Original Creative Team

Avrom Sutzkever (1913 – 2010) was dubbed “the greatest poet of the Holocaust” by The New York Times. Born in Smorgon, he spent his childhood in Siberia as a refugee from the First World War. Thereafter he and his mother lived in Vilna, where he became a member of Yung-Vilne, a group of poets and painters forging a modernist ethos that resonates even today. During World War II, Sutzkever was active in Holocaust resistance, winning literary prizes in the Vilna Ghetto even as he worked to smuggle Jewish cultural treasures out of Nazi control. After the war he served as the Soviet delegation’s sole Jewish witness at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947 he settled in Israel where he founded and edited the journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), where many of NIGHT STORIES’ tales first appeared. In 1985 Sutzkever became the only writer to receive the Israel Prize for his work in Yiddish literature.

Shane Baker translated Waiting for Godot into Yiddish and has appeared both Off-Broadway and internationally in such shows as Bashevis’s Demons, Tevye Served Raw, Everett Quinton’s stagings of Charles Ludlam’s Galas and Conquest of the Universe or When Queens Collide, his solo show The Big Bupkis! A Complete Gentile’s Guide to Yiddish Vaudeville, as well as his own Yiddish translation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The New Yorker said of the translation, “Beckett’s play may finally have found its mother tongue.” Baker is a proud alumnus of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company. In 2020 he received the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award. 

Miryem-Khaye Seigel is a Yiddish singer, songwriter, actor, recording artist, and scholar in Yiddish music and culture who “exemplifies the attempt to bring a centuries-old language and culture into the contemporary world” (The New York Times). She has performed internationally and released her first CD of original and adapted songs Toyznt tamen = A thousand flavors in 2015. Miryem-Khaye is co-editor (with Alyssa Quint) of Women on the Yiddish Stage and a member of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project.

A veteran of both Yiddish and modernist world theatre, director Moshe Yassur, who was born in Iassy, Romania (the cradle of the Yiddish theatre), worked for several years with Jean-Marie Serreau at the Théatre de Babylone in Paris, taking part often as assistant director in several world premiere productions of Beckett and Ionesco. In New York Yassur was a protege of Woody King Jr., directing at the New Federal Theatre, and has more recently helmed acclaimed Yiddish productions of Bashevis’s Demons, Death of a Salesman and Waiting for Godot. Beate Hein Bennett holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. She co-directed Bashevis’s Demons and served as Production Dramaturg and designer for the Yiddish Waiting for Godot and Death of a Salesman.