YIVO-Bard Summer Program
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Dramatic Reading and Discussion of 'The Builder,' Shloyme Mikhoels’ Lost Play

Monday Aug 12, 2019 7:00pm
Shloyme Mikhoels at the grave of Sholem Aleichem. YIVO Archives.
Night of the Murdered Poets

Co-sponsored by the Congress for Jewish Culture


Admission: $10

Almost precisely 100 years ago, the company that would form the basis for the future Moscow Yiddish Art Theater performed the only play ever written by Shloyme Mikhoels, its star actor, future director, and head of the wartime Jewish Antifascist Committee. The play was assumed lost, but Dr. Vassili Schedrin of Queen's University in Canada discovered a Russian version of the text and Dov Ber Kerler translated it back into Yiddish.

Now, for the first time in a hundred years, Mikhoels’ play will be performed in a dramatic reading starring Allen Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson (the shtetl couple from the Coen Brother’s A Serious Man), Shane Baker (Director of the Congress for Jewish Culture), and Boris Sandler (Editor of Yiddishe Branzhe).
 
Dr. Schedrin, currently working on a biography of Mikhoels, will provide an introduction to the play and take questions afterward. 

The reading will be in Yiddish with English supertitles; the talks will be in English.