Caraid O'Brien | |
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| Born | December 20, 1974 Galway, Ireland |
| Language | Translator |
Caraid O'Brien (born December 20, 1974 [1] ) is an Irish-born, US-based writer, performer, translator and theater director. Although she is from an Irish Catholic background, she is best known for her work with material originally written in Yiddish. Theater J Artistic Director Adam Immerwahr has praised "her superb theatrical ear and facility for transforming Yiddish work into relevant contemporary text." [2]
O’Brien was born in Galway in 1974, one of five children of Michael and Patricia Gill O'Brien. [1] Her maternal grandfather was an Irish-speaker [1] from the Aran Islands [3] and, by O'Brien's account, her paternal grandmother was a great storyteller. [3] Her family were back and forth several times between Ireland and Eastern Massachusetts. [3] When she was 12, her family moved definitively to Hingham, Massachusetts. [1] Her father, Michael O'Brien, is a pathologist; as of 2023 he is an emeritus professor at Boston University. [4]
She discovered Yiddish literature and Jewish American literature as a teenager, as part of her high school studies of American literature. At the time, she already had a strong interest in Irish literature, [3] but teacher Catherine Doyle assigned their class stories by Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick (all of whom wrote in English but were either Yiddish-speakers or a generation removed), as well as Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the latter in translation, of course. [1] [3] This led her to look at the Boston Public Library to seek further Yiddish literature in translation, [3] among which she discovered Chaim Grade. [1] [3] [5] Grade's My Mother's Sabbath Days inspired her to decide to learn Yiddish. [1] While in high school, she also learned enough French to read a novel by Albert Camus in the original. [3]
As early as elementary school O'Brien had an interest in acting. [3] In her all-girls high school, Notre Dame Academy in Hingham, she played male leads in plays by Oscar Wilde. [3] She relates that her parents were relieved, though, when she didn't choose to major in theater in college: "[T]wo of [my siblings] majored in French literature… And if I wanted to learn Yiddish instead of French, that was fine with them." [3]
As an undergraduate at Boston University, [5] unable at first to find any opportunity to study Yiddish, she studied some Hebrew and became comfortable with the Hebrew alphabet, in which Yiddish is written. [3] She discovered from a poster the possibility to learn Yiddish as a summer intern at the Yiddish Book Center in Western Massachusetts. [3] After completing that internship, taking advantage of her now-decent knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish, she was able to spend a year studying at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taking advanced Yiddish literature classes with Avraham Novershtern, and Nati Cohen, and Mikhl Borden. [3] She later said of this experience, "I understood what I understood. But it was a lot. It really just kind of dipped me into deep waters, and I gained a tremendous amount from it." [3]
A class on Yiddish theater taught by Ruth Wisse (then chair of the Yiddish department at Harvard) introduced O'Brien to Sholem Asch's play God of Vengeance , about a Jewish brothel-owner whose bid for respectability crumbles when his daughter, whom he has kept entirely away from men, becomes sexually involved with one of the prostitutes in the brothel. [3] [6] O'Brien would later write a new translation of that play. [1] Her main paper for that class was on "Yoshke Muzikant" ("Yoshke the Musician") and the many versions of it presented over the years by Joseph Buloff of the Vilna Troupe, perhaps the most prominent literary/art theater group to perform in Yiddish. [3] While she was researching for that paper in the Yiddish theater archives at Harvard, [3] [5] librarian Charles Berlin offered to connect her to Buloff's widow Luba Kadison, also a former member of the Vilna Troupe (and daughter of its founder Leib Kadison [7] ), then still alive and in New York, who became one of O'Brien's mentors. [5] For many years, the two met on a weekly basis. [3] [5]
After college O'Brien moved to New York City and began getting some roles as an actress. [1] Her initial intentions were not at all specific to Yiddish theater, but as she put it in 2019, "I had the passport, because I spoke the language… The same thing happened in college. I studied with Elie Wiesel, because I spoke Yiddish. I spoke to Saul Bellow in Yiddish. I spoke to Harold Bloom in Yiddish…" [3] Besides acting, she worked at NYU, putting together a website on Yiddish theater, which included translating books and posting excerpts. [3] Disappointed with a translation of God of Vengeance she saw staged at a venue on Ludlow Street, she began work on a translation of her own in collaboration with theater director Aaron Beall, creator of the New York International Fringe Festival. [8] This resulted in a November 1999 production at Show World, historically a porn venue at Eighth Avenue at 43rd Street, [1] portions of which were still showing porn at the time; under zoning-based pressure from the administration of mayor Rudy Giuliani, they were required to devote some of their stages to "cultural" programming. [3] O'Brien played the prostitute Hindl; years later, in 2017 she played the role of Sarah, the brothel-owner's wife, in New Yiddish Rep's Yiddish-language production of God of Vengeance at the off-Broadway Theatre at St. Clement's Church [5] with Beall directing. [3] She also translated Asch's Motke the Thief for a 2005 production by Beall at the University Settlement on Eldridge Street. [1]
Besides her friendship with Luba Kadison, O'Brien also got to know the famous Yiddish musical theater tenor Seymour Rexite, and in the last five years of his life helped organize Rexite's recordings and papers for Harvard University. [9]
Beginning in 2002, O'Brien directed the James Joyce "Bloomsday" readings at Symphony Space. [1] When WBAI's "Radio Bloomsday" split from that in 2008, [10] she went with the radio side and became the director of the annual radio broadcast, where she also performs Molly Bloom's soliloquy (the last chapter of Ulysses ). [11] [12] [13] In 2017, she performed in the first-ever Yiddish-language production of Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros at the Castillo Theatre on Theatre Row. [14]
In 2022 the Jewish-American Theater J and the Irish-American arts organization Solas Nua, both based in Washington D.C., co-commissioned O'Brien to translate and adapt Sholem Asch's previously untranslated play Rabbi Doctor Silver; this was Theater J's first commissioned translation. [2]
Despite her immersion in Yiddish literature and culture, O'Brien remains (in her own words) "culturally… Catholic…, more Irish than anything." [1] She analogizes certain aspects of the status of Jews in America to that of the Irish in the British Isles. In an interview, she talked about how, in first translating God of Vengeance, "my model for how I wanted it to be was John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World " (written one year before God of Vengeance), where Synge immersed himself for several months in the Gaelic-speaking Aran Islands, then wrote his play in English with some Irish Gaelic words. As O'Brien puts it, "[I]t was a translation," and its boisterous plot constituted "a 'shande far di goyim [embarrassment in front of the Gentiles],'… but in an Irish context. And so I wanted to do that with Sholem Asch." [3]
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Tevye the Dairyman, also translated as Tevye the Milkman is the fictional narrator and protagonist of a series of short stories by Sholem Aleichem, and their various adaptations, the most famous being the 1964 stage musical Fiddler on the Roof and its 1971 film adaptation. Tevye is a pious Jewish dairyman living in the Russian Empire, the patriarch of a family including several troublesome daughters. The village of Boyberik, where the stories are set, is based on the town of Boyarka, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. Boyberik is a suburb of Yehupetz, where most of Tevye's customers live.
Sholem Asch, also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States.
Yiddish theatre consists of plays written and performed primarily by Jews in Yiddish, the language of the Central European Ashkenazi Jewish community. The range of Yiddish theatre is broad: operetta, musical comedy, and satiric or nostalgic revues; melodrama; naturalist drama; expressionist and modernist plays. At its height, its geographical scope was comparably broad: from the late 19th century until just before World War II, professional Yiddish theatre could be found throughout the heavily Jewish areas of Eastern and East Central Europe, but also in Berlin, London, Paris, Buenos Aires and New York City.
The Vilna Troupe, also known as Fareyn Fun Yiddishe Dramatishe Artistn and later Dramă şi Comedie, was an international and mostly Yiddish-speaking theatre, one of the most famous in the history of Yiddish theater. It was formed in and named after the city of Vilnius (Vilna) in the Russian Empire, later capital city of Lithuania. Distinctly Modernist, and strongly influenced by Russian literature and by the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski, their travels in Western Europe and later to Romania played a significant role in the dissemination of a disciplined approach to acting that continues to be influential in the present day.
David Kessler (1860–1920) was a prominent actor in the first great era of Yiddish theater. As a star Yiddish dramatic performer in New York City, he was the first leading man in Yiddish theater to dispense with incidental music.
Peretz Hirshbein ; 7 November 1880, Kleszczele, Grodno Governorate – 16 August 1948, Los Angeles) was a Yiddish-language playwright, novelist, journalist, travel writer, and theater director. Because his work focused more on mood than plot, he became known as "the Yiddish Maeterlinck". His work as a playwright and through his own short-lived but influential troupe, laid much of the groundwork for the second golden age of Yiddish theater that began shortly after the end of World War I. The dialogue of his plays is consistently vivid, terse, and naturalistic. Unusually for a Yiddish playwright, most of his works have pastoral settings: he had grown up the son of a miller, and made several attempts at farming.
Yiddish literature encompasses all those belles-lettres written in Yiddish, the language of Ashkenazic Jewry which is related to Middle High German. The history of Yiddish, with its roots in central Europe and locus for centuries in Eastern Europe, is evident in its literature.
Alexander Asro was a film and theatre actor. He was a member of the Vilna Troupe and appeared in several comedic films in the United States.
Seymour Rexite, originally Shayele Rechtzeit, was a Polish American singer and actor. He was a significant figure in Yiddish theatre in the United States, and with his wife Miriam Kressyn he performed on the radio over four decades, performing pop standards in Yiddish. He also served as president of the Hebrew Actors' Union.
Miriam Kressyn, one of the "First Ladies of the Yiddish Theater", acted and sang on stage, film and radio; she wrote plays as well.
Joseph Rumshinsky (1881–1956) was a Jewish composer born near Vilna, Lithuania. Along with Sholom Secunda, Alexander Olshanetsky and Abraham Ellstein, he is considered one of the "big four" composers and conductors of American Yiddish theater.
Joachim Neugroschel was a multilingual literary translator of French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish. He was also an art critic, editor, and publisher.
Shmuel Niger was a Yiddish writer, literary critic and historian and was one of the leading figures of Yiddish cultural work and Yiddishism in pre-revolution Russia.
Luba Kadison Buloff was a Lithuanian Jewish actress, active for decades in Yiddish theatre, in both Europe and the United States.
Indecent is a 2015 American play by Paula Vogel. It recounts the controversy surrounding the play God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, which was produced on Broadway in 1923, and for which the producer and cast were arrested and convicted on the grounds of obscenity.
Joseph Buloff was a Jewish actor and director known for his work in Broadway and Yiddish theatre. He received the Itzik Manger Prize for contributions to Yiddish letters in 1974.
Eleanor Reissa is an American actress, singer, theatre director, playwright, librettist, choreographer, translator, and author based in New York City. She works and performs in English and Yiddish speaking stages, and also interprets and performs Yiddish theatre and songs.
Miriam Orleska was an actress in the Vilna Yiddish theatre, best known for her role as Leah in S. Ansky's The Dybbuk.
"Ikh Hob Dikh Tsu Fil Lib" is one of the most popular love songs written in Yiddish.
Chaim Shmuel Towber was an American and Canadian actor of Jewish-Ukrainian descent, best known as the author of the song "I Love You So Much".
