by Avrom Sutzkever
directed by Moshe Yassur with Beate Hein Bennett
featuring Shane Baker and Miryem-Khaye Seigel
Original music is composed by Uri Schreter

December 17, 2025 – January 11, 2026

When the sun sets, forgotten figures from the Holocaust emerge to invade the writer’s dreams and even assault his waking moments, settling old scores and seeking absolution as they describe their destruction and share the terrible secrets of their survival, all in Sutzkever’s haunting Yiddish with English supertitles. In Where the Stars Spend the Night, a survivor from the swamps begs the writer to forgive her for eating his soul. In A Child’s Hands, from the coldest of clues – handprints on a windowpane – the poet deduces the last moments of an unknown child and his grandmother. Lupus, an old ghetto cyanide dealer, materializes from a mirror, demanding that the writer “unalive” him. (Yes, Sutzkever created the word 50 years before TikTok.) And concluding the evening with a spirit of grace, Portrait in Blue Sweater, a Chanukah story, is the true account of a lost portrait of the poet painted by a murdered artist which reappears to the surprise of everyone but Marc Chagall.

NIGHT STORIES is additionally unique in its being the only run of a Yiddish language production in New York’s current season.

Avrom Sutzkever (1913 – 2010) was dubbed “the greatest poet of the Holocaust” by The New York Times. Born in Smorgon, he spent his childhood in Siberia as a refugee from the First World War. Thereafter he and his mother lived in Vilna, where he became a member of Yung-Vilne, a group of poets and painters forging a modernist ethos that resonates even today. During World War II, Sutzkever was active in Holocaust resistance, winning literary prizes in the Vilna Ghetto even as he worked to smuggle Jewish cultural treasures out of Nazi control. After the war he served as the Soviet delegation’s sole Jewish witness at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947 he settled in Israel where he founded and edited the journal Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), where many of NIGHT STORIES’ tales first appeared. In 1985 Sutzkever became the only writer to receive the Israel Prize for his work in Yiddish literature