Annie Sommer Kaufman discusses her new English-language translation of the Yiddish novel Your Comrade, Avreml Broide, A Worker’s Life Story, in converation with Khave Morales.

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 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 Yiddish translator and teacher based in Chicago. She trained in History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and was Yekhiel Shraybman’s last Yiddish student in Kishinev, Moldova. She served for five years as the coordinator for Yugntruf’s Yiddish immersion retreat Yiddish Vokh, and worked for a decade in the fashion industry as a pattern maker, including in New York City. She was a founding member of Red Emma’s Bookstore in Baltimore, and has been organizing with Jewish Voice for Peace in many capacities for a dozen years. She is a SVARA trained Talmud teacher and runs The Lace Midrash in Chicago.

Khave (Lina) Morales is a red diaper baby, yiddishist, communist, former JVP board member, long time Anti-Zionist and lover of communist and radical history.

Registration for this event is not required.

This translation was supported by a fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts (2020–21).