Nov 20, 2024
Ben Gold. Avreml Broide, A Worker’s Life Story. translated by Annie Sommer Kaufman. (Wayne State University Press, 2024). 154 pages, $24.99.
My first glance at the contents of Ben Gold’s Your Comrade, Avreml Broide gave me the impression that the book might fall neatly within the familiar contours of the Jewish American novel of immigration and assimilation: the First Part of the narrative is set in a Bessarabian shtetl, the Second Part in New York.
I soon discovered that the similarities between Gold’s novel and the standard Jewish coming-to-America story end there.
The Old World shtetl has typically been framed as an economically primitive enclave in which observant Jews—isolated within the Pale of Settlement and threatened by antisemitic peasants, or Tsarist pogroms, or both—escape dehumanization to seek renewal and rebirth in the “land of Columbus.” This pattern does not apply to twenty-three-year-old Avreml Broide, who emigrates not from a village but from a vibrant urban-cosmopolitan setting that seems more like Brooklyn than Bessarabia.
Moreover, Gold’s titular protagonist does not emigrate out of desperation, but with strength and pride. By confronting and beating into submission a group of thieves who have stolen his fiancée’s bridal trousseau, he acquires in the shtetl “the status of a legendary hero.” Realizing as well that his bride-to-be has not been honest with him, he breaks off his engagement because he believes he deserves better: “He was young and strong . . . No one could hold him back.” Having demonstrated the core principle of self-reliance, he takes decisive action, using the money he’d saved for his wedding to buy a transatlantic ship ticket.
Though Avreml handles himself capably in the dog-eat-dog world, this does not mean that his struggle in New York is easy. Like many a greenhorn, he is panicked by the “large tombstone-like buildings,” the “weird” language, and the loneliness of a job hunt that leads only to exploitative needle-trade sweatshop toil amid unbearable work conditions.
In canonical immigrant novels like Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (a book Ben Gold knew well), what usually happens next is the hero’s gradual rise from rags to respectability, a clichéd plot trajectory that endorses bourgeois values and reinforces the capitalist order. A second formula, less canonical but still important, is on display in the 1930 bestseller Jews Without Money by Michael Gold (no relation to Ben). In this novel the greenhorn strives for decades but fails to rise. “America is so rich and fat,” he learns, “because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.” Not until the last page of Jews Without Money does the hero discover socialism and hope.
There is a third formula. As translator Annie Sommer Kaufman’s erudite introduction to Avreml Broide notes, Ben Gold’s protagonist is almost unique; he “never falls for the false promise of the materialist American Dream.” Early in his American struggle, Avreml finds the revolutionary way—the way of the Communist Party. A valuable feature of Avreml Broide is the chance it offers to take a deep dive into the world of twentieth century radical left activism to understand essentials of the CPUSA as an American subculture.
Image of Ben Gold, from his In yene teg: novele (New York: Ben Gold bukh-komitet, 1970).
What exactly do we learn? First, we witness a representative political conversion. At a mass meeting in Cooper Union Hall, Avreml hears a rousing speech by a militant labor leader. The beautiful phrases “stream like bullets” into the young man’s heart and mind. “So this is America!” he realizes, “freedom, equality, brotherhood, socialism. It’s wonderful!”
Next we learn the psychology of sectarianism. Gold’s alter ego protagonist, a working-class activist, finds it “painful that the struggle divided the workers into two camps, damaging them all.” He is overjoyed to be elected to his local’s executive committee because it might enable him to unify the left wing (communist) and right wing (socialist) factions and thereby realize “the holy dream of building the beautiful new free world.”
What follows, of course, is disillusionment. Avreml had believed that his union’s Socialist Party leadership was “decent,” but he notices that “some of the leaders openly showed their disdain for the workers.” Their cynicism drives the young acolyte to bitterness, as does the fact that “genuine crooks, even gangsters” operate as union dues collectors. Such knowledge brings on “a real crisis in his life” and lays the foundation for other paradoxes that mark Avreml Broide as a political novel of unusual psychological depth.
Adding to this depth is an exploration of the very nature of political commitment. Though the main character feels “constrained” in his union, he realizes that he “couldn’t live without the labor movement” and takes a strong turn to the left. Ultimately it is the Communist Party that best “speaks his language.” The party’s “deep faith in the masses” re-ignites his passion and furthers his revolutionary development.
The real struggle, however, is only beginning. Avreml discovers that his friend Morris has turned to scab labor to eke out money for his wife’s medical care. Though Comrade Broide is required to turn him over to the union, his pity for Morris overpowers his duty to the strikers. As a result he is formally charged with a serious offense against the party. In response he confesses his “grave error” and endures “the sharpest censure.” For his “insufficient Marxist-Leninist knowledge,” he is required to register for remedial courses in the “workers’ school.”
Avreml is actually excited about the prospect of learning more communist theory, but his classes lead to a far more serious loyalty test. He falls in love with his English teacher Miriem, a party member from an upper-class background who has lived a life of ease. Their attraction is mutual and the two are married, though Avreml adamantly refuses an offer from Miriem’s father to set up the couple in permanent bourgeois comfort as a wedding gift. A genuine party member must “remain a worker.”
Nevertheless, a bitterly contested factional conflict in the party drives a wedge between the comrade-newlyweds. Miriem sides with a less radical socialist faction deemed “false and corrupt” by the communist leadership. When her faction is expelled, Miriem leaves the party with it. The remaining members are instructed to make written declarations of their loyalty.
Hopelessly conflicted, Comrade Avreml refuses to condemn the heretical “anti-party” faction because it would mean denouncing his own wife. For this offense, he is himself expelled. Not surprisingly, the affair also makes for an “oddly strained” marital relationship that cannot endure.
Confused, exhausted, alone, and reeling from his perceived failure to live up to his ideals, Avreml descends into self-hatred. He drinks himself into stupor and is accosted on the street by a prostitute who takes him to her apartment and steals his wallet. Avreml awakes and, in a sudden epiphany, realizes that he doesn’t want his money back but absolutely must have his “party book,” the document all communists carry to confirm their party membership and service. The symbolism is clear. He atones for his apostasy by immediately composing a loyalty declaration “right there in the party office,” and returns to his alma mater.
In reading this part of Gold’s novel, I was reminded of the notorious “Albert Maltz affair” of 1946, a tense Cold War showdown among communist cultural leaders. Maltz, a gifted novelist and screenwriter, published in New Masses the essay, “What Shall We Ask of Writers,” in which he asserted that communist novelists were producing inferior work because party doctrine was “not a useful guide, but a strait jacket.” Essentially, he was asking for a loosening of ideological restrictions, reminding fellow Marxists that “where art is a weapon, it is only so when it is art.”
A handful of powerful party-affiliated critics immediately and harshly rejected Maltz’s argument in New Masses and the Daily Worker. Under withering attack, Maltz recanted his views and wrote a rebuttal to his own “mistaken” article. He was accepted back into the communist fold, but the painful controversy stayed with him.
As does Avreml Broide’s painful controversy. Obsessed by a need for self-redemption, he throws himself into the fray of a dangerous strike in the fur-goods industry. When the strikers are attacked by company thugs and police with clubs and tear gas bombs, Avreml is arrested and criminally charged. During his trial he recognizes the main witness against him as “a Nazi, a Hitler agent who had openly declared his wish that Hitler would conquer America and eradicate the unions and the Jews.”
His trial ends with a fascist victory: “The boss, the Nazi, and the district attorney won.” Avreml is sentenced to eighteen months in prison, where his spirit of resistance grows stronger. In 1936, when the Spanish Republic’s call for help goes out “to stop the murderous fascists,” Avreml becomes one of the first American freedom fighters to volunteer. Gold’s novel is dedicated to the “The American needleworkers who fell in Spain” as members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
This dedication no doubt resonated strongly at the time of the novel’s spring 1944 publication, a moment when the Soviet Red Army, an ally of the United States, was locked in a gory death struggle with Hitler’s fascist forces in Europe. Gold does not pass up the opportunity to remind readers of the great communist sacrifice.
Searching my recollection for works that may be compared with Avreml Broide, I’m drawn again to Albert Maltz, whose 1940 novel, The Underground Stream, climaxes with an equally direct fascist-communist confrontation. Maltz’s battlefield is not Madrid or Stalingrad but southeast Michigan, in the General Motors auto industry factories of Detroit and Flint during the Depression decade. His hero is a CPUSA organizer who dies a martyr to the cause of social justice and anti-fascism. One of the most interesting press reviews of The Underground Stream, published in the Daily Worker in July 1940, applies seamlessly to Avreml Broide:
What are Communists? How do they work, think, feel? What gives Promethean courage enough to ordinary baseball Americans to go on despite the daily pressure and peril that surrounds Communists in a savage and dying capitalist society? Here is a psychological theme that contains material for endless novels, poems, dramas. Yet few American authors have tackled it—perhaps because we are too close to the battle, and it is not easy to find perspective while under fire.
Ben Gold and Albert Maltz were able to find perspective on the battle and write under perilous conditions. For the crime of portraying and embodying the communist path as a representative American journey, both were sentenced to prison during the Cold War, though Gold’s conviction was overturned on appeal after a legal battle that lasted four years.
The Yiddish Book Center and Wayne State University have made Your Comrade, Avreml Broide widely available in English for the first time. How does the novel fit into the present-day cultural conversation? Obviously the stunning rise of authoritarian fascism in the United States validates Ben Gold’s reminder that it can happen here. The novel also has a place in higher education. In Jewish American literature courses like those I teach, Avreml Broide is a good companion text to Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky,Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money, or Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, balancing out the politics of all three while filling a gap in the endlessly diverse diaspora story.
