A working-class radical revolutionary's tale—penned by a prominent union leader—now available in English.
Please join us as we welcome Annie Kaufman to read from and discuss her translation of Ben Gold’s novel Your Comrade, Avreml Broide. Annie will be in conversation with Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky.
Sarah Schulman calls it "A great read and a crucial reminder."
Patrick Chura calls it "A political novel of unusual psychological depth."
Paul Buhle says: "Your Comrade, Avreml Broide is one of the most remarkable texts in all of American labor fiction."
Raffi Magarik observes: "At a moment when many American Jews are grappling with our community’s story of racial assimilation and class ascent, Kaufman has made available, in Gold’s novel, a welcome, if bracing, alternative: an unabashedly leftist story of the Jew who remains proudly, defiantly, a worker."
About the book: Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline.
With bold and stimulating illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman's translation brings Gold's emotionally rich narrative forward to reveal some of the most dramatic conflicts in America's suppressed Communist history. This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broideoffers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists.
Annie Sommer Kaufman is a Chicago organizer who builds antizionist Jewish community by teaching Yiddish and Talmud, and as a member-leader of Jewish Voice for Peace. She worked for a decade in the fashion industry as a pattern maker. As a founding member of Red Emma's bookstore in Baltimore, she was active in the Industrial Workers of the World.
Rosza Daniel Lanf/Levitskiy
cultural worker and organizer. never learned how to make art for art’s sake; rarely likes working alone. can’t stop picking things up on the street and making other things out of them – outfits, collectives, performances, barricades, essays, meals… raised by red diaper radicals, active since the 90s in jewish left projects and the yiddish cultural revitalization svive. just another diasporist gendertreyf veltlekhe mischling fem who identifies with, not as.