Product details
- ISBN 9781350320963
- Weight: 120g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 23 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In their English translation of the Yiddish play Mississippi, Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint have undertaken a work of cultural salvage.
Penned in 1935 by Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach, the play was performed on the Warsaw stage by the experimental Yiddish theatre company “Young Theater” (Yung Teatr) led by legendary director and drama theoretician Mikhl Weichert. Malach and Weichert were keen to depict a dramatic episode from contemporary life that reflected their humanistic and leftist political ideas as well as avant-garde theatrical practices.
Mississippi is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America. In her introductory essay, Quint treats the political aspirations that animated Malach and Weichert, and the vulnerability felt by European Jewry that it saw reflected in the experience of Black Americans.
Alyssa Quint is a writer based in New York City, USA. She is a Visiting Fellow at Yeshiva University, USA and Associate Editor at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (2019), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award. She is also the editor of two forthcoming volumes on the Yiddish theater - Women on the Yiddish Stage and Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis: a Critical Edition. She is a contributing editor of the online Digital Yiddish Theater Project and a curator of a number of exhibits at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where she served as senior scholar for many years.
Ellen Perecman holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Graduate-Center CUNY. She has published her research in neurolinguistics in scholarly journals and books and has
edited several volumes containing her work as well as the work of other researchers in the fields of neurology, neurolinguistics and the social sciences. Ellen trained as an actor with Julie Bovasso and Vivian Matalon and served as Producing Artistic Director of New Worlds Theatre Project, a company she founded to produce her English translations of neglected Yiddish plays. Her book, Ten Yiddish Plays in Translation, was published in 2020 and includes translations of plays by Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, I.D. Berkowitz, Peretz Hirshbein, H. Leivick and David Pinski. She is a native speaker of Yiddish. Ellen has translated Peretz Hirshbein’s memoir, “In the Course of Life,” which will be published in 2026.
Leib Malach (pen name of Leib Salzman, 1894-1936) was born in Zwolen, Poland where he received a traditional Jewish education. He moved to Warsaw as a teenager, supporting himself by working in various trades. His literary talents were discovered by Hersh Dovid Nomberg, who helped him publish his first ballad in 1915. He later became a prose writer and noted dramatist. He emigrated to Argentina in 1922, and traveled widely in South America. After his return to Poland in 1929, he continued to travel and write popular travel sketches. He lived in Mandate Palestine from 1934-35 and was active with the Labor Zionists. Many of his plays reflect his leftist politics and concern with social injustices. He died after an illness in a Paris hospital, aged 41.
