(PREORDER) Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair

By Leib Malach
Edited by Alyssa Quint
Translated by Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint
Bloomsbury Publishing in partnership with YIVO
Published in 2026

128 pages, 8 x 5 in
Paperback

In their English translation of the Yiddish play Mississippi, Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint have undertaken a work of cultural salvage. Penned in 1935 by Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach, the play was performed on the Warsaw stage by the experimental Yiddish theatre company “Young Theater” (Yung Teatr) led by legendary director and drama theoretician Mikhl Weichert. Malach and Weichert were keen to depict a dramatic episode from contemporary life that reflected their humanistic and leftist political ideas as well as avant-garde theatrical practices. Mississippi is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America. In her introductory essay, Quint treats the political aspirations that animated Malach and Weichert and the vulnerability felt by European Jewry that it saw reflected in the experience of Black Americans.

Please note this book has limited availability.

This item is a preorder and will ship in late July 2026.