Miryeml

Performance Co-sponsored by the Congress for Jewish Culture In Person: Admission: $15 YIVO members & students: $10 Zoom Livestream: Admission: Free

View the program.

Tea Arciszewska's Miryeml was heralded as a powerful memorial to the million children murdered in the Holocaust. This nearly-forgotten modernist masterpiece is now available in English translation for the first time.

Arciszewska was a dazzling figure in the prewar Warsaw Yiddish culture scene – an actress, dramaturge, salon hostess, and muse to the renowned Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. In the 1920s, she began writing a play about the experiences of children during the pogroms that followed World War I. She worked on it for decades, first publishing Miryeml in 1958. Yiddish critics praised the play, seeing it as a powerful response to the Holocaust. They recognized the character Miryeml as an extraordinary figure in Yiddish drama. The play received an Alexander Shapiro Prize from the Congress for Jewish Culture for Best Yiddish Drama.

Miryeml is a modernist work that deftly integrates twentieth-century history and Jewish folklore into a narrative about children’s response to trauma, challenging our expectations of Yiddish theatre.

Directed by Caraid O'Brien, this “rehearsed reading” will be performed in Sonia Gollance’s new English translation.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Participants

Sonia Gollance is Lecturer in Yiddish (Assistant Professor) at University College London. Her research interests include Yiddish studies, German-Jewish literature, gender studies and performance studies. She has taught previously at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen. Her book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her ongoing translation of Tea Arciszewska's play Miryeml was supported by a Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center. She is currently developing a project on women who wrote plays in Yiddish. In addition to her scholarship, she is also a Yiddish dance leader.

Galway born translator, performer and director Caraid O’Brien is a three-time recipient of a new play commission from the Foundation for Jewish Culture. White Goat Press published her translation of Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy in 2023. A co-curator for the theater section at the YBC’s acclaimed new exhibit Yiddish: A Global Culture, Caraid developed a series of audio narratives for the exhibit including recreating Y.L. Peretz’s Warsaw literary salon at the turn of the twentieth century. For ten years, Caraid studied Yiddish theater with Luba Kadison, the last surviving member of the famed Vilna Troupe and for six years, she studied Yiddish musical theater with crooner Seymour Rexite while performing in the store front theaters of NYC’s Lower East Side. www.caraidobrien.com