Cyankali, 1931

Title

Cyankali, 1931

Description

First performed in its original German in the Berlin Lessing Theatre by a group of young actors, Cyankali became one of the most controversial plays of the 1920’s. Its author, Friedrich Wolf, an Expressionist playwright and medical doctor,wrote the play to protest the law against abortion. In 1928, Wolf joined the Communist Party and published a volume of essays entitled Art as a Weapon, and Cyankali was the first of them. The play's production led to Wolf’s arrest and subsequently caused a sensation from New York to Tokyo and from Moscow to Paris. And, while the play was outlawed in some countries, Cyankali was produced in Poland in both Polish and Yiddish, the Yiddish-language version being produced by the writer and director Moyshe Lipman.

Translation

Pictured is a review of the first production of the Yiddish Cyankali (published in Warsaw's Moment, 1931):

[Friedrich Wolf] the doctor demonstrate the only the poor girls fall victims of the law while the rich find doctors willing to circumvent the law and willing to risk punishment for good money. In [the play's] gallery of tragic images show how young women die young and no one wants to help them because they are poor. At the same time, the need of the proletariat is shown starving and in a downward spiral...

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Citation

“Cyankali, 1931,” YIVO Online Exhibitions, accessed May 11, 2025, https://ataleoftwomuseums.yivo.org/items/show/2301.

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