This haunting new Off-Broadway play brings Yiddish resistance poetry back to life

Night Stories, a new Off-Broadway production built around the work of legendary Yiddish poet and Holocaust resistance fighter Avrom Sutzkever, opens this month at the Wild Project in Manhattan’s East Village at 195 East 3rd Street by Avenue B.

The 68-minute production—which makes its official Off-Broadway debut on December 21 following a South American tour through São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires and is scheduled to run through January 11, 2026—comprises four surreal, deeply unsettling tales drawn from Sutzkever’s writing. Performed in Yiddish with English supertitles (captions projected on a screen above the stage), Night Stories is the only Yiddish-language production running in New York this season.

Set largely in the shadowy terrain between sleep and waking life, the play imagines figures from the Holocaust emerging after dark to confront a writer—demanding forgiveness, reckoning and remembrance. These visitors are not ghosts in the traditional sense; they are fragments of unfinished lives, carrying stories that refuse to stay buried.

In Where the Stars Spend the Night, a survivor from the swamps begs the poet to forgive her for consuming his soul in order to live. A Child’s Hands reconstructs the final moments of an unknown child and his grandmother using nothing more than frost and handprints on a windowpane. In Lupus, a former ghetto cyanide dealer materializes from a mirror, insisting that the writer “unalive” him—using a verb Sutzkever invented decades before it entered Internet slang. The evening closes with Portrait in Blue Sweater, a Hanukkah story inspired by the true account of a lost portrait of Sutzkever painted by an artist murdered in the Holocaust, which later resurfaces to the astonishment of nearly everyone except for Marc Chagall.

The production stars Shane Baker and Miryem-Khaye Seigel, two of the most prominent figures working in contemporary Yiddish theater. Baker, best known for translating Waiting for Godot into Yiddish, also translated Sutzkever’s text for the stage.

The play is directed by Moshe Yassur, a veteran of both Yiddish and modernist theater.

Sutzkever himself remains one of the towering figures of 20th-century Jewish literature. Born in 1913, he survived the Vilna Ghetto, participated in cultural resistance during the war, testified at the Nuremberg trials and later founded Di Goldene Keyt, a seminal Yiddish literary journal. In 1985, he became the only writer ever to receive the Israel Prize for Yiddish literature.

That Night Stories is opening in the East Village—just blocks from Russ & Daughters and Katz’s Delicatessen, among other NYC staples—feels fitting. The neighborhood remains a living archive of Jewish cultural life, and this production adds another layer: one that insists Yiddish is not only a language of memory, but of urgent storytelling.

Tickets are available here.