Reviving Yiddish Theater in London and Recovering Female Playwrights: An Interview with Sonia Gollance

Tamara Gleason Freidberg: How did the Season of Yiddish Theatre at JW3 in London, where your translation of Miryeml was performed, come into being? Can you tell me a little bit more about who you were collaborating with?

Sonia Gollance: The Season of Yiddish Theatre series was based on a collaboration between UCL, JW3, and the Yiddish Café Trust. I’d worked with the Yiddish Café Trust before on their immersive Yiddish Sof-Vokh, and they had put on Yiddish Open Mics with JW3, but this was the first time all three organizations had partnered together.

Through this collaboration, a group of London Yiddishists interested in developing a Yiddish theater troupe formed, including cultural historian Vivi Lachs, performer and Yiddish teacher Tamara Micner, Yiddish Café Trust chair Stephen Ogin, and noted actor and director David Schneider. London historically had a vibrant Yiddish theater scene on the East End, but we don’t currently have regular Yiddish theater performances. That being said, since moving to London three years ago, I’ve learned that theater is a strength of the local Yiddishist community. For instance, in 2021 my predecessor at UCL, Helen Beer, directed a Zoom reading of The King of Lampedusa – the biggest British Yiddish theater hit of all time, which was extremely popular with audiences during World War II. Hosted by the Parkes Institute, this performance was based on Katie Power’s dissertation research. The Yiddish Café Trust has also organized staged readings of Moshe Nadir plays in Yiddish as part of their Yiddish Open Mic series (it helps that Nadir translator Michael Shapiro is part of the local scene!).

In Winter 2022, shortly after we had started discussing possible Yiddish theater activities with JW3, I found out about a Knowledge Exchange grant offered by my employer, UCL. Essentially, a researcher at UCL could apply for funding (provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) to work with a community organization to do programming that would share their research with the public in a way that would also be beneficial for the research. Since I’m a Yiddish theater scholar who was translating a Yiddish play and hoping to see it performed in some form, the grant seemed like the perfect opportunity to support my research and the London Yiddish theater scene at the same time.

I applied with Steve (representing the Yiddish Café Trust) and JW3 staff for a grant to support a Yiddish theater series held at JW3. The series would include a staged reading of my translation of Tea Arciszewska’s Miryeml (since a performance would help me finetune my translation for future publication). Our hope was that this series would help build momentum for a Yiddish theater troupe. We received the grant, brought in Vivi and Tamara M. as part of the artistic team, and created a series that involved three performances and a Yiddish theater workshop in the first few months of 2024. Along the way you came in as Postgraduate Administrator, Neil Marcus produced the series, David Schneider became part of our core team, etc.

TGF: Can you tell me a little bit more about the repertoire of the Yiddish season?

SG: Our goal was to have a varied program that would highlight the strengths of the London Yiddish theater community while also introducing a general audience to the range of Yiddish theater. The first production, in January, was a sold-out reprisal of Vivi Lach’s Secrets of the London Yiddish Stage, an entertaining medley of sketches, songs, and scenes that were popular in Yiddish theaters on London’s East End (which premiered to sold-out crowds the previous November as part of the Tsitsit Fringe Festival). Based on Vivi’s research, the production included lines in both English and Yiddish (with English surtitles) and featured New York Yiddish actor Shane Baker. (As a bonus, Shane also did a vort-kontsert, a recital of the Yiddish word, at UCL the following week.) Next, in February, we had a reading of Jacob Gordin’s celebrated drama Mirele Efros, sometimes called the Yiddish Queen Lear, with Shakespearean director Richard Beecham and West End actors, followed by Yiddish extracts performed by David and Tamara M. and a Q&A with David, Vivi, and me chaired by Tamara M. A few days later, I got to assist Tamara M. in leading a Yiddish theater workshop that focused on Mirele Efros. Then, in early March, we had a staged reading of my translation of Tea Arciszewska’s modernist masterpiece Miryeml, directed by Leo Doulton. As far as we know, this was the first time time Miryeml was performed in any language.

TGF: How did you decide to translate Miryeml?

SG: I’m developing a project on women who wrote plays in Yiddish, and decided I should also translate a play by a woman writer. Up until Fall 2022, to my knowledge, there were no published English translations of Yiddish plays by women. Even now, as far as I know, there are only five published English translations of Yiddish plays by women (including Katie Brown’s Bankrupt, which was included in Secrets of the London Yiddish Stage). There are also, to my knowledge, only two academic articles about Yiddish plays by women (one by Debra Caplan and one by me). I’ve made a point of including plays by women in the Digital Yiddish Theatre’s Plotting Yiddish Drama database, and initiatives such as the Folksbiene’s Yiddish Women Playwrights Festival (curated by Sabina Brukner) and the Yiddish Book Center’s Translation Fellowship have also promoted awareness of plays by women. But there’s still a lot more to do, especially when it comes to kunst theater.

My goal was to translate a critically-acclaimed play and sidestep the question that frequently dogs people who engage in recovery scholarship: “but was it good?” As a scholar and teacher, I spend a lot of time making the case for the significance of popular literature, but here I was hoping to find something that was important because of its literary qualities, not its authorship or historical interest. Bibliographer David Mazower introduced me to Miryeml on a tour of the Yiddish Book Center where he showed us particularly beautiful books (the 1959 edition of Miryeml is really gorgeous). I was fascinated by her life story, and when I took the play home and read it, I realized it was worth investing the time to translate Miryeml.

Arciszewska was an actress, theater company founder, and arts patron in early twentieth century Warsaw, and she spent several decades writing Miryeml. When she began work on it, in the 1920s, her apparent goal was to represent the trauma experienced by children in the pogroms that followed World War I. But in the 1950s, when she finally published it, her contemporaries regarded it as a memorial to the children murdered in the Holocaust. Both ambitiously modernist and deeply folkloric, Miryeml won a prize for best Yiddish drama from the Congress for Jewish Culture in 1954, four years before her play was first published. My translation was supported by a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship, and I was fortunate to work closely with Caraid O’Brien as my mentor.

TGF: What were the biggest challenges while translating Miryeml?

SG: The rhymes! Miryeml is an incredible character, an adolescent orphan who is described as both mentally ill and as a prophetess. She scares the other children with her morbid comments, which are frequently delivered in rhyme, but she also has a lot of emotional range. Trying to make the rhymes sing in English, and to make all the dialogue suit the characters and work out loud, was a big undertaking. Miryeml delivers speeches that are punctuated with rhymes, and she also responds in rhyme to the lines of other characters. I read all of my translation out loud to my mom (mostly over Zoom) and also had sessions with friends in London where we read the whole translation out loud together to see if it sounded right (and not too American for British ears). In the end, the rhymes were one of the things audiences appreciated the most about the reading.

TGF: What were the biggest challenges staging Miryeml?

SG: Dr. N. Shverdlin, the Vice President of the Yiddish Writers Union, once wrote that he doubted Miryeml could ever be staged – even though he read his copy with great enthusiasm. It has something like fourteen different settings, a large cast, involves a Greek-style choir and shadowy Symbolist figures, and ends in a somewhat mystical realm with an almost untranslatable final line. Leo, the director of the London reading, once described it to the cast as a “beast of a play.” Fully staged and choreographed, it would probably take about three hours. And yet, the full story arc – with its themes of constant dislocation, increasing detachment from reality, and memorialization of East European Jewish culture in the Yiddish word – is truly incredible. I was very happy to leave the decisions of how to cast all the characters (with a limited number of actors) and how much of the script to perform up to the directors, and was really impressed with how they interpreted this rich and complex work.

TGF: I was really struck by the portrayal of children playing and imagining new worlds in the midst of war in a time of peril. Was this something that weighed on you when you were preparing for the reading?

SG: Absolutely. It’s been really uncanny working on this play over the past few years. I did most of the initial draft during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the group of children and their adult relatives trying to survive together felt a bit like a bubble to me. Like so many of us at that time, the adult characters were terribly concerned about their children’s future (and also a bit overwhelmed to be dealing with their antics and needs constantly). Revising the translation in a post-October 7 world, when so many of us are thinking about the plight of children in war (regardless of our specific political views), has also been really powerful. The children in Miryeml spend a lot of time underground in cellars, many of them are orphans, they play games that reflect the violence they’ve experienced, and at one point they declare that it is Simkhes toyre (October 7 also fell on this holiday). The fact that Arciszewska’s characters never say who is persecuting them or why makes Miryeml feel universal, even though most of the characters are very clearly Hasidic Jews.

As someone who often researches topics – like social dancing – that might seem at first glance to be somewhat removed from political concerns, the timeliness of this play is a kind of jarring experience. The fact that it is timely makes it easier to make a case for the importance of Arciszewska’s magnum opus, of course, but I also hate the fact that the suffering of children during war is still so relevant today.

How were the performances in NYC and in London similar or different?

Both of the performances had really amazing directors, who invested a tremendous amount of time into getting to know Arciszewska’s work, but their interpretations were very different.

Leo Doulton, the director of the London reading, is an opera director who also has a sideline helping academics (including Jewish studies academics) bring things they found in the archives to life. Leo hadn’t directed Yiddish theater before, but he’s the kind of person who asks for a reading list and UCL library access to be able to properly understand how the play might have been performed had it premiered in the 1950s. His meticulous reading of the script also gave me more insights into the plot arc and the different characters. I attended all of the rehearsals, both to act as Yiddish and Jewish studies consultant and to hear how naturally my translation worked for the actors. We had eight actors (all women, several of whom will hopefully be part of a London Yiddish theater troupe, such as series collaborator Tamara M.). Most of them played multiple characters, and we tried to perform as much of the script as we could in the available time. A lot of the play was staged, including a dance scene I choreographed and a fight scene.

The New York reading at YIVO was directed by Caraid O’Brien, a prominent Yiddish theater actor, director, and translator who already knew Miryeml quite well as my Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship mentor. She cut the script down more substantially to allow time for a Q&A with me, cut or combined characters so that the actors didn’t have to double up, didn’t stage as much (no dance or fight scenes), and cast a multigenerational group of actors, including several high school students and a child, as well as several actors with substantial Yiddish theater expertise, like Mikhl Yashinsky, Dylan Seders Hoffman, Rachel Botchan, and Alona Bach. Caraid decided to interpret the play more concretely as being set in Ukraine in 1919, and she used archival film recordings from this period between the scenes. The New York reading was also special because it was co-sponsored by the Congress for Jewish Culture, which had given Arciszewska the I. L. Peretz Prize 70 years before. In addition, this performance was hybrid, so we could share the reading with people who couldn’t make it to New York.

TGF: What are the next steps for Miryeml? What do you plan to do for Miryeml in the future?

SG: I’m on sabbatical in Fall 2024 and my main goal is to finish my manuscript for a scholarly edition of Miryeml, complete with my translation, a biographical introduction, and additional translations of short texts by and about Arciszewska. I also have several conference presentations about Arciszewska and Miryeml in the coming weeks and months, and I’m planning an article about Arciszewska’s essay about her first meeting with her mentor I. L. Peretz. I’d also love to do more performances of Miryeml in translation or in Yiddish, especially a fully staged version. We have video recordings of both the London and New York readings, which could be used to pitch the performance to theaters or festivals and apply for grants.

Vivi, Steve, David, Tamara M., and I are also using the momentum from the Yiddish theater season to work towards a future Yiddish theater troupe. We’re currently in the midst of a series of Yiddish theater workshops. Each workshop is facilitated by a different local Yiddish theater director and showcases a different topic, such as gesture or popular theater. My role in these workshops is primarily being host, since UCL is providing the room, but I’m hoping to do some workshop teaching based on my Yiddish dance experience in the future.