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Join Pilsen Community Books as they welcome Annie Kaufman and Marc Kaplan to the store for an event in celebration of Your Comrade, Avreml Broide.

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.

"A fascinating document of two disappeared worlds: Rural Jewish life before immigration produced the foundational experiences that made struggles for organized labor at the center of our contributions to American life. But Ben Gold's novel of frontline living also reminds us of a time when the "right wing" of Jewish politics was the Socialist Party, and many factions of the Yiddish world reached for different utopian visions of collective equality and liberation. Annie Kaufman's erudite introduction contextualizes the world of Jewish gangsters trying to break Jewish unions, and leaders daring to reach across race and ethnicity to unite the working-class. Her buoyant translation recalls the old, fallen dreams of one party that would answer everybody's needs, and bitter pills of complexity dividing friends and lovers. A great read and a crucial reminder." —Sarah Schulman

Marc Kaplan is a lifelong organizer for Justice, Human Rights and People’s Power. His first organizing efforts were as a teenager organizing fellow students against the war in Vietnam. He came to Chicago in 1973 as a member of the Intercommunal Survival Committee, an organizing bureau of the Black Panther Party, whose focus was to organize poor and working class white people into the Black led struggle for human rights and Peoples Power. That organizing brought him to the Uptown Community and he has been involved in organizing efforts since then. He is currently a leader with Northside Action for Justice.

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.