Overview

A working-class radical revolutionary's tale—penned by a prominent union leader—now available in English.Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Communist 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 Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists.

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9780814351383

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Ben Gold was born in Bessarabia in the Russian Empire in 1898 and immigrated to the US with his family in 1912. He worked in the fur industry and served as the president of the International Furriers Union, leading the legendary 1926 strike. A member of the US Central Committee of the Communist Party, Gold was forced out of the labor movement by the Taft Hartley Act and the second Red Scare. He went on to write Your Comrade, Avreml Broide and several other novels in Yiddish before his death in 1983. Annie Sommer Kaufman studied US history and Russian and spent considerable time in the former Soviet Union. She also trained in fashion design and worked as a patternmaker in the garment industry. She was a translation fellow (2020–21) at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, and has served on the Jewish Voice for Peace board of directors. She lives in Chicago, where she teaches Yiddish and Talmud.

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