A. Vayter was a major figure in the Yiddish Culture Movement of the early 20th Century. He co-founded the Literary Monthly Journal in Vilna, one of the first regularly published platforms for Yiddish Literature. He studied at the Smorgon, Eishishok, Radun, and Kovno Yeshivas, but his love of secular literature and social reform drew him away from rabbinical preparation. His work on behalf of the bristle-makers bund in Kovno, where future Polish President Joseph Pilsudski was also active, got him a ticket to imprisonment in Tomsk, Siberia, where he was soon exposed to the work of Chekov and Tolstoy.

Upon his release in 1904 he and his wife decided to leave Russia and they lived in Zakopane, Poland, Berlin, Germany, and Bern, Switzerland, before returning to Vilna in the Spring of 1905, only to find many of his family members had been tortured and killed. Seeing that his vision for Yiddish Cultural Nationalism was being blotted out by extremist forces, he turned to play-writing as a vehicle for both self-expression and social evolution. During this period he wrote three plays, Daybreak (1907), In Fire (1910), and The Mute (1912), each being a trenchant and poignant expression of the condition of Yiddish Culture and Judaism more generally during this fervent period.

When Vayter was killed during the Vilna pogroms of 1919, he was mourned as a person (Ansky eulogized him, Rayzen, Weinrieich and others were at his funeral) and as a symbol of Yiddish Cultural Nationalism, his death symbolizing the beginning of the end for the movement and provoking a new wave of youthful Yiddishist emigration to Europe and America. Today, with Yiddish spoken by few and Yiddish Culture demolished in Eastern Europe, Vayter's all-but-forgotten works stand as brilliant testaments to the struggle faced by minority ethnic communities the world over, then and now. This edition is the first ever translation into English and is a Bilingual Edition, including reproduced images of the Yiddish text.