Your Comrade, Avreml Broide (Paperback)

Ben Gold

ISBN 10: 0814351387 / ISBN 13: 9780814351383

Published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI, 2024

About this Item

Paperback. A working-class radical revolutionary's talepenned by a prominent union leadernow 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. A working-class radical revolutionarys talepenned by a prominent union leadernow 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780814351383

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Your Comrade, Avreml Broide (Paperback)
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814351387
• ISBN 13: 9780814351383
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Gropper, William
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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 1985. Annie Sommer Kaufman is a scholar of the US and the former Soviet Union, where she spent considerable time and studied Yiddish with novelist Yekhiel Shraybman. This translation was supported by a fellowship at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts (2020–21).