Mourning a lost future: Miryeml, a Yiddish Drama of Children in Wartime

Tea Arciszewska’s play Miryeml was heralded as a powerful memorial to the million children murdered in the Holocaust. Begun in Warsaw in the 1920s to commemorate the pogroms that followed the Great War largely in Ukraine, Miryeml was completed in the 1950s in Paris and awarded a prize for Best Yiddish Drama in New York. In this talk, Sonia Gollance will discuss her translation of this nearly-forgotten modernist masterpiece as part of a broader effort to uncover Yiddish plays by women.

Speaker's Bio:

Sonia Gollance is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at University College London. Her book, It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford UP, 2021), was a National Jewish Book Awards finalist. She co-edited a special issue of Feminist German Studies on 'When Feminism and Antisemitism Collide' and a special issue of In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies on 'M**der, Lust, and Laughter, or, Shund Theater'. Her translation of Tea Arciszewska’s play Miryeml was supported by a 2020-21 Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center.

Image credit: Image of Arciszews­ka from the 1958 edi­tion of . Image cour­tesy of the Yid­dish Book Cen­ter Steven Spiel­berg Dig­i­tal Yid­dish Library.

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