Jack Goodman, Interviews with Jews in Utah, Accn 998

Page 60

L: J: was a Briska or something organization. There was a club, as it were, a social semi-social and semi-insur­ance oriented thing. You had to belong to something like the Arbeiter Ring and/or the Briska thing. You paid a few dollars a year and it was a burial society. You therefore had enough money, I mean you paid into this thing, maybe it was a couple of dimes a month so that you had a burial plot in a Jewish cemetery in Brooklyn or in Queens. The Arbeiter Ring, well, the Briska, it was the Briska branch of the Arbeiter Ring. It's corning back to me now. It was like everybody from their local area in Russia-Poland was considered a Briska. A person from Brest-litovsk. The Arbeiter Ring was apparently .. By the way, you spell? B-r-e-s-t - L-i-t-o-v-s-k. Now, that's famous in history in a way. That's the place where Germany and the Karensky government signed the treaty that took Russia out of World War I. When Germany defeated Russia and the Czar was gone or maybe he was still down in the cel­lar before they shot him, Brest-Litovsk was the place where the treaty was signed. It's known in the history books as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. At any rate, the Arbeiter Ring apparently was a socialist oriented--that meant union irented organization that was both social and a burial society and an insurance society. Socialist in that--the membership was made up, let's say, of fu~­riers, hatters, cigar workers union people. Father