Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish

by Hannah Pollin-Galay

During the Holocaust, prisoner experiences under Nazi occupation radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words—Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust”—puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan, and Elye Spivak—Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, German-Yiddish hybrids, and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Last, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.

Genres: Jewish, History

312 pages, Hardcover

Published September 3, 2024

Reviews

[Isadora · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so fascinating! Book review and interview to come for JBC. I learned so much about how language shifts with context, and how perspectives of that shift differ throughout a community. And I'm proud of myself for reading a more academic book on my own time.

[Ben Rothke · Rating 5 out of 5]

One does not have to be a linguist to know that languages are fluid. Oxford University, Dictionary.com, and many others publish their Word of the Year.

Language change is usually a slow process. But in Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press), author Dr. Hannah Pollin-Galay (Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University) has written a fascinating book on how the Yiddish language can be classified as BC (before Churban Europa) and AC (after Churban Europa).

She shows that there were no words in pre-Holocaust Yiddish to describe many of the atrocities. And the needs forced people to come up with new terms to deal with the terror of the concentration camps. It is this Khurbn Yiddish that developed during the Holocaust. There were simply no words to deal with what they were going through.

One of the most interesting sections details how the German word for Jew is Jude, while the Yiddish term is Yid. In Nazi German, Jude was more than a word. It was a visual emblem that rose above the rules of everyday language, and it could contain contradictory qualities—like repulsive inferiority and conniving intellect, backward religiosity, and degenerate Bolshevism.

Nazi German also had compound words that contained Jude in order to use language to materialize and objectify race. They used these words to transform a fluid group of human subjects into material objects.

The Holocaust drastically changed the way Jews spoke Yiddish, which Pollin-Galay compellingly shows in this fascinating book. One does not need to understand Yiddish to appreciate this insightful book.