Published: 18 October 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
After sitting in a drawer for a century, a newly unearthed piece of theatre is finally having its moment
In 2010, Jeffrey Michael Brown was cleaning out the Long Island home of his late father, David, when he came across a school notebook with bands of inky Yiddish script. As he could not read Yiddish, he sought out a translator. He could already assume, however, that the notebook belonged to his grandmother, Lena Brown, who had arrived in the US in the late 19th century and had lived in an apartment in Brooklyn until she died in the 1940s.
It has turned out that one of the most powerful Yiddish plays of the 20th century -one of only a small number of Yiddish plays written by women, and one that expresses honest and difficult sentiments about marriage, motherhood, and reproductive rights - sat in a drawer for about a century only to have its moment now, as we contemplate American women’s newly curtailed reproductive freedoms.
The poetry of this moment would not be lost on the titular character of Brown’s Yiddish play, Sonia Itelson: Or, a Child, a Child, a tragedy set in the second decade of the 20th century in Jewish immigrant New York, which will be published next month.
While they don’t use the word “abortion,” the characters speak about or around abortion casually and with the shared knowledge that it is the key to their reproductive freedom. Perhaps precisely because she was writing for the drawer, Brown writes with a satisfying frankness about abortion as she touches on such issues as aging and adoption, and the effect of men’s desires on women’s own conflicting and conflicted desires.
Sonia Itelson: Or, a Child, a Child will be published next month by Bloomsbury alongside two other Yiddish plays written by women.
A lost great Yiddish abortion play (Tablet)
Photo: Yiddish theatre posters
