Mississippi
A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair
Leib Malach author Ellen Perecman translator Dr Alyssa Quint translator Dr Alyssa Quint editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:23rd Jul '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 23rd July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A historically contextualized original English translation of a 1935 Yiddish play by journalist and playwright, Leyb Malakh, which depicts the racial injustice of the Scottsboro Affair that unfolded in 1930s Alabama.
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.
‘This is a lucid and lively translation of a timely Yiddish play, one that asks difficult questions about allyship and the intersecting interests and conflicts of marginalized peoples. How do we see ourselves in the “other”? Can we see truly, or is our own image always foregrounded in our representation of others?’ * Barbara Henry, author of Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin’s Yiddish Drama (2011) *
‘Alyssa Quint and Ellen Perecman deserve high praise for bringing this artifact of interwar Warsaw to an English readership. A work of unapologetic agitprop depicting racism, imperialism, and capitalism for a working-class audience, the play illustrates how engaged Yiddish culture was with international politics as well as an aesthetic avant-garde. This will be an invaluable resource for teachers, performers, and devotees of Yiddish culture.’ * Marc Caplan, author of Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism (2021) *
‘Mississippi, available in English for the first time, should change our understanding of discussions about race in the 1930s. This sensitive translation by Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint, combined with Quint’s thoughtful and thoroughly researched introduction, will add a new artistic source to studies of Black history, Jewish history, and Yiddish theater.’ * Amelia Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine (2020) *
ISBN: 9781350320963
Dimensions: 196mm x 128mm x 14mm
Weight: 120g
128 pages