A Usable Past

In the United States at least, the Yiddish language has long also been associated with the Jewish left, even if there was little in the late nineteenth century that suggested it would be. Prominent Jewish leaders in the labor movement at best saw pamphlets and speeches in Yiddish delivered to the millions of newly arriving Ostjuden — immigrants from the Russian Empire — as a necessary burden. Yiddish was seen by Russian Jewish intellectuals as at best a dialect; to American Jewish intellectuals, it was the language of the uncultured peasants and greenhorns. Even Yiddish-language newspaper editors and novelists in the United States such as Abraham Cahan, who published the most widely read social democratic Yiddish-language newspaper, Forverts (“The Forward”), assumed that speaking Yiddish was merely a transition along the road to eventual Jewish assimilation.

By the late nineteenth century, attitudes toward the Yiddish language had begun to change, in part thanks to an influx of Bundist intellectuals fleeing the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia who brought with them ideas of internationalist, diasporic Jewish cultural nationalism. In a provocative essay by socialist émigré Chaim Zhitlovsky entitled “Socialism or Zionism,” Zhitlovsky explicitly argued that “Yidishe Kulture” was the antidote to the bourgeois nationalism of Zionism.

Instead of giving up Yiddish to learn English as many other Yiddish-speaking socialists argued, socialism would, Zhitlovsky hoped, be an internationalism of cultural diversity. Vos mer mentsh, alts mer yid un vos mer yid, alts mer mentsh was Zhitlovsky’s famous dictum: “the more human, all the more Jewish, and the more Jewish, all the more human.” One need not choose between Jewishness and socialism, the particular or the universal; they are dialectical and mutually reinforcing. These ideas not only challenged Zionism but, more importantly for immigrant workers, they challenged the frankly racist and eugenicist frameworks of nativism and assimilation.

Even as European Bundists were absorbed into American Jewish socialist groups and unions, the early twentieth century witnessed the rise of left-wing Yiddish cultural organizations. The largest and most famous being the Arbiter Ring, or Workman’s Circle. With hundreds of thousands of members, the Ring not only promoted socialism, it promoted Yiddish language and culture, including Yiddish poetry, Yiddish novelists, and Yiddish music, all within a left-wing working-class milieu.

Splitting into two organizations after the Bolshevik Revolution, the pro-communist members formed the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order (JPFO), starting their own new left-wing Yiddish publications such as Yidburo and Morgen Freiheit. In a roundtable featuring Jewish luminaries from Marc Chagall to Howard Fast, the 1940s communist magazine Jewish Life (precursor to Jewish Currents) argued “progressive Jewish culture” as they referred to it, would be socialist, Yiddish and Ladino, internationalist, diasporic, and humanist.

Yiddishkayt Is 20th-Century Americanism

Gold’s Yiddish-language, proletarian novel was a conscious part of the left-wing Yiddishkayt movement, as was Gold. Irving Howe said of Gold that “in the whole immigrant world there is no one quite like him,” and yet, in many ways, Gold was exemplary. An immigrant from the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement in Bessarabia (now Moldova), Gold immediately joined both the socialist movement and the labor movement in his teenage years, helping to lead a strike that both launched the radical fur and leather workers’ union in New York, and also Gold’s lifelong career in the Communist Party.

Gold’s role as leader in the Fur and Leather Workers helped diversify the union, adding black and Greek leaders to what was once a Jewish-dominated board. Yet this commitment to the broad multiethnic working class did not diminish his commitment to Yiddishkayt or to the role of Jewish workers in the socialist movement — they were all of a piece. Gold’s union was destroyed by the Red Scare, as was Gold’s Yiddishkayt socialism at least organizationally (the JPFO was banned by the federal government); Gold himself faced years in prison for violations of the anti-communist provisions of the Taft-Hartley and Smith Acts. While his case was finally dismissed by the Supreme Court in the 1950s, Gold’s political and labor work was ended by the purges and he finally left the labor movement to devote his remaining years to writing. Yet his commitments to both socialism and to Yiddish culture remained until his death in the mid-1980s.

Kaufman suggests we can read Gold’s novel as a rejection of one of the central, maybe even governing themes of canonical twentieth-century American Jewish literature. From Cahan’s Rise of David Levinsky to Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the painful, often ironized — though seemingly inevitable — assimilation of working-class Jewish immigrants into the middle or even upper classes is taken as a given.

One may struggle, or even succumb en route, but a one-way ticket to Highland Park is accepted with as much finitude as the ending of Exodus. While Gold was certainly not alone among left-wing Jewish authors in questioning this telos, including Anzia Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements and Bread Givers, Mike Gold’s Jews without Money, Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning, Gold alone seems almost giddy in his denunciation of “the false promise of the American dream.”

“So this is America,” his working-class hero Avreml Broide exclaims after his first union meeting, “workers’ meetings, unions, freedom, equality, brotherhood, socialism.” The Roths and Cahan are not only wrong on the merits, they are wrong on the substance: to be a good American Jew, Gold seems to argue, one must also be a socialist and union activist. It was the genius, or the genus, of American Communism to believe it would be the inheritor of “Twentieth-Century Americanism” then to attempt to make that assertion a reality.

And indeed, one way to read the novels’ plot is as a kind of instruction manual for young Jewish socialists. Beginning in a shtetl of Bessarabia, the young Avreml flees his family and betrothed to America after he brawls with a local thief over their mutual courtship of a young woman. After a period of intense alienation and regret while working in a tenement sweatshop, Avreml, still a teenager, attends his first union meeting and hears his first socialist speech, delivered in Yiddish and English by none other than Meyer London, New York City’s Yiddish-speaking socialist member of Congress.

Immediately drawn to the workers’ struggle, Avreml survives factional fights, gangsters, sellout socialists, and a weeks-long strike before finally joining the Communist Party and meeting who he assumes to be the love of his life, another Jewish communist, from a well-to-do home in New England. Experiencing betrayal again as she militantly joins a rival faction in the Communist Party, Avreml leaves her and sails to Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The novel concludes with Avreml’s goodbye letter, addressed to “our America” and “the Jewish people,” as he sacrifices his life with several of his comrades to heroically defend Madrid from fascist advance.

While one could read the novel as a kind of portrait of a hero, it is also a kind of guidebook for how immigrants and the children of immigrants should comport themselves in a strange, new hypercapitalist world. America is a land of hustlers, ganefs, gangsters, and bosses: join unions and the fight for human emancipation if one wants to be a real denizen of this New World.

While Your Comrade, Avreml Broide can be read as a debate within American Jewish literature, it is important to also understand it in the wider context of the proletarian literary movement. Not only were novels about workers popular in the 1930s and 1940s — John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm were all acclaimed bestsellers — working-class novels were also understood to be a crucial part of what the literary critic Edmund Wilson dubbed the “cultural class war” in the United States.

They were a diverse set of novels, often punchy, bawdy, grotesque, modernist, and deeply radical; they were also nearly always novels about movement. Proletarian novels, as critic Michael Denning argues, were novels of migration. Not only did the 1930s and 1940s witness millions of people uprooted and looking for work, it was an era in which tens of millions around the globe were making the transition from the countryside to the city, leaping from a rural life of the eighteenth century to a twentieth-century urban metropolis.

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath can be seen as broadly representative. While the journey of the Joads from the cotton fields of Oklahoma to the peach orchards of California is well known, it’s less commonly thought of as a novel that transitions from premodernity to the modern world. Destroying the Joads’ farm are not just dust storms but the tractor and the abstractions of financial capital; replacing the horse is the car; the hog the Joads butcher themselves gives way to store-bought lunch meats and refrigerated colas.

And yet the Joads transform themselves, from premodern kin-culture to one in which their family is all of humanity, or at least all of the working class. The final scene in which Rose of Sharon breastfeeds a starving worker she meets moments before in a barn is a precise metaphor for this transition: the family is not just birth relations but all those oppressed unto death by industrial capitalism.

Steinbeck was hardly alone in this observation. Other important proletarian novels that track the transition from country — or colony — to metropole include Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, Fielding Burke’s Call Home the Heart, Wright’s Black Boy/American Hunger, Algren’s Somebody in Boots, and H. T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands among many others. While many dismiss the first Bessarabian third of Gold’s novel as a kind of clearing of the throat, narrative parallels Gold constructs between the shtetl and New York City suggest he is drawing the readers’ attention to Avreml’s rural-to-urban transformation.

The opening scene in the shtetl is a showdown between a moneylender and a local voice of prophetic outrage; Avreml’s time in the shtetl ends with an open brawl with the town bandit. These two scenes are paralleled in New York City when Avreml first unionizes against the sweatshop bosses, and then his union defeats the hired gangsters sent as strikebreakers. Everything in the shtetl, like Joad’s Oklahoma, is up close, personal, immediate, and embodied; New York is a city of organized money and organized labor, organized crime, and unified socialists on a picket line.

The journey that Avreml makes is not merely then one of worker to labor leader; the story is a journey to modernity. The meaning of modernity, Gold suggests, is not singular — it is a choice every worker has to make when they land in the city: gangsterism or organized labor, barbarism or socialism.

Vos Macht a Yid?

Gold wrote his novel amid World War II, as the scope of the Holocaust was beginning to be understood in the United States. The novel’s argument with and about Jewish culture is not just against those who would see English replace Yiddish and the country club replace the union hall. The novel ends on a note of Jewish, anti-fascist defiance, with Avreml sacrificing his life so that the struggle of his anti-fascist comrades may continue.

Yet many have noted that its final lines are the first and only place in which Avreml mentions his Jewishness. Avreml moves from a Yiddish-only shtetl to New York City to finally the global struggle against fascism on the world stage. His Jewishness also transforms, from something rooted in the immediate kin-relations Bessarabia to the political abstractions of global socialism. “Jewishness” in the novel is, like other identity markers of modernity, a different sort of relation, one produced out of the abstract political and economic categories of capitalism. Avreml begins as a Yiddish-speaking person from Russia; he ends a diasporic Jew.

While, in one sense, we can say the worlds that Avreml Broide inhabited and made are gone: the shtetls of Eastern Europe burned up in the Holocaust, the socialist and communist unions in the ashes of the Red Scare and de-industrialization. American Jews — while not by and large the bankers of antisemitic fantasy — are solidly middle class, with twice the college graduation rate as the average American.

Yet in an era of Zionist hegemony over American Jewish institutions, often in league with American fascism, Kaufman’s translation is not just a literary work but an event, an intervention. American Jews, especially younger American Jews who have broken with Zionism, are searching for a usable past, one that can help them not just affirm a sense of Jewish ethics but remind them of a time when being Jewish was synonymous in the United States with the forces of socialism, organized labor, and, above all, the fight against racism and fascism. Kaufman adds the phrase, “your comrade” to the title, she says, to give the book a sense of immediacy. It is also an invitation to a world not of tribes, races, or states but of comrades, a fellowship of solidarity.