Caraid O'Brien Transcript, Episode 10:
Eitan: Welcome to the MetaShtetl, this is Eitan Binstock. I inherited the Yiddish language and culture from my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, and I am interested in exploring the way it’s been flourishing in the 21st century. Specifically, how technology is being used to spread and proliferate Yiddish worldwide. Before I welcome my next guest, please note the full translations of the podcast can be viewed on my blog themetashtetl.com, feel free to follow along, and thank you for coming along on this adventure with me. And now for my next guest, Caraid O’brien, who wears hats that include actress, writer, translator, director, as we switch to the language we both hold dear. Caraid, undzer bekovediker gast, adank farn aynteyl nemen in der podcast. Zay azoy gut un leygt zikh for farn oylum.
Caraid O’brien speaking, I hail from Ireland, I was born in Goway but I lived in Massachusetts. I began learning Yiddish at the National Yiddish Book Center with teachers including Daniel Kokin, and after that I travelled to Israel and I studied Yiddish literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I am an actress, and director and writer, translator, I work a lot in Yiddish Theater and in other theaters also.
Eitan: Thank you, switching back to English here which is a first for this podcast, but each episode has brought with it many firsts and that’s what makes this the adventure that it is. Dr. Daniel Stein Kokin, for those listening who don’t know, teaches and runs the school library at Ramaz Upper School where I am a student. He has been a mentor to me for this project and introduced me to some of my guests including caraid Obrien, although I’ll let you tell us more about that. First, tell us a little bit about your personal history. Where are you from? Where did you study and what is your profession? What role did Yiddish play in your childhood years, if any?
This is Caraid Obrien I’m an actress a writer a translator a director, I work in theater a lot. I was born in Ireland but I got introduced to Yiddish Literature not through my family but through translation and there was one book, Chaim Grada’s, “My Mother’s Sabbath Days” that inspired me to learn how to speak Yiddish and read Yiddish. My family – my grandfather was from an Irish-speaking Island off the coast of Ireland, The Aerin Islands, Irish Moore, and I grew up with Irish-Gaelic as a part of my life, and I understood its influence on Anglo-Irish literature, and I knew that what made Irish writers really great was their connection to the Irish language that poked through their English language writing. And so when I was a high school student in Massachusetts and I began reading American literature I noticed that the writers that I really liked like Phillip Roth and Cynthia Ozyk and Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud were Yiddish speakers and their descendants, and Henry Roth’s Call is Sleep was another exciting book for me that had Yiddish in it, and I saw that the relationship to Yiddish in American Language and Literature of 20th century American culture was similar to the Irish language influence on Anglo-Irish literature. But nobody was really talking about it and no one seemed to know other than Bashevis these other writers that I was discovering, like Chaim Grada, in translation at The Boston Public Library, so that began to really interest me and I had been studying French and Spanish in high school and reading literature in the original language and I was very excited by how different a text was in translation vs in the original so I really got into my head that if I really wanted to fully experience this literature I had to learn Yiddish. And then when I went to Boston University, I wanted to take a Yiddish class but they didn’t have any so I started with Hebrew and I started looking for Yiddish classes to take and everyone told me it was a bad idea and I couldn’t do it, and I was going to a meeting with my advisor at the School of Theology, and there was a poster on the wall that said “get paid to learn Yiddish.” And I couldn’t believe it! I was willing to pay to learn Yiddish and here I was, the opportunity to get paid to learn Yiddish, and it was an advertisement for an internship at the Yiddish Book Center, and so I applied and I was accepted and that’s where I met your teacher Daniel Kokin, who was an intern with me and there was 10 of us and it was all wonderful, interesting students who had decided to learn Yiddish and we studied with Robert Shapiro, who I think taught at your high school as well. And then we worked with Yiddish books, shelving them and organizing them, and opening donation boxes for the rest of the day. It was really a wonderful, wonderful summer.
Eitan: That internship program still exists at Amherst, and I actually visited the Yiddish Book Center with my family on a road trip a few years ago and got to see firsthand the results of the work of the Zamlers like you, who help collect and sort donated Yiddish books. I’m fascinated by the fact that as a high school student you picked up on threads connecting Yiddish to mainstream American literature. And this didn’t come from knowing any Yiddish at all – not the language and not the culture – but because you were raised with a different non-mainstream language, and so your ears and mind were trained in a way to pick up on how a minority culture can influence the mainstream culture its embedded in. Tell us more about how Yiddish created authentically American experiences for you.
3:38 For me, Yiddish is a huge part of American culture, especially in the 20th century. It shaped the theater, it shaped the literature, even just a simple example of this: when I went to BU and started learning Yiddish I was able to speak to Elie Weisel in Yiddish, I was able to speak to Saul Bellow in Yiddish, I was able to speak to Pearl Bloom in Yiddish. So these major cultural figures I had access to just because I could speak Yiddish and they were interested to know why and how I came to the language.
Eitan: yes because it’s a unique trajectory. So Yiddish opened a door for you here.
4:09 – So it really opened a doorway into a deeper understanding of American culture and I was curious, having not been born here, even though I grew up in both Ireland and America, I wanted to know what was American culture; what made it different from Irish culture. Seemingly both countries spoke English but it a different kind of English but they were very different cultures. And it seemed in my teenage mind that -you know -Yiddish was a huge force in shaping American culture and American art, and American theater. It was - you know my senior year of college I took a Yiddish theater class with Ruth Weisse, I had always done theater throughout my life and it was a really exciting part of my life, my favorite activity for sure, and we studied God of Vengeance by Sholem Ash, we studied Lubi Catison and Joseph Buloff these incredible actors who were part pf the Vilna Troop, and I became really interested in the play that Buloff directed in Romania in 1924 that influenced the young teenage Eugene Eanesco, and I was like wow, it’s just amazing that nobody knows that much about Yiddish theater or the mainstream world kind of disregards it, and here it was influencing a playwrite like Eanesco, and they did a play in Brooklyn in 1952 they a Yiddish translation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman that one critic said returned Miller’s play to its Yiddish original.
Eitan: I love that line, it’s like the critic could get into Miller head and sense the translation Miller was doing from Yiddish to English when he wrote the play. That happens to me sometime when I’m talking to my grandmother, we talk in Yiddish to eachother but if I hear her speaking English, sometimes – because of her choice of words or the intonation or whatever – I know which Yiddish words she is translating in her mind in order to express herself in English. It seems like that kind of idea. And what that reveals is that if you know all languages that influenced a piece of writing or an author, you can understand it on such a much deeper level than just the published words….Another thing you touched on that is painful to me but it needs to be talked about, is the fact that you noticed American culture disregarding its Yiddish influences, not knowing about it or not caring about it, until people like you shined a light on it. Can you talk more about that-
5:38 - So they were having a huge influence on American culture but most people didn’t know about them. And the librarian at Harvard, Charles Berlin, told me that Lubi was still alive and living in new York, so I go visit her, I took the greyhound bus to New York, and I was met with this incredibly vibrant artistic woman who lived an incredibly artistic life since she was seven years old and her family started the Vilna troop during world war 1 in Lithuania, and her home was just humming with artistic creativity and all the incredible conversations that happened in that room and the walls were full of paintings by Manny Katz Arbet Blatis, and Rubin Rubin, and her own father an incredible painter, and theater creator named Leib Catison, and many of the paintings were of her and of her daughter Barbara. So I really developed a friendship with this wonderful creative woman at end of her artistic life when I was at the beginning of mine. And so when I moved to New York to work in theater, she became my closest friend and my confidant and my teacher and we studied many classics of the Yiddish theater together and including Sholem Ash’s Got a Vengeance, and Shai Onsky’s The Dibbuk, and she had been in the original production of The Dibbuk and had performed Leah all over the world, so she really gave me an education into the literary side of the Yiddish theater.
Eitan – wow, well the phrase, “if these walls could talk” comes to mind, and my family is part Lithuanian too, just something I thought of listening to you. So tell us more about your move to New York and how your career in theater grew there.
7:08 - And then I got a job because I spoke Yiddish writing a website for NYU on the Yiddish Theater. I don’t think anybody there was too much interested in the Yiddish theater, they were just trying out different technologies and they picked the Yiddish theater as a subject because they felt it would be easier to avoid rights issues about the artists’ work. And so I called up the Hebrew Actors Union, and Seymore Reksite, the incredible singer and union man and actor, and radio personality was on the other side of the line and I met him in his apartment in the West Village at 1 University place and this was another incredible apartment just bursting with theatrical archives and scripts and reel-to-reel tapes and wall and sack machines and he played me some of his radio shows and he told me all about the work that he did with his wife, Miriam Cressen, they had a radio show for over 50 years for Maxwell House coffee one of the longest running radio shows in world history with the same sponsor and on the same radio station WEBD and with the same hosts, and Seymore was my education into the Yiddish musical stage and how much it influenced the Broadway stage, it was just another tributary of the American Theater that again people dismissed, never mind that it had 12 Broadway size houses in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan alone, and then there was many more Yiddish theaters in Boston and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Los Angeles and Canada and South America and Europe and Eastern Europe, and Russia and the Ukraine. It was this huge global movement of world theater. I mean Yiddish theater was not one style of theater. There were musicals or melodramas there were biblical dramas, there was agiprop theater there was avant guard theater, there was experimental theater and symbolist theater, and when I was a young actor I was talking to other theater makers about the Yiddish theater, and people either knew nothing about it even though we were working on the Lower East Side in like sixty-seat theaters and the Yiddish theaters on the lower east side were like 3,000-seat theaters or bigger even sometimes, and so I thought that was very curious and so I kept trying to talk about it – the longest running repertory company in New York City was Maury Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater on second avenue and 12th street it’s a movie theater now. And some of those actors became a part of the group theater and Stella Adler was one of those actors and she became one of the greatest acting teachers of the 20th century who taught Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty and so many others so you just had to scratch the surface…
Eitan – it’s so hard to fathom a world where Yiddish is that widespread, and here in my own hometown. It’s like there was a golden age where Yiddish was – if not quite mainstream, then at least a hugely present minority, but as soon as it receded in the second half of last century, so did the awareness of it. But it’s there in both literature and theater.
9:50 - I mean I knew already how much Yiddish culture and language had influenced American letters in terms of literature but now I saw that its influence on theater was even greater if that was possible. These were so many of the creators of Second Avenue, Broadway, or Tin Pin Alley, the music writing part of American theatrical life, the song writing part. They all had the same biographies: they were Yiddish speakers, immigrants to America or first generation who learned art and music at the settlement houses on the Lower East Side and then they would make a decision: some people would go to Tin Pin Alley, some would go to Broadway, and some would stay on second avenue. You think of Irving Berlin, the most quintessential American composer, and he was born Yishaia Bialin in Siberia, a Yiddish speaker, and you know Seymore and Miriam would translate and perform the hit songs from Broadway, all the hit musicals, or the popular songs, they would translate them into Yiddish and it fit beautifully. And so many of the great composers like Irving Ceasar who did Tea for Two, he was a Yiddish speaker as well. So Seymore had the same accompany-ness as Peri Como the great singer and that was Dick Manning, but when he worked with Seymore he was known as Sam Medoff, so even some of these artsist had a Yiddish name and an English name, but Semore and Perry Como would record the same songs one in English and the other in Yiddish. And just to give an idea of what a career was like on the Yiddish stage, in the 30s Seymore did a show on Second Avenue, he did 18 live radio shows a week, then he did the midnight show at Billy Rose’s casino di Paris which was THE supper club of studio 54, and it’s now a Broadway house, and he was the lead singer and there would be the Zigfield Folly Girls dancing topless behind him, Buck and Bubbles, a great tap routine, Eleanor Powell the movie star, it was the top talent of the day and he was part of that. So Yiddish actors, because their audience was more limited, and the entrance into the Hebrew Actors Union was notoriously difficult, they worked a lot more than their Broadway counterparts. A Broadway actor might do one show a year, and a Yiddish actor would do like 12 shows a repertory for the same company. So it was quite a prolific career and education for any artist -the opportunity to work in the Yiddish theater and you had the opportunity to world all over the world too because up until World War II there were Yiddish speakers all over the world, hungry and excited to be entertained.
Eitan – I was born 80 years too late to see that excitement firsthand, at least on that scale, but that’s why we’re here doing this podcast. So tell us, how did your excitement for theater and acting develop into translating and directing?
12:43 – so when I was a young actor, I was in my early 20s, I saw a production of God of Vengeance, I had read a play in college and it was a great play it was a sexy play about a Jewish brothel owner who was trying to have a Torah scroll written and his daughter has a lesbian affair with the prostitute downstairs, it was written in 1907 I just thought it was so exciting and daring. And I saw a production of it that was terrible and wasn’t the play that Sholem Ash wrote. And I was complaining about this to a collaborator of mine and he suggested I stop complaining and translate it myself. So that’s how I began translating plays into Yiddish and the first show that I did was God of Vengeance and we staged it in 1999 in Times Square at Showworld, which was a world famous strip club. We staged it on the go-go stage, and it went really well and we got a lot of publicity for it, and then I’ve since translated 8 plays by Sholem Ash, including Mock a Ganef, which is the show that brought Palmuni from the Yiddish stage to Broadway -palmuni is an academy award winning movie star. It was a psychological portrait of a criminal. I did a portrait called the Dead Man which you can listen to online, it takes place in Eastern Europe in 1919 during a flu epidemic after the Jewish communities have been destroyed and the veil between the living and the dead is very thin and a soldier comes back from the dead and tried to bring people to safety and it turns out that he’s bringing them to the cemetery, because that’s the only place that they’ll be safe. So he’s kicked out of the community and everybody attempts to rebuilt. It’s a really beautiful haunting play that we recorded in my living room during the pandemic – the covid pandemic – we recoded the actors one by one and I spliced them all together so it’s a very interesting play to listen to.
Eitan – your use of splicing is one important benefit technology brings to digital content -the idea that you can gather content from various times and locations and combine them so that the final product gives the listener or viewer the experience like the whole production crew came together to create a piece together when that’s not actually what happened. ok so back to the play -
14:35 - And then, having my favorite Sholem Ash play which was also online as a Radio Play’s On the Road to Zion, it’s a Jewish family getting together in Poland in 1905 to say goodbye to the grandparents who are moving to palestine. And everybody has a different idea of where Jewish life should go and is going. There’s a socialist democrat, there’s a young university student who doesn’t feel jewish at all she feels Polish, there’s a Zionist, there’s plenty of capitalists, there’s the traditionally religious, so it deals with a lot of the questions the Jewish community is facing today and I really love it would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Eitan – well the first thing I’ll say is that few things are scarier than drawing parallels between prewar Europe and current events because of course, for the Holocaust. But yes in terms of the issues at play in the play, without the Holocaust clouding my perception, the themes are timeless and a lot of fun to watch and identify with. In my school alone which is a relatively homogenous community, being that it’s a modern orthodox jewish day school, you’d find within it all the opinions that show up in the play, so if you looked at it within the greater jewish world, the voices represented would be even stronger I think. So, given how Yiddish has evolved during the first part of your career until now, where do you see it going?
15:17 – you know in terms of where I’ve seen Yiddish go in the past 30 years since I’ve been working in Yiddish, it’s really been so exciting, there are so many more artist working again in Yiddish, there’s a wonderful new documentary called “Welcome to Yiddishland” that I was a part of, that spot lit artists all over the world doing performances or music or new work in Yiddish. I think that for me, the life of the Yiddish artist is endless inspiring, historically, I mean these were artists who worked under all circumstances – whenever I would complain about how difficult it was to produce a play, Luba would tell me the story of how the Vilna Troop produced their first productions with a subsidy from the German Army, which was several sacks of potatoes to feed the starving actors, and they performed on an abandoned circus arena, and they became a legendary theatrical company that people are studying to this very day. So the message of that for me was that there’s never an excuse not to do your art, and yes there were artists such as Jacob P. Adler, Stella Adler’s father, or Boris Thomasevsky, the grandfather of Michael Tillson Thomas the composer-conductor, who made of money but there were plenty who didn’t, whether the were writers or ators, and maybe sometimes that money was short lived, and some did cross over and become famous like Paul Mooney or Joseph Buloff or Molly Pecan or actors like that. Sidney Lumet started as a kid in the Yiddish theater, his father Baruch Lumet was a playwright, Sydney is a very famous director, film director, so there are so many connections to like the classics of modern cinema that have a connection to Yiddish artistry, the Yiddish language, and the Yiddish way of looking at art, and the importance that Yiddish speakers gave to art and its creation like the poorest families had wonderful collections of books, and the poorest families went to see theater on a regular basis.
Eitan – well we are the people of the book, and that refers to THE book, the Torah of course, but I think it also means that we are a people of books – many books, we are a people about education and that’s an ancient Jewish value. We’ve literally been teaching our children to ask questions and learn, since we escaped from slavery in Egypt. We’re studious and cultural, as a people. And going back to your production of Road to Zion by Sholem Ash, encouraging education means encouraging a variety of opinions so in many ways we are the people of discourse and democracy and the exchange of ideas. And it’s the love of that learning and that discourse which encourages parents to keep libraries and take their children to the theater and so on. We are both learners and because of that we are also creators.
17:28 - And in terms of – we don’t have the calling to become artists to be rich and famous, that’s a story that we’re told – we become artists because we don’t know how to be anything else. We have something to say, we have a journey to go on, and we’re going to go on that at all costs. And that journey is heightened when you do it in a language that survived a genocide or a non dominant language, and you just go really deep, and you get a certain amount of privacy working in Yiddish because you don’t have to worry about that there’ll be too many eyes on you, you get to try out things, and it’s such an intellectual and literary language, and there’s other languages that are dancing with Yiddish, sometimes Russian words come in there, you know the way Yiddish affects English, English affects Yiddish, and so it’s really satsfying for a creative mind who also is an intellectual mind. And I got a lot of inspiration from working on Yiddish texts. I do other - for ten years I did marathon performances of James Joyce’s Ulysses, broadcast on the radio, or on stage at Symphony Space, so I enjoy a really meaty text, I enjoy playing with language, I enjoy going deep into character. One of the translations was very difficult for me when I started, but one of my rewards was, oh I’d have a great role to play. And the Yiddish actresses were incredibly impressive, many of them were also producers, sometimes they would divorce their just-as-famous husbands and then they would start rival theater companies on the same avenue and they’d be their own producers, sometimes their own lyricists or writers or directors, and the parts for Yiddish actresses were great, so translating a Yiddish play always meant that I’d have an exciting role to play at the end of it.
Eitan – so you approached each piece from various angles, I see that theme in the way you understand a piece of writing and also your contribution to art is similar – you’re deeply tied to it because you immerse yourself as a translator, writer, director and actor within the same piece.
19:26 - I think that Yiddish theater and the story of Yiddish and the story of Yiddish culture is a huge part of the American story, and that we can’t understand American culture without knowing how vastly Yiddish has influenced what we enjoy today. I worked with Jerry Stiller for many years and the character that he played on Seinfeld, you know George’s parents, I mean they remind me of a parent character in Dovid Pinsky’s play, Yankl Der Shmeed, Jake the Mechanic, there are these two parents who are always screaming at their kid in a way to get him to be better and of course that doesn’t work and the kid Yankl der Shmeed makes endless mistakes beause you can’s scream someone into a better life or being a different person. But they’re also very funny characters in this play and the levels of influence of Yiddish language and dynamics speech patterns and value systems and humor and the self deprecating nature of things, the influence of religion on the culture and on the language, the moving through poverty, all of this is reflected I think in a large part of American entertainment that we still enjoy.
Eitan – yes I think Seinfeld was a major part of another type of golden age of Jewish-American culture, but I see the connections you’re making. I’d like to ask your opinion about the role of technology within the world of Yiddish culture.
20:42 – one kind of technological development of Yiddish that I really appreciate is VerterBukh.org that’s an online dictionary; I have lots of dictionaries but I aways go there first and it’s so convenient and easy so that’s a wonderful addition and it’s so great that people can learn Yiddish online or on Duolingo.
Eitan – what is your mission with your work in Yiddish?
21:05 - for me, my mission is to tell the story of the Yiddish theater in a way that excites people and gives it its due as a huge tributary of the American theater. I think every theater program in America should have at least one class on the Yiddish theater and should be doing at least one play in Yiddish translation. I focused on Sholem Ash who is an extraordinary playwright perhaps the greatest Yiddish playwright, he wrote a dozen plays they were performed in Yiddish but also in the major theaters all over the world -in Max Rhinehart’s theater in Berlin, in the top theaters in Russia, you know on Broadway, he’s been translated into dozens of languages, and he was a Yeshiva school drop out who went to Warsaw from his little town Kutno, Poland, in his early twenties and made his mark. And he didn’t realize Yiddish was even a literature until he was a teenager and he came across a Yiddish magazine So it’s just full of these inspiring stories for how to create an artistic life under all circumstances. And I think that Ash is on the level of Chekov, and I’ve done 8 of his plays and I’d like to do many more of them, and I’d like them to be studied and read by everyone who is crafting a career on the meican stage or the global stage actually. I had the honor of working on the theater section of the global culture which is the new exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst massachusetts and if that exhibit had existed when I was your age, my whole life would have been different. It’s just such an explosion of creativity in Yiddish and the story of Yiddish and you have a sense of how dynamic and huge the theatrical scene was, and its an incredibly inspiring and informative exhibit and I hope you all get to go.
Eitan – that sounds in credible thank you for the recommendation.
23:05 – I hope this answers your questions and thanks for having me on, and Yiddish literature and theater needs a lot more translators and it’s an endless wellspring of inspiration and ideas for anyone who wants to create a great new play, especially one that’s rooted in Jewish history. And so many of the playwrites had incredible Jewish educations as well like you and your classmates are getting.
Eitan – yes I totally agree. Any final thoughts for the listeners?
23:34 - I think that Sholem Ash’s play should be studied in every Jewish school in terms of creating a conversation around the Jewish world in Poland in 1905 and comparing it to how it is in the present day and how much what was happening then has created the moment that we are in now.
Eitan – it’s kind of shocking that it needs to be suggested for Jewish day schools, let alone mainstream American education. But I agree with you it is a must for education today.
So thank you so much for having me on, you can go to the website of the Yiddish Book Center and you can listen to some of my radio plays, I also translated a memoir by Clara Clebenova who was a Russion jewish teenager in the early part of the 1900s who was part of the Maximalists who was an extreme political group that was fighting to overthrow the Russian government during the first Russian revolution, so I think you might enjoy that, she was 17, so you’re age, and what I life she led, my goodness. To know more about my work you can visit my website caraidobrien.com , and it has links to everything that’s available online as well as some more in dept material about my work, so thanks so much and we’ll talk again soon.
Eitan - Caraidobrien.com, check the blog for the exact spelling, and links to some of these incredible productions including “On the Road to Zion” by Sholem Ash which cannot be missed. Caraid: a groysn dank farn prekhtikn derklerung vegn ayer perzenlekhe meyse un vi Yiddish shpilt aza vikhtike role in velt-culture. Zayt gezunt un ikh hof oykh tsu kenen redn vayter in gikhn. Vareme grusn.