Mississippi (1935) by Leyb Malakh: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Boys

This book provides the first ever English translation of the Yiddish play, Mississippi. Penned in 1935 by Leyb Malakh, it was commissioned for production by a Warsaw-based experimental Yiddish theatre company and was focused on the racial injustice of the Scottsboro Boys case which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African-American youths in Alabama, 1931. The book includes a detailed, multifaceted scholarly introduction which ranges widely and effectively across the various historical and literary contexts in which the play can be appreciated.

As our volume shows, both the writer and the director, Michal Weichert, were keen to depict a dramatic episode from contemporary life that reflected the leftist goals and ideas to which they were devoted. Alyssa Quint examines the fact that while the plight of the Scottsboro Boys lasted throughout the 1930s and inspired works of Communist or leftist struggle by a substantial number of artists and writers in the United States, few beyond America took on the subject. She looks at how Malakh’s drama reflects the influence of the African American writer Langston Hughes, who wrote Scottsboro Limited in 1931 after the Boys’ first trial when they were sentenced to death. Writing in 1935, after a number of successful appeals, Malakh refers to the rallies that took place throughout Europe in protest of the Boys’ arrest and sentencing. The introduction also shows how the play reflects the influence of ’synchronous theater’ (akin to immersive theater) as well as other avant-garde theatrical strategies of the time. Quint goes on to consider the substantial success of Mississippi, which played on city stages at least one hundred times throughout Poland and attracted significant critical attention, and what this can tell us about the connection between the Jewish people of Europe and African-Americans around this time.

Alyssa Quint is a writer based in New York City, USA. She is a Visiting Fellow at Yeshiva University, USA and Associate Editor at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater (2019), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the Jordan Schnitzer Award. She is also the editor of two forthcoming volumes on the Yiddish theater - Women on the Yiddish Stage and Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis: a Critical Edition. She is a contributing editor of the online Digital Yiddish Theater Project and a curator of a number of exhibits at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research where she served as senior scholar for many years.