Daybreak tells the story of Sonia, a chemistry student from the Pale studying in Bern, on the night following Bloody Sunday (a labor demonstration which turned into a massacre in St. Petersburg, January 2, 1905). Speaking vernacular Yiddish, she and her fellow students seek to obtain news of the day's events in St. Petersburg while deciding what to do next with their young lives. Sonia retires to sleep and is visited in her dreams by echoes and figures from her past life, with whom she dialogues. At daybreak, Sonia makes a momentous decision.

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. 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.