By April Drew

Daring to be original, an Irish-born Catholic girl has found her niche by translating and performing Yiddish plays.

Caraid O’Brien, 32, who immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 12, is non-chalant about her unique occupation and the reactions she has received nationwide. On vacation in San Francisco, visiting her boyfriend’s parents with her five-month old son Mannix, O’Brien, a bubbly linguist, spoke to the Irish Voice about her relationship with the Yiddish language, the connection it has with Gaelic and her work to date.

Growing up in Salthill, Co. Galway and spending some time in Dublin, O’Brien’s parents, Michael and Patricia Gill, and her four siblings moved across the Atlantic to Hingham, Massachusetts when she was 12 where her father, a pathologist, received a faculty position at the Boston University School of Medicine. She spoke a little Gaelic while growing up and returned in 2002 for a semester to study the language in more depth at Galway University.

“I guess my interest in literature began at an early age when Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (a popular contemporary Irish poet) a family friend, used to come to the house all the time,” said O’Brien, whose grandmother fulfilled her life long dream in the 1980s when she traveled to Jerusalem and ran into a Gaelic speaking Orthodox Jew.

It was in high school in Hingham that O’Brien was first introduced to Yiddish literature when she was required to read a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Jewish author and Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1978, for English class. She was intrigued.

His work reminded her of that of Patrick Kavanagh. “They shared the same self-deprecating humor,” she says.

As an undergraduate at Boston University, O’Brien, described by the New York Times as one of “Yiddish culture’s most ardent and least likely champions,” designed her own Yiddish literature major while at the same time taking Yiddish classes.

Describing Yiddish theaters as “very socially progressive and experimental,” O’Brien added, “To understand American theater we need to know the impact the Yiddish language had on it.” She traveled to Jerusalem for a year where she immersed herself in the Yiddish culture and theatre.

O’Brien, who visits Galway once a year, mentions that the Irish theater, founded in 1899, was known better worldwide than the Yiddish theater, even though Irish theater only began with one national theater in comparison to dozens of Yiddish theatres and traveling companies throughout the world. She believes the reason for this is because Irish theater was produced in English.

She also sees a comparison between the tragic events of the Irish Famine, and the Holocaust.

“The Potato Famine decimated the Irish language by causing a third of its speakers to emigrate, a third to die and the surviving countrymen to be ashamed of it. The same thing happened in the Holocaust.”

Moving to New York in 1997, O’Brien planned on becoming an actor. After reading Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance and consequently viewing the play in New York City, she was disgusted with the translation.

She met with Aaron Beall, founder of New York International Fringe Festival and the Todo Con Nada theater, and together he agreed to direct God of Vengeance if she would translate it. A year later, O’Brien appeared in her own translation of the play as a prostitute.

Her love for translating Yiddish plays started from there. While in New York she was shocked to find out that Yiddish theater was alive and well.

“I was blown away to discover that there was this huge movement with nine Broadway sized theatres along Second Avenue, and I found out that hundreds of thousands of plays were written in Yiddish and I never knew it, in fact you’d be hard-pressed to find a theater or a director who knew anything about Yiddish theaters,” she says.

Not only does O’Brien translate plays, she also writes them. One such play, The Sandpiper, which was performed at Symphony Space on Broadway and 95th Street, was inspired by her great grandmother, a traditional Irish storyteller. O’Brien starred in her play as one of three generations of Irish artists.

O’Brien, who will return to Hingham after her vacation, will teach Yiddish at the local synagogue. “When they heard I was home for a few months with my son they asked me to give a class at the synagogue,” said O’Brien, who plans to return to New York shortly and get back to translating Yiddish plays and writing new ones based on her Irish heritage.