Your Comrade, Avreml Broide

Your Comrade, Avreml Broide is one of the most remarkable texts in all of American labor fiction. Its author, widely regarded as 'incorruptible' in a union world where corruption threatened on all sides, was a veritable god to his labor devotees—for good reason—and never mind his literary drift toward political sectarianism. This is a novel that will be widely enjoyed and appreciated!

~Paul Buhle, retired senior lecturer, Brown University, and coeditor of Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land

This is an important literary document that vividly recounts a turbulent time of Jewish working-class struggle.

~Tony Michels, George L. Mosse Professor of American Jewish History, University of Wisconsin–Madison

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, professor, playwright, author