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The first in a playwright series by White Goat Press, Sholem Asch: Underworld Trilogy includes three of Asch’s Yiddish dramas – taking place in the world of the criminals and the literal underworld – that had successful and influential debuts on the Yiddish stage in the 1907, 1917, and 1922.

Translated by Caraid O'Brien

Item Special Note

About Caraid O'Brien

Born in Galway, Ireland Caraid O'Brien is a writer, performer, translator and director. Her translation from the Yiddish of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance directed by Obie award winner Aaron Beall "set Show World aflame" according to the Village Voice and was produced by the Rorschach Theatre in Washington D.C.

She is three time recipient of a new play commission from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for her contemporary adaptation of Dovid Pinski's Yiddish classic Jake the Mechanic as well as the first ever English translations of Sholem Asch's underworld plays Motke Thief (University Settlement, 2005) and The Dead Man (Eldridge Street Project, 2003), both written in New York City. Her original plays include Colbert Quigley: a three act American tragedy (Finalist, Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays) and The Sandpiper (Leonard Nimoy Thalia, 2004), a verse comedy about three generations of Irish artists. In 2019, she received a translation fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center to translate Sholem Asch: Plays of My People, a collection of four dramas never before translated into English.

Her book Seymour and Miriam: Yiddish Theater and Radio in 20th Century New York is forthcoming from Harvard Judaica. Caraid has written articles in English and Yiddish for Parabola Magazine, The Forward, Lillith, Yidishe Kultur, The Daily Free Press, Canada's National Post and Der Pakentreger, the magazine of the National Yiddish Book Center where she was a fellow in 1993. Her article about the The Yiddish Theater appears in A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from The Forward (Norton, 2007) and she has several articles in The Encyclopedia of Jewish American Popular Culture.

Caraid wrote an on-line history of the Yiddish theater for NYU. She has lectured on Yiddish Theater at Harvard University, Queens College, Kean University, the LMDA conference for Dramaturges, the 92nd Street Y, Detroit's Jewish Ensemble Theater, the NYPL and the New York Theater Workshop among others. She received a grant from the Littauer foundation to videotape oral histories of the Yiddish theater's last remaining performers. For ten years, she studied acting with Luba Kadison, the last remaining actress of the Vilna Troupe. She spent 6 years working on the archives of the last president of the Hebrew Actors Union, the great Yiddish crooner Seymour Rexite, as well arranging for their donation to Harvard University. In 2011, she created The Triangle Walk, together with the Eldridge Street Project for the centennial anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. 146 people in period costume walked from the site of the fire at NYU to the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side where they were eulogized by poetry in Yiddish and English. In 2014, she wrote and recorded a chapbook of poems called Yes, including the poem Mother's Milk

As an actress, she has performed in Jerusalem, Boston and in over thirty productions in New York City. Caraid is the director of Radio Bloomsday , an annual 7 hour radio performance of James Joyce’s Ulysses featuring over 100 performers. Since 2008, she has performed the complete Molly Bloom monologue broadcast live nationally on the Pacifica Radio Network. Her direction of Bloomsday on Broadway for Symphony Space is available on CD starring Stephen Colbert. Caraid has produced many hours of radio for WBAI including shows on Yiddish theater and literature and interviews with such stars as Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Caraid performed with New Yiddish Rep, a Drama Desk nominated company that produces classic Yiddish plays and works of world literature in Yiddish translation. Her roles with New Yiddish Rep include Soreh and Hindl in God of Vengeance and Mrs. Beouf in The Rhinoceros.

Caraid graduated summa cum laude, phi beta kappa with a BA in Yiddish literature from Boston University, studied Yiddish and Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Irish (Gaelic) at the National University of Ireland. She was ordained as an interfaith and interspiritual minister from One Spirit in 2013. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times, The Irish Independent, The Forward, Backstage, The Villager and Bostonia Magazine.