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 more...
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.
