Occu­pied Words: What the Holo­caust Did to Yid­dish by Han­nah Pollin-Galay assess­es the evo­lu­tion and impact of Khurbn Yid­dish — ​“Destruc­tion Yid­dish” — dur­ing and after World War II. In response to their expe­ri­ences in the ghet­tos and con­cen­tra­tion camps, Yid­dish-speak­ing Jews began to use new or altered words and phras­es to describe the world around them. These words could be phon­i­cal­ly unpleas­ant, wit­ty, mor­bid, rebel­lious, point­ed; they encom­passed com­plex reac­tions to a ter­ri­fy­ing real­i­ty and its consequences. 

Through her research, Pollin-Galay high­lights the work of lex­i­cog­ra­phers and writ­ers who used Khurbn Yid­dish in their every­day lives. Each of these fig­ures had dif­fer­ent approach­es to the study of these strange new words — they looked at the for­ma­tion of Khurbn Yid­dish, the var­i­ous uses with­in the com­mu­ni­ty of sur­vivors, and its last­ing influ­ence on the Jew­ish experience. 

I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to speak with Han­nah Pollin-Galay about her writ­ing and research process, the world of Yid­dish acad­e­mia, and her next steps after fin­ish­ing Occu­pied Words. 

Isado­ra Kianovsky: I was lucky enough to hear you lec­ture about your research before read­ing this book, but I’d love to hear more about how you came to this work. What was your first intro­duc­tion to Khurbn Yid­dish (Holo­caust Yid­dish)? What drew you to this subject? 

Han­nah Pollin-Galay: I was lis­ten­ing to hours and hours of Holo­caust tes­ti­monies in Yid­dish as part of my dis­ser­ta­tion work on lan­guage and oral tes­ti­mo­ny. I kept hear­ing words that I didn’t know, weren’t in the dic­tio­nary, and didn’t make sense. I also noticed that sur­vivors some­times shared these words with a spe­cial sense of mis­chief, with a kind of a wink and a nod. I sensed there was some­thing going on with these words. Around that same time, by coin­ci­dence, my col­league Amos Gold­berg showed me a copy of Nach­man Blumental’s dic­tio­nary Vert­er un vert­er­lekh fun der khurbn tkufe (Words and Phras­es from the Holo­caust Peri­od). I was shocked to find that the quirky neol­o­gisms I had been hear­ing in oral tes­ti­monies were list­ed and explained in this book — that some­body else had heard them, got­ten curi­ous, and writ­ten it up. I dug a bit deep­er and found that there were many more Khurbn Yid­dish neol­o­gisms that I had imag­ined, and many oth­er dic­tio­nar­ies like Blumental’s.

IK: What was your research process like for this book? Did you find any ele­ment par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­leng­ing or rewarding? 

HPG: My project was dri­ven by three main ques­tions: What were the Khurbn Yid­dish words invent­ed? Why did these words mat­ter so much to peo­ple (enough for some to ded­i­cate years study­ing them and writ­ing dic­tio­nar­ies)? And what kind of a lega­cy did they leave on Yid­dish cul­ture? These ques­tions took near­ly a decade to address and required me to try out a wide vari­ety of research modes. There were unfor­get­tably fun moments in the process: I sat in a hut off the grid in the Negev in order to read all of Cha­va Rosenfarb’s 2,000 page tril­o­gy with as few inter­rup­tions as pos­si­ble. I was invit­ed into the kitchen of Sholem Eilati, the son of the lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er Israel Kaplan, to look through Kaplan’s diaries and dic­tio­nary. There were also months and months of very dry, empir­i­cal leg­work — like sift­ing through all of the word search results for cer­tain terms in order to find out if they could be con­sid­ered Holo­caust neol­o­gisms or not. Those word search­es kept my project hon­est, so they were worth it in the end.

IK: Was there a Khurbn Yid­dish word or phrase that you found espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to research? If so, what about it intrigued you? 

HPG: I prob­a­bly could have writ­ten an entire book about the word shabreven. The word would have struck most Yid­dish speak­ers as fun­ny-sound­ing gib­ber­ish before the war. It was invent­ed (or re-invent­ed) in the War­saw ghet­to to mean, ​“Tak­ing own­er­less prop­er­ty, also steal­ing.” There’s an obvi­ous con­tra­dic­tion here: How can one word sig­ni­fy both a legit­i­mate way of gain­ing prop­er­ty and an ille­git­i­mate way? All of the things that fas­ci­nate me about this word — its bizarre sound, its inter­nal moral con­tra­dic­tion, its mys­te­ri­ous ety­mol­o­gy — also fas­ci­nat­ed peo­ple in the War­saw ghet­to. They debat­ed this word robust­ly on every lev­el, and in real time. I see the word shabreven as an archive of human des­per­a­tion, of moral con­fu­sion, of a lan­guage gone wild — but also of curios­i­ty, inven­tive­ness, and self-reflection. 

IK: Out of all the approach­es exam­ined in your book, is there one lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er or writer that you find your­self agree­ing with more than oth­ers? Or, rather, if you can­not choose who you think is most ​“right,” does your own research take shape in a sim­i­lar way to one of the fig­ures’ that you dis­cuss in the book? 

HPG: I want­ed the book to be a seri­ous engage­ment with philoso­phies of lan­guage. I also want­ed it to be his­tor­i­cal­ly ground­ed and per­son­al. That was why I invest­ed so much in telling the sto­ries of three lex­i­cog­ra­phers and two writ­ers — and their impas­sioned com­mit­ments to Khurbn Yid­dish. I tried to let major philo­soph­i­cal debates speak through their lives and writings.

If I had to pick, I think that Nach­man Blu­men­tal had the most expan­sive and coher­ent the­o­ry of Khurbn Yid­dish. He saw word cre­ation as a result of bod­i­ly and per­son­al trau­ma, which then spi­raled out into a col­lec­tive word shift. He also addressed the widest range of ques­tions, such as the encounter of Yid­dish with oth­er lan­guages, the geo­graph­i­cal spread of words, and the impor­tance of metaphor.

At the same time, each of the oth­er fig­ures I dis­cuss adds some pow­er­ful insight to the pic­ture: Kaplan about humor, Spi­vak about the nec­es­sar­i­ly polit­i­cal nature of lan­guage choic­es, Rosen­farb about women’s expe­ri­ences and also about the poten­tial for com­mu­ni­ty build­ing in lan­guage, and K. Tzetnik about the impor­tance of mak­ing lan­guage rebel­lious, pur­pose­ful­ly inter­rupt­ing polite discourse.

One per­son who read my man­u­script said that I overi­den­ti­fied with the fig­ures I researched. That’s prob­a­bly accu­rate. I felt like each of them were my part­ners in try­ing to unlock this strange lan­guage. In each case, I got to some moment in their writ­ings or their archives where I had to stop and take a deep breath. 

IK: How much Khurbn Yid­dish has become inte­grat­ed into the mod­ern day Yid­dish lex­i­con? For instance, would a stu­dent like myself learn any of these phras­es as part of a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry Yid­dish lan­guage curriculum? 

HPG: Almost none. Many lead­ing Yid­dish cul­tur­al fig­ures after the war, like H. Leyvik and Yakov Zerubav­el, were dis­gust­ed and embar­rassed by Khurbn Yid­dish. I think this dis­gust made its way into news­pa­per edi­to­r­i­al poli­cies, which then edit­ed these words out of major stan­dard-bear­ing pub­li­ca­tions. There are impor­tant excep­tions: the cre­ators of the Groyser vert­er­bukh fun der yidish­er shprakh (The Big Dic­tio­nary of the Yid­dish Lan­guage), the ambi­tious mul­ti­vol­ume Yid­dish dic­tio­nary styled after the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, did include Khurbn Yid­dish words, with exam­ples, often draw­ing from Blumental’s work. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, that dic­tio­nary project ran out of fund­ing after the let­ter aleph, so their mes­sage of Khurbn Yid­dish inte­gra­tion didn’t real­ly work. 

By con­trast, if you want to see Khurbn Yid­dish, you can find it all over writ­ten or oral tes­ti­monies, where the sur­vivor com­mu­ni­ty didn’t edit this lan­guage out. 

IK: Your book describes many of the con­ver­sa­tions and philoso­phies sur­round­ing Khurbn Yid­dish, espe­cial­ly post-World War II and with the cre­ation of the State of Israel. Many Zion­ist insti­tu­tions, writ­ers, schol­ars, and opin­ions pushed against Khurbn Yid­dish for var­i­ous rea­sons, chief among them being the sup­posed rumi­nance on the grotesque, hor­rid, and trag­ic real­i­ties of the Holo­caust. Some lex­i­cog­ra­phers, such as Israel Kaplan, used humor or sar­casm to counter this, to make Khurbn Yid­dish more palat­able for both its speak­ers and out­side observers. My ques­tion is, through a lens of Khurbn Yid­dish, do you think sur­vivors are oblig­at­ed to make their lan­guage — and the sto­ries that that lan­guage rep­re­sents — palat­able to those who can nev­er ful­ly under­stand? Isn’t that the essence of Khurbn Yid­dish — to trans­late the untranslatable?

HPG: Much of Khurbn Yid­dish is unpalat­able and embar­rass­ing. Orga­nizirn becomes a word for pris­on­ers steal­ing from one anoth­er. Pipel is a young boy forced into sex­u­al slav­ery. It’s not by chance that Ben­jamin Har­shav, the only inter­na­tion­al schol­ar to ever men­tion Khurbn Yid­dish in a major schol­ar­ly work, called it ​“gram­mat­i­cal sub­hu­man stam­mer vis-à-vis the Mas­ter Race.” 

But, oth­er aspects of Khurbn Yid­dish show wit, resis­tance, and inge­nu­ity: Yid­dish speak­ers, for instance, invent­ed many faux acronyms to make fun of the Nazi Ger­man acronymic fetish. N.D.M. sounds like some Nazi orga­ni­za­tion, but it actu­al­ly meant nit dayn mazel, as in ​“shit out of luck.” Just that term alone is a beau­ti­ful show of poet­ic auton­o­my. It’s an effort to reclaim the pow­er to mean what you say.

I think that Khurbn Yid­dishists — lex­i­cog­ra­phers and writ­ers — want­ed peo­ple to remem­ber and bear wit­ness to both of those aspects, the low­ly and the wit­ty, which often appear at the same time, and even in the same word.

As an addi­tion­al out­come, Khurbn Yid­dish also breaks down bina­ries about speak­a­bil­i­ty ver­sus unspeak­a­bil­i­ty. The Holo­caust did engen­der a major cri­sis in lan­guage. How­ev­er, the result was not silence, but a trans­for­ma­tion of lan­guage. Vic­tims insist­ed on find­ing a way to speak. 

IK: I found your chap­ter on Khurbn Yid­dish in regards to female and effem­i­nate bod­ies so inter­est­ing — espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing that women’s bodies/​fem­i­nin­i­ty are still regard­ed in a sim­i­lar neg­a­tive man­ner by those in pow­er today. Can you speak more about the rem­nants of this ele­ment of Holo­caust Yid­dish in mod­ern day Jew­ish schol­ar­ship and language? 

HPG: Sex­u­al­ized female bod­ies are used to warn the Jew­ish peo­ple of moral down­fall, or tell of a down­fall that has already hap­pened, in a num­ber of sacred texts — from the Book of Lamen­ta­tions to Ezekiel, and that’s only nam­ing a few. What star­tled me about the Khurbn Yid­dish words relat­ing to this top­ic was how these age-old motifs came to life and informed the way that peo­ple thought and talked dur­ing the Holo­caust. For me, the answer is not to turn away from the sacred texts that use women’s bod­ies as a sym­bol in this way, or to turn away from the Khurbn Yid­dish texts that do so, but to widen the con­ver­sa­tion and include cre­ative respons­es to that tra­di­tion. I think that this is what Cha­va Rosen­farb does. She acknowl­edged and dra­ma­tized the Khurbn Yid­dish motif of the sex­u­al­ized woman, with its ancient prece­dents, but then turned it on its head — adding in female agency, human­i­ty, indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, and desire.

IK: I see many of the themes in Occu­pied Words present in our cur­rent world — what can we learn from Khurbn Yid­dish to influ­ence how we move through a still war-torn and rup­tured soci­ety? How does it inform our efforts at cul­tur­al preser­va­tion — the phys­i­cal, the his­tor­i­cal, the social, the linguistic? 

HPG: I’m sure that there are par­al­lels in the cur­rent Israel-Hamas war, in Hebrew and in Ara­bic. I could list the Hebrew words that have changed or been added to every­day par­lance fol­low­ing Octo­ber 7th. I am curi­ous to learn about how the war has impact­ed Ara­bic. I hope that peo­ple are research­ing or will do research on this.

IK: How has the trans­for­ma­tion of lan­guage, both aca­d­e­m­ic and col­lo­qui­al, impact­ed the way we read and write today? 

HPG: Lan­guage is always in motion. I think that the inter­net, social media espe­cial­ly, expe­dites changes in lan­guage. Look­ing through the lens of today’s Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, the months July through August 2024 have changed the mean­ing of the extant terms like ​“weird,” ​“coconut tree,” and ​“cat-lady,” and brought in some new ones, like ​“AI’d” (which is one of many Trump neol­o­gisms). I think memes and twen­ty-four ‑hour glob­al con­ver­sa­tions online enable cer­tain words to become marked, over­stuffed with mean­ing or nor­mal­ized at a break-neck speed. The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic also brought in a whole slew of neol­o­gisms, and trans­formed assump­tions about what it means to com­mu­ni­cate. Maybe some of these con­tem­po­rary whirl­wind expe­ri­ences with words can give us a clue, in some minor way, into what it felt like for Yid­dish speak­ers in the Holocaust.

IK: What are some oth­er works you’d rec­om­mend to those inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about this subject? 

HPG: Vic­tor Klemperer’s mem­oir-cum-lex­i­con of Nazi Ger­man, LTI, is a must read. It gives the Ger­man ver­sion of the Khurbn Yid­dish story.

IK: What do you hope a read­er who is less famil­iar with this sub­ject will get out of Occu­pied Words? 

HPG: From what I see, this book speaks to two lay audi­ences. One is word­smiths and arm­chair philol­o­gists: if you mar­vel at the cryp­tic acronyms and stump words you find in your — or, as in my case, your teenage offspring’s — Tik­Tok account, just because secret codes are inher­ent­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, then this book is for you. 

The sec­ond is peo­ple who are inter­est­ed in the Holo­caust, but need a new way in. There is some­times an implic­it mes­sage cir­cu­lat­ing in intel­lec­tu­al cir­cles , that we already know what we need to know about the Holo­caust, and so it is time to move on. This impa­tience or ​“off-trend” approach can lead to a dehu­man­iza­tion of Holo­caust vic­tims and sur­vivors. Khurbn Yid­dish words bring us close to Holo­caust expe­ri­ence in a new way, show­ing less fil­tered aspects of what they lived through. These sources also demon­strate how much we still don’t know about the Holo­caust, espe­cial­ly if some­thing was record­ed in Yid­dish or it relates to women’s expe­ri­ences. I think that Khurbn Yid­dish can reawak­en curios­i­ty towards Holo­caust vic­tim­hood and, as a result, reawak­en empa­thy towards this episode of human torment. 

IK: What does the future of your research look like? How would you say that your book, as well as Khurbn Yid­dish as a con­cept, informs the cur­rent sta­tus of Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture around the world?

HPG: So many great con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish writ­ers and film­mak­ers now incor­po­rate his­tor­i­cal research into their imag­i­na­tive books and films. Who knows, maybe Michael Chabon will write his next nov­el with Khurbn Yid­dish sprin­kled all over it? Or maybe the Coen Broth­ers will have a ten-minute seg­ment in Khurbn Yid­dish? Just saying.

My next project is about nature, Yid­dish, and the Holo­caust. My aim is to unrav­el the knot­ty rela­tion­ship between Jews, plants, and ani­mals and how that informed their respons­es to cat­a­stro­phe. I hope that this will also tell us some­thing about cul­tur­al respons­es to the cli­mate cri­sis we are cur­rent­ly facing.