Annie Sommer Kaufman with Jenny Romaine: Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker's Life Story

Join translator of the new English edition Annie Sommer Kaufman for this conversation with theater artist Jenny Romaine about the 1944 working class, coming-of-age Yiddish novel that traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide.

Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, Your Comrade, Avreml Broide traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. 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 presents Gold's emotionally rich narrative 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.

To join the event in person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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.

Jenny Romaine is a director, designer and puppeteer and co-founder of the OBIE winning visual theater collective, Great Small Works. She is music director of Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok and a lead artist with the Naming The Lost Covid Memorials project. Romaine has directed community-based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world. She was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and for several decades has drawn on Yiddish/Pan Jewish primary source materials to create diasporic art that has contemporary meaning. Romaine has worked extensively as an educator in public schools, prisons, and museums, and was Visiting Professor at the Pratt Institute's department of Performance Studies. She was the first recipient of the Adrienne Cooper Award for Dreaming in Yiddish (2014) and received a Risk-Taker Award from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (2015).

GET THE BOOK

• Borrow: NYPL Catalog


• E-Book app: SimplyE, available on iOS and Android


• This event will also include signing and sales of the book by our Library Shop.

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ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

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All programs are subject to change or cancellation. All programs are subject to recording and photography.

This program is presented in collaboration with Jewish Currents. Founded in 1946, Jewish Currents is a magazine committed to the rich tradition of thought, activism, and culture on the Jewish left and the left more broadly.

The 7 Stories Up Series at SNFL is made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).