AVROM BRAUN

AVROM BRAUN (January 12, 1881-November 23, 1940)

He was best known by the name Sergey Braun, born in Riga to well-off parents.  In 1900, while a student at the Riga Polytechnic, he joined the Bund.  In 1901 he was expelled from the Polytechnic.  He was arrested many times.  He was at the center of the revolutionary “February events” in Dvinsk, a main speaker at the historic funeral of fallen revolutionaries of October 1905 in Vilna (run by Aron Devenishski).  He participated in the Bund’s conference in Bern, Switzerland in 1906.  That year he prosecuted a highly successful campaign in South Africa on behalf of the Bund.  He took part in many other activities of the party.  After the March Revolution [actually, February 1917], when he had returned to Riga, the nationalistic Latvian government sentenced him to death (June 1921) for apparent Communist agitation; the intervening stance taken by the international labor movement saved his life.

He was a popular tribune and lecturer on literary and social-philosophical issues.  From time to time he also wrote articles for various central and local press organs of the Bund.  Over the years 1925-1926 he edited the Riga daily newspaper Dos folk (The people), for which he regularly wrote editorials.  In 1934 at the time of the upheaval caused by Karlis Ulmanis in Latvia, Braun and many other Latvian and Jewish socialists were imprisoned in a concentration camp in Liepaja.  In 1935 he was deported to Estonia, and from there he moved to New York in October 1938, making a lengthy lecture tour across the states and publishing a series of articles and impressions in Der fraynd (The friend) (New York, 1939).  In the autumn of 1940 he planned to return to Europe.  On November 22, at a send-off testimonial dinner, he suffered a heart attack and died one day later.

Sources: M. Gerts, 25 yor yidishe prese in letland (25 years of the Yiddish press in Latvia) (Riga, 1933), pp. 42-43; R. Abramovitsh, in Forverts (New York) (November 28, 1940); N. Khanin, in Der veker (December 1, 1940); Y. Kharlash, “A. braun-sergey” (A. Braun-Sergey), in Doyres bundistn (Generations of Bundists) (New York, 1956).