Fight for Life: Dave Kashtan's Memories of Depression-Era Communist Youth Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BEFORE HIS EIGHTEENTH BIRTHDAY Dave Kashtan became a Communist and so, in some respects, his partial and posthumous memoir is unsurprising. Public demonstrations and state repression, organization and strikes, time spent in a Soviet school and in a Quebec prison, Party meetings and police informants — all these Kashtan remembers, but only as part of a larger story: about growing up in a diverse and working-class Montreal; about workers’ sports and left-wing culture; about the friendships and fellowship of social activism; and about the ideals shared by many Canadian youth in the 1930s that superseded political, ethnic, and religious differences. Kashtan readily admits that his political commitments were exceptional, but his experience, in its totality, had much in common with many young Canadians radicalized in the years of Depression and war. What Kashtan has here brought together, disciplinary specialization will quickly tear asunder. Historians of Canadian immigrants, Jews, childhood, sports, labour, youth movements, the penal system, and the Canadian left will all find different passages to note, to interrogate, and to incorporate into their many narratives of Canadian life in the first half of the 20th century. This dissection, however, may obscure the larger point the memoir seeks to convey. Kashtan contends that though his experiences were various, they were not incongruous; that his cultural, political, social, religious, and athletic involvements and commitments were not compartmentalized, but were knit together in the broader life of the working class and the left.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.068 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".