Caraid O'Brien (born December 20, 1974) is an Irish-born, US-based writer, performer, translator and theater director. Although she is from an Irish Catholic background, she is best known for her work with material originally written in Yiddish. Theater J Artistic Director Adam Immerwahr has praised "her superb theatrical ear and facility for transforming Yiddish work into relevant contemporary text."
Family, youth and education
O’Brien was born in Galway in 1974, one of five children of Michael and Patricia Gill O'Brien. Her maternal grandfather was an Irish-speaker from the Aran Islands and, by O'Brien's account, her paternal grandmother was a great storyteller. Her family were back and forth several times between Ireland and Eastern Massachusetts. When she was 12, her family moved definitively to Hingham, Massachusetts. Her father, Michael O'Brien, is a pathologist; as of 2023 he is an emeritus professor at Boston University.
She discovered Yiddish literature and Jewish American literature as a teenager, as part of her high school studies of American literature. At the time, she already had a strong interest in Irish literature, but teacher Catherine Doyle assigned their class stories by Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick (all of whom wrote in English but were either Yiddish-speakers or a generation removed), as well as Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the latter in translation, of course. This led her to look at the Boston Public Library to seek further Yiddish literature in translation, among which she discovered Chaim Grade. Grade's My Mother's Sabbath Days inspired her to decide to learn Yiddish. While in high school, she also learned enough French to read a novel by Albert Camus in the original.
As early as elementary school O'Brien had an interest in acting. In her all-girls high school, Notre Dame Academy in Hingham, she played male leads in plays by Oscar Wilde. She relates that her parents were relieved, though, when she didn't choose to major in theater in college: "[T]wo of [my siblings] majored in French literature… And if I wanted to learn Yiddish instead of French, that was fine with them."
As an undergraduate at Boston University, unable at first to find any opportunity to study Yiddish, she studied some Hebrew and became comfortable with the Hebrew alphabet, in which Yiddish is written. She discovered from a poster the possibility to learn Yiddish as a summer intern at the Yiddish Book Center in Western Massachusetts. After completing that internship, taking advantage of her now-decent knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish, she was able to spend a year studying at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, taking advanced Yiddish literature classes with Avraham Novershtern, and Nati Cohen, and Mikhl Borden. She later said of this experience, "I understood what I understood. But it was a lot. It really just kind of dipped me into deep waters, and I gained a tremendous amount from it."
A class on Yiddish theater taught by Ruth Wisse (then chair of the Yiddish department at Harvard) introduced O'Brien to Sholem Asch's play God of Vengeance, about a Jewish brothel-owner whose bid for respectability crumbles when his daughter, whom he has kept entirely away from men, becomes sexually involved with one of the prostitutes in the brothel. O'Brien would later write a new translation of that play. Her main paper for that class was on "Yoshke Muzikant" ("Yoshke the Musician") and the many versions of it presented over the years by Joseph Buloff of the Vilna Troupe, perhaps the most prominent literary/art theater group to perform in Yiddish. While she was researching for that paper in the Yiddish theater archives at Harvard, librarian Charles Berlin offered to connect her to Buloff's widow Luba Kadison, also a former member of the Vilna Troupe (and daughter of its founder Leib Kadison), then still alive and in New York, who became one of O'Brien's mentors. For many years, the two met on a weekly basis.