Tuesday, March 4th at 6:30pm at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library in NYC:

Join translator Annie Sommer Kaufman and theater artist Jenny Romaine for a conversation about the 1944 coming-of-age Yiddish novel, Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story—newly translated by Kaufman. The story traces the origins, immigration, and radicalization of Avreml Broide, an ordinary worker with an extraordinary commitment to Communism, unionism, and revolution. Born in the Russian Empire’s province of Bessarabia just after the turn of the 20th century, Avreml begins his life in an intergenerational criminal community. But personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to the Communist Party, the Furriers Union, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships.

Alongside bold illustrations by William Gropper, Annie Sommer Kaufman’s translation re-surfaces some of the powerful conflicts in America’s suppressed Communist history. And through strikes and dissident activities in New York, and eventually fighting on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml’s journey offers a powerful counter-narrative to histories of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility at the expense of working-class collective spirit.

Jewish Currents is proud to co-sponsor this conversation with the New York Public Library.

Annie Sommer Kaufman is a Yiddish translator and teacher based in Chicago. She studied history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and was the last student of the Yiddish writer Yekhiel Shraybman 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. She was a founding member of Red Emma’s Bookstore in Baltimore and has organized with Jewish Voice for Peace for many years. She is a SVARA-trained Talmud teacher and runs The Lace Midrash in Chicago. (Photo credit: Chana Shapiro.)

Jenny Romaine is a director, designer, and puppeteer who has directed community-based spectacles for numerous projects in New York City and around the world. She is a co-founder of the OBIE-winning visual theater collective, Great Small Works; the music director of Jennifer Miller’s Circus Amok; and a lead artist with Naming The Lost Memorials, a project that honors those who died from Covid. She was a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 13 years and regularly uses Yiddish and other Jewish sources to create diasporic art. Romaine has worked extensively as an educator in public schools, prisons, and museums, and was a 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 in 2014 and received a Risk-Taker Award from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in 2015. (Photo credit: Daniel Terna.)