Bert Brecht set out in 1935 on his first voyage to America. He sailed on a dingy, if not black, freighter, from Denmark, where he lived during several years of exile from Hitler's Germany. His destination: New York and the opportunity to collaborate in a production of The Mother at the Theatre Union, the most famous American socialist theatre.

Brecht had had few chances to see his work done since his emigration. He worked with productions in Copenhagen and Paris, but the reputation of American left theatre stood much higher, with enthusiastic theatre groups in dozens of large and small cities seeking good “social plays,” in response to the depression crisis. Friedrich Wolf, a fellow German emigre playwright, declared sweepingly in International Literature that New York left theatre was “without exaggeration the strongest and most outstanding outpost of the Left Theatre in all the capitalist countries.” (Wolf's Sailors ofCattaro was being done at Theatre Union.) Brecht had doubts.