Review of Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story by Ben Gold, translated by Annie Sommer Kaufman (Wayne State University Press, 2024)
It’s something of a truism to say history does not reveal the past but rather the present: the refracted light of dead stars, to use the French philosopher Daniel Bensaïd’s image of the gone revolutions, will disappear in a daylight of mere facts if not recognized as a “concern of the present.” Annie Kaufman’s new translation of Ben Gold’s 1944 Yiddish language proletarian novel Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story is one of those events, in which a seemingly lost footnote of left-wing American history suddenly brushes against the grain of the present.
It says something then about our present that radical Yiddish-language culture is having a comeback. From Daniel Kahn’s urban-folk “song smuggling” to Eli Valley’s use of golem-grotesques in his satiric graphic novels to the surging in popularity of Yiddish classes, the language once thought nearly wiped out by the triple forces of the Holocaust, assimilation, and Hebrew-dominant Zionism has become an emergent feature of a youth-led American Jewish life, rapidly parting ways with Zionism. While of course not every new Yiddish speaker is anti-Zionist, diasporic Jews who wish to retain a sense of their cultural heritage separate from Israel are looking for a usable past.
In the United States at least, the Yiddish language has long also been associated with the Jewish left, even if…
Auteur: Benjamin Balthaser
