the UJPO in 1960. Sam was a founding member of the New Jewish Fraternal Association later the same year. After taking in an evening course in journalism at the University of Toronto in 1959, Sam assumed the role of editor for the association's magazine, "Fraternally yours," from March 1960 until his death in 2000. Sam also edited "Voice of Radom," the periodical of the United Radomer Relief for the United States and Canada. Manya was similarly occupied with literary endeavours, writing several articles for Sam's magazines and working on a memoir of economic, political, and social turmoil that followed the Russian revolution of 1917 and the insecurity of Jewish life on the commune during the years that followed her separation from her family. Her book, "Bletlekh fun a shturmisher tsayt" (the added title is "Memories of stormy times"), was published in Yiddish by Sam in 1977, and an English edition translated by Max Rosenfeld and Marcia Usishkin was published in 1991 as "Time remembered : a Jewish children's commune in the Soviet Union it the 1920s." Manya died on 27 July 1996 after a lengthy illness, and was remembered as a teacher, poet, and humanitarian. Sam carried on their legacy as champions of the Yiddish language. He was a member of the Yiddish committee of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Greater Toronto for 25 years, served on the Yiddish Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and wrote more than 170 bi-weekly columns in Yiddish for the "Canadian Jewish news" until he resigned from this post in September 1999. He suffered a massive stroke only two days after completing the Rosh Hashonah issue of "Fraternally yours," and died in Toronto two weeks later on 14 September 2000.