Tea Arciszewska’s 'Miryeml' (1958) and Yiddish Plays by Women

Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series See all lectures » Admission: Free Watch the video

Sonia Gollance | Delivered in English.

Tea Arcizewska’s play Miryeml is a modernist work that deftly integrates twentieth-century history and Jewish folklore into a narrative about children’s response to the Holocaust. Although the playwright (1890-1962) herself is largely forgotten today, she was very involved in Yiddish cultural production in Warsaw in the 1910s and 1920s. After surviving World War II, she moved to Paris and finished her play Miryeml, which she had begun before the war. In 1954, Miryeml received the Alexander Shapiro Prize for best Yiddish drama from the World Jewish Culture Congress. 

In this talk, Sonia Gollance will discuss her translation-in-progress of Miryeml and selected texts about Arciszewska by contemporaries such as Y. Y. Trunk, Yosef Opatoshu, and Melech Ravitch. This talk will also address Gollance’s broader project as Managing Editor of Plotting Yiddish Drama (the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project’s database of English-language synopses of Yiddish plays) to locate and include works by women.

About the Speaker

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.