In Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story (Wayne State University Press, November 2024), translator Annie Sommer Kaufman offers a fresh and vital glimpse into the vibrant lifeworld of early-20th-century American Jewish radicalism– with a lesson strikingly relevant for our moment. 

Written by labor leader Ben Gold in 1944, Your Comrade tells the fictional story of Avreml Broide, a worker and organizer who makes his way from the colorful world of the East European shtetl to the passionate ranks of the working class American Left. Far from the nostalgic cliches of immigrant radicalism dutifully and dimly retold by many American Jews today, Your Comrade gives a front-row seat into the beating heart of these movements. 

Ben Gold, whose own trajectory through the labor movement and into left-wing militancy in many ways mirrored Avreml’s, feverishly wrote Your Comrade while a bout with the flu offered him rare reprieve from his round-the-clock organizing duties. Written for his comrades, his text traces the contours of the world they inhabited and transformed together. Fleeing the close-knit shtetl world after a romantic pursuit lands him in a bloody brawl with local petty gangsters, Avreml faces isolation and exploitation in the crowded streets and shop floors of New York until joining the Furrier’s Union awakens a burning passion. 

The heart of the novel recounts Avreml’s winding political and personal evolution. Growing disillusioned with the corrupt, opportunistic union leadership, Avreml joins the Communist Party and organizes the union towards greater militancy. He struggles to reconcile his fierce loyalty to his party comrades with his relationship to an old friend, who becomes a scab out of financial desperation, and his wife, who joins an opposing political faction, a split which their marriage ultimately cannot survive. Jailed for his organizing during the First Red Scare, Avreml emerges with greater resolve and promptly travels to Spain to fight fascism, like many of his generation, where he dies defending Madrid from Franco’s army.

With the first English translation of Your Comrade, Kaufman has made Avreml’s story crackle with new life. Her translation brings us into Avreml’s world of stormy conflicts and fiery organizing, and adeptly captures, with skillful invention, how strange the new English language felt on Avreml’s Yiddish tongue. In his iconic World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe describes Ben Gold’s rousing speeches: “a stream of fire came pouring out of him…a voice that leapt through the higher octaves of yearning and release…as a rush, a flood of rage, summoning the anger of his listeners and teaching them they had funds of anger of which they had not even known.” With straightforward and accessible prose, Kaufman preserves that passion in a time capsule, a window into a lifeworld that feels simultaneously intimate and distant, invigorating and challenging to today’s reader. 

As Kaufman tells us in the introduction, Gold originally named his work Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story, but she renamed it Your Comrade, Avreml Broide in order to open “provocative questions about how we relate to Avreml as our activist ancestor.” Kaufman’s title asks us to imagine an intimacy of inheritance and obligation between the lifeworld of the early 20th-century American Jewish Left and our own. 

For many on today’s Jewish Left, such intimacy can seem far from straightforward. In June 2024, Jewish Currents made a splash with a controversial episode of their publication’s podcast, On the Nose. Critics had complained that by publishing a commentary on the weekly Torah portion, Currents had abandoned its nearly-century-old staunchly secularist legacy. In dialogue with those critics, leading editors of Currents stressed the distance they saw between Avreml’s Jewish Left and our own.

“The secularist world did not socially reproduce itself sufficiently to be meaningful. It just didn’t,” one claimed. “Instead, what we received was a world where Jewishness and Jewish social uplift, especially for white Jews, meant, essentially, whiteness and assimilation into an American power structure.” The suburban cul-de-sac was a dead end, and today’s Jewish Left, seeking a new countercultural positionality, grounds its identity not primarily in secular Yiddishkeit but in religion.

In last year’s widely-celebrated book Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, author and former Currents contributor Joshua Leifer advanced a similar teleology. “The grand ideologies, the old political faiths” of the 20th-century Left, he proclaimed at the conclusion of his sweeping survey of the roots and fruits of the American Jewish past, cannot be inherited in our “post-ideological age.” Orthodox Judaism, for Leifer, remains “the only living Jewish alternative to liberal capitalist culture on offer.” In one interview, Leifer compares his prescriptions for the contemporary Jewish Left to right-wing Catholic writer Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option– Jewish radicals should “seek refuge” in religious traditionalism as a separatist revolt against modern life. 

Despite their many differences, Leifer and the Currents editors both locate Avreml’s Jewishness squarely in the past, superseded by assimilation into what one editor called “Zionism and Americanism” as the “twin nationalisms at the heart of what American Jewishness has become…the interest in religion is one key way, I think, of exploring a way out of that, toward this sense of Jewishness as alterity.” To be sure, this does describe the 20th-century assimilationist trajectory of many American Jewish institutions, leaders and communities. And while some today do maintain active traditions of left secular Yiddishkeit– embodied in organizations like the Workers’ Circle and Camp Kinderland, musicians like Daniel Kahn and the identities and family lineages of many activists– today’s American Jewish Left undeniably includes a more diverse ethno-cultural context, a warmer relationship to religion, and other substantive differences.

But the pages of Your Comrade suggest another way to approach these questions. While undoubtedly secular, the novel contains no polemic against religion– rather, it models secularism as what Judee Rosenbaum, in the Currents podcast, described as “a way of being in the world that starts with the real world, where it is, what that means, who is of importance– the working class is of primary importance.” 

Interestingly, Jewishness itself is only explicitly referenced a few times in the text, always in passing. The residents of Avreml’s shtetl are named as Jews. Later, after Avreml is arrested and prosecuted for helping organize a picket line during a fur worker’s strike, his lawyer reveals during the trial that a prosecuting witness, the shop foreman, was in fact a Nazi “who had openly declared his wish that Hitler would conquer America and eradicate the unions and the Jews.” Explaining to the judge why he led a demonstration outside the German consulate, Avreml testified “the Nazi government murders Jews and has eradicated the unions, imprisoned the bravest freedom fighters in concentration camps, and is preparing to ignite a firestorm of war over the entire world.”  

Finally Avreml, in the impassioned letter which closes the novel, tells his comrades back home that he fights on the frontlines against fascism in Spain to “protect the freedom not only of the Spanish people but of all people, including our America and the Jewish people. ‘No pasarán!’ is our motto, and as long as we live, we are determined that the fascists will not break through.” The novel soon ends with a final salute– “Comrade Broide, the American freedom fighter, had died.”

Jewishness, in Your Comrade, appears consistently intertwined with anti-fascism, Americanism and class politics. Indeed, Avreml’s radicalization and Americanization are one and the same. He spends his early immigrant days isolated and hopeless, until union organizing fills him with resolve and purpose, roots him in community and belonging. “So this is America!” Avreml thought to himself after attending his first electrifying union mass meeting, “workers’ meetings, unions, freedom, equality, brotherhood, socialism. It’s wonderful!”

 As Paul Novick, editor-in-chief of the Yiddish Communist Morgan Freiheit put it in his review, these immigrants “couldn’t get used to this country. They wandered around as if in a world of chaos…the union made them true Americans, gave them a sense of the flavor of America, set them up as the builders of America, gave them a chance to participate in American traditions.” (Freiheit broke off from the Forward in 1922. They published Avreml Broide, and also issued an English supplement that eventually became the monthly magazine Jewish Life, now known as Jewish Currents.)

But this Americanization eschews the teleology outlined by Leifer and the Currents editors. “Avreml does eventually ‘find his way’ in America,” Kaufman writes in the introduction, “but through striving for a better collective future and embracing loyalty to his union, his class, his people, and his party.” At every turn, Avreml rejects the paths of upward mobility, ruling-class accommodation and capitalist corruption taken by other characters in the novel. Reflecting the Popular Front strategy of Communist organizers of the 1930s, the content of the Americanism expressed in Your Comrade is working-class solidarity and exuberant struggle towards collective liberation. 

One may argue that this path of Jewish Americanization died, like Avreml, in the trenches of Spain; or that it was consumed in the fires of HUAC, smothered in the placid suburban cul-de-sac, transmuted into all-pervasive ‘Israelism’. But a vibrant Jewish Left has remained a constant presence in American Jewish life, with Currents itself as one among many testaments to its living legacy and continued relevance. Many American Jews remained part of the working class throughout the 20th century, while others are seeing class privilege vanishing amidst 21st-century neoliberal immiseration. Much has changed along the way, but many of us still can’t “get used to this country”, still “wander around as if in a world of chaos”, still look to progressive and radical politics for rootedness, belonging and resolve. 

What does a text that only mentions explicit Jewishness in passing have to offer the Jewish Left today? Avreml’s Jewishness, much like his Americanism, is one of anti-fascism and collective struggle. The culture of the Left, wrote cultural critic Benjamin Balthaser, became a way for Jews of Avreml’s era “to separate themselves from what they understood to be a bourgeois, Anglo- Saxon, Christian-dominated American culture, while also avoiding the right-wing nationalism of Zionism…For Jewish socialists, communism was twentieth-century Judaism.” This orientation has maintained itself as a reservoir of “Jewishness as alterity” that generations of Jewish Leftists have drawn upon from Avreml’s time and earlier (some may root its this-worldly orientation as far back as Spinoza, Maimonides or the Biblical prophets) to our own. Like the pages of Your Comrade, it is not primarily anti-clerical but not terribly concerned with ritual; it doesn’t have anything against religion, but not much to do with it either– in fact, it would likely dismiss the secular-religious binary itself as a product of Christian hegemony. 

We can reclaim Avreml as our “activist ancestor” without needing to adopt his exact cultural milieu as our own, or even to locate his Ashkenazi immigrant experience on our own family tree. Indeed, Your Comrade arrives at an auspicious time. With the onset of the second Trump administration, Avreml’s final exhortation to his comrades may well be addressed to us, as the conditions he faced– ascendant fascism, antisemitism and political repression, widespread exploitation and deepening class conflict– grow increasingly resonant with our own. Our task may be less to critically interrogate our distance from Avreml, and more to recover our proximity; to rediscover, in a new time, what Kaufman calls “some of the lessons and legacies that have been hidden by political repression and cultural assimilation”; to relearn, if we have forgotten, how to call him comrade.