Your Comrade, Avreml Broide

First published in Yiddish in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, Your Comrade, Avreml Broide is a working-class, coming-of-age novel that 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, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to 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.

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.

Annie will be in conversation with Micah Wilson, whose research practice explores how communities, states, and artists craft and deploy Jewish folklore across the diaspora. Drawing on oral history, decolonial psychoanalysis, and the Black radical tradition, they explore how archival absences produce spaces for both reactionary statecraft and fugitive imagination. They hold a BA in History and Urban Studies from Bowdoin College, where they researched diasporic placemaking at three Jewish housing cooperatives in the Bronx. As a Fulbright Scholar based in Morocco, they studied the memory of Muslim-Jewish entanglements in the city of Essaouira. More recently, they have been facilitating a Yiddishist storytelling group called Zamler Collective to fashion new and old ways of engaging with ancestry, assimilation, and participatory archiving.

Copies of Your Comrade, Avreml Broide are available for purchase in advance with your ticket.