You Don't Have To Be Jewish Bm.

JULIE WIENER

Special to the Jewish News

JEN

3/17
2005

44

I is a Wednesday evening at Manhattan's 92nd
Street Y, and the audience, waiting for a lec-
ture on "Great Dramas of the Yiddish Stage,"
is about what you'd expect: a handful of middle-
aged and elderly Jews, many with Yiddish-inflect-
ed New York accents.
Settling into folding chairs in this cheerful
orange nursery-school classroom decorated with
children's finger paintings and construction paper
dreidels (the room doubles as a spot for adult
classes), the students take off their coats, put their
bags down and chat amiably about their grand-
children's latest antics.
Now comes the surprise: the teacher. For
starters, she's only 30. And not only is she not
Jewish, this Catholic girls-school grad is as gentile
as you can look: tall, blonde, fair — and when
she talks, it is with a faint Irish brogue.
Meet Caraid O'Brien, one of America's leading

champions of the Yiddish theater, the lively and
influential chapter in cultural history that peaked
in the 1920s but had almost entirely vanished just
a few decades later, thanks mainly to the
Holocaust and American Jewish assimilation.
Bright, charismatic, fluent in Yiddish and
impressively well read, O'Brien is adding new
vitality to a subject most Jews her age associate
with great-grandparents.
"People haven't realized this is one of the great
literary traditions," says O'Brien, in an interview
later over coffee at Starbucks, adding that wide-
spread ignorance of the subject "boggles my
mind."
"It's such a huge part of American culture," she
says, noting that Yiddish theater had a major
influence on Broadway and Hollywood.
In addition to teaching and writing on the his-
tory of the Yiddish theater (she hopes to write a
book on the topic one day), O'Brien has translat-
ed, produced and acted in several Yiddish plays.
In 1999, O'Brien translated and helped pro-

duce God of Vengeance, a controversial Sholem
Asch play set in a brothel. O'Brien's version was
staged at Show World, a former peep show near
Times Square. Despite the seedy venue, complete
with poles used in strip shows, the production
attracted a diverse audience.
"We had grandmothers at Show World,"
O'Brien laughs.

The Early Years

The Irish-born O'Brien moved to the United
States at age 12 and caught the Yiddish bug when
she read several Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories
in her high-school American literature class.
"I wasn't relating to Hemingway and American
epics, but I could relate to the humor, poverty
and influence of religion in these stories," she
recalls.
Soon, O'Brien was reading everything else by
Singer and his brother, Israel Joshua.
Then she discovered a translation of My