“Power” is a Yiddish play about civilization and what fuels it, literally and figuratively. The personification of Electricity outpowers Steam, the Airplan outmaneuvers the Horse, and Madam Cinema outshines the Radio. The only human character is the abstract Slave whose naïve questioning revelas that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Playwright Leah Hoffman was born in Latvia in the late nineteenth century. At the age of fourteen, she began writing plays and poetry, but as she was female, it was difficult to get published. Hoffman moved to the United States in 1913. She was able to write children’s poetry books and later published the first Yiddish-language book of children’s literature in 1919. Many Yiddish speaking school children read these stories in primers.