This play tells the story of the Paper Brigade - a group of Jewish writers and intellectuals who risked their lives to smuggle thousands of historical documents and books, rescuing them.
When the archives of the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Vilna Lithuania fall under control of the Nazis, fascist academics try to appropriate the collection for a propaganda museum in Frankfurt. Quickly, they realize that they need Jewish labor to process and appraise the archive, and by necessity, conscript laborers with the very cultural consciousness that will ultimately undermine the fascist scheme,-- a vanguard of Yiddish cultural activists, whose book smuggling ring expands to weapons.
In the second act, we return to postwar Vilna. Surviving partisans and smugglers pick up the pieces. Trauma and vengeance, tensions over the role of the archivist, and contradictions between Communism and Zionism threaten to fracture the new world built on the ashes.
Through the eyes of songwriter Shmerke Kaczerginski, poet Avrom Sutzkever, and historian Rokhl Krinski, the play explores these questions: What do we owe to the future? What can we offer the past? In a zero-sum decision between cultural inheritance and life itself, what is the correct choice?
In this world, the Angel of Poetry takes a dangerous interest in the lives of human beings, ghosts refuse their roles and try to change the world, books get their bearings, and living people find ways to live forever.

All named characters in this play are real people. Poems, songs, diary entries and other primary source documents are spaced throughout the play as interludes.

In English and Yiddish. Two acts.