Review of Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish by Hannah Pollin-Galay

There is a well-known Yiddish proverb that argues Verter zol men vegn un nit tseyln (Words should be weighed and not counted). But when one pays attention to the weight of words in the way Hannah Pollin-Galay does, every word counts. In her brilliant new book, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish, Pollin-Galay studies “the strange, grotesque, humorous, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words that were born of prisoner experiences in Nazi ghettos and camps – terms that amassed into a sociolect” that she calls Khurbn Yiddish (“destruction Yiddish”) (2). As she also notes, however, “the idea of studying Khurbn Yiddish words is not a product of twenty-first-century scholarship. Rather, Yiddish speakers during and immediately after the Holocaust were fascinated by the metamorphosis that they perceived in their own language – a fascination that is, itself, worth exploring,” something which she describes as “the will to use lexicography and philology to serve as a mode of testimony” (2).

The Khurbn (the Yiddish term used to refer to what would come to be known as the Shoah or Holocaust) completely devastated Yiddishland. As Pollin-Galay notes, the Khurbn took the lives of roughly 5,000,000 Yiddish speakers out of 11 million living worldwide before the war; of the approximately 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, roughly 85% were Yiddish speakers. “Clearly by eradicating, roughly 45% of the world’s Yiddish speakers and dislocating even more, the events of the Holocaust drastically and irreversibly altered the conditions of speaking, living, and writing in Yiddish. However, what remains under-explored is what happened to Yiddish in this moment of great historical breach – not in quantitative measurements of language use, but in terms of how the language changed as a means of thought, expression, and human connection. This book thus asks not if Yiddish survived, or died in the Holocaust, but how it might have transformed in those years.” (10).

As Pollin-Galay demonstrates, this transformation in the Yiddish language under German occupation fascinated both professional linguists and average Jews during the war to such an extent that it gave rise to multiple projects during and after the war that sought to document the impact of Nazi persecution in this war. It is not remarkable that Yiddish-speakers sought to document the impact of Nazi persecution on the daily lived experience of Yiddish speakers – what is remarkable is that it has taken 80 years for this book to be written. (Yet more evidence of how much source material from the period during and after the Holocaust remains to be investigated by scholars with the requisite Yiddish language training.)

Through a study of the Yiddish language spoken by Jews during and after the war, and then analyzed almost immediately by linguists fascinated by the ability of the language to adapt to life in extremis, how might we better understand the ways in which Yiddish-speaking Jews understood, processed, wrestled, and coped with what they were forced to endure? How might a study of the adaptation of the Yiddish language help us to better understand new meanings ascribed to old words (Bod: once a bath, now a gas chamber)? Or the many words that suddenly meant the difference between life and death? Bone (a grocery coupon in the ghetto) or Khaim – both the ironic meaning of life and the name of der alter, the elder, Rumkowski, the head of Lodz Ghetto whose choices could mean the difference between life and death? How might a study of the words used by Jews during the Holocaust help us to better understand the nature of Jewish life and death under German occupation? The strategies employed by Jews to survive under the most extreme conditions? Or the ways in which Jews made sense of the absurd and ironic fact of continued existence and then mass death under the Nazi regime? As Pollin-Galay argues, such a study has the potential to help us better understand the very nature of “genocide,” itself a neologism invented by a Yiddish speaker attempting to understand the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, members of a group, as such. “[...]Khurbn Yiddish might teach us about the concept of genocide. Instead of trying to gauge, whether, in fact, genocidal events have truly destroyed a victim group’s culture, I suggest, exploring how that victim culture becomes transformed, in ways both willed and unwilled, as a result of genocide” (13).

The book is organized in three parts. Part one looks at language consciousness during the Holocaust and focuses on three specific glossaries created in the immediate aftermath. Part two takes a deep dive into three specific areas of linguistic focus: words relating to theft, German-Yiddish hybrid terms, and words relating to the effeminate body. Part three examines literary aftermaths and focuses specifically on two authors, Yechiel Dinur (also known by his pseudonym, Katzetnik) and Chava Rosenfarb.

Among the linguists Pollin-Galay features in the first part of the book are Israel Kaplan, Nachman Blumenthal, and Elye Spivak. Foremost among the testimonial lexicographers was Israel Kaplan (1902-2003), “a native speaker of Khurbn Yiddish during the war” (74). A teacher in prewar Kovno, Kaplan continued collecting Jewish folk sayings and black humor throughout his time in the ghettos and camps, and even after liberation, while recovering in the hospital and a nearby DP camp. Once the Central Historical Commission was established, he became its academic secretary and the editor of its journal, Fun Letstn Hurbn. Pollin-Galay’s choice to compare Kaplan to Blumenthal and Spivak is especially commendable, for while Kaplan lived through and observed the transformations in the language first hand, Blumenthal and Spivak, exiled from the land of destruction, were foreign speakers of Khurbn Yiddish who spent the war in the USSR and upon return discovered the rapid transformations in the language. As Pollin-Galay explains, Kaplan was less theoretical than the first two but more attuned to the “lived tension between mind, body, and soul. Thus, his writings alert us in an especially insightful manner to the ways that language flows between the physical, cultural, and universal realms” (75).

A key part of Kaplan’s dedicated ethnographic work was his effort to collect examples of Jewish expressions from “the mouth of the people” - dos yiddishe folksmoyl: “The expressions, mottoes and witticisms which were created by and circulated among the captives contained within them the power to comfort and encourage the broken-hearted…” ^{1 1} Israel Kaplan, Jewish Folk Expressions Under the Nazi Yoke (Tel Aviv: Beit Lohamei Hagettaot, 1982), iv. Kaplan’s research on humor and wartime folklore also demonstrated the unifying function of humor, by helping to create a collective identity of the She’erit Hapletah, who suffered together, laughed together, and managed to sometimes outwit the Germans together.

But Pollin-Galay also demonstrates how the linguistic innovations in the language and their subsequent documentation were not so straightforward. For while Kaplan may have been fascinated by such neologisms during the war and in its immediate aftermath, the definitions he provided for such words may have evolved over time, minimizing the dark, the vulgar, and the bitter, while elevating the humorous, the resilient, and the redemptive aspects of language. Pollin-Galay traces Kaplan’s journey from physical rehabilitation to linguistic analysis and ability to trace his progress. Over time he made editorial changes attempting to describe more linguistic agency to the Jewish population. “Kaplan’s verbal wit implied that Jews were able to assert some level of intellectual and symbolic control over their suffering, enough to record the language around them as ironic. The act of making words funny revealed a surprising fragment of self-possession. Likewise, Kaplan’s elimination of excessively vulgar terms supported this impression: the Jewish “folk mouth” could misbehave without losing control completely” (87). By collecting all of these sayings into dictionary of Khurbn Yiddish from the mouth of the people, Kaplan’s project also had a unifying function, demonstrating that despite extreme efforts to destroy Jewish communal solidarity, the people remained one, bound by Yiddish and such linguistic adaptation was ultimately a very Jewish response to persecution. “This effort was in keeping with his prewar notion of the “folk,” a People, bound by shared, cultural habits, shared memory, and verbal sensibilities” (86-87).

To understand the evolving nature of the language, the second part of the book analyzes specific words in three categories: words relating to theft, German-Yiddish hybrid terms, and words relating to the effeminate body. Through this analysis Pollin-Galay examines how language functions as a universal, ethical code; as cultural memory; and as a bodily activity. As she notes, these three layers of language are, of course, “deeply intertwined in Khurbn Yiddish” and her analysis argues convincingly that one of the distinctive features of Yiddish is the manner in “which meaning travels between these three realms of language” (99).

One of the words analyzed by Pollin-Galay, organizirn, proved to be one of the more enduring Khurbn Yiddish words that would find its way into modern spoken Hebrew as well (i.e. le’argen).

Organizirn: lit., to organize; in Khurbn Yiddish, to steal or obtain in a backhanded way.

As Pollin-Galay’s analysis reveals, the definition of a word and the evolving meaning of a word as used “in the people’s mouth” change over time. Thus, Kaplan expressed much more ambiguity towards the term in May 1945, complaining about it as a symptom of degenerate behavior demonstrated by the Jews during the war. However, as Pollin-Galay demonstrates, “[i]n contrast to his diary, in his dictionary, Kaplan achieves some distance and control over organizirn by performing his comic, folkloric persona. There, Kaplan glosses organizirn and its related words proudly, glibly, as if he and his friends had coined them all as a joke on the Nazis. In the spirit of ironic role play, the dictionary allows him to enact the part of someone who can outsmart his captors with humor” (106).

Likewise, a word like shabreven (to loot or take ownerless property; originated in Warsaw ghetto) analyzes the evolution of a word from its prewar etymology, wartime usage (looting or taking ownerless possessions in Warsaw ghetto by Jews from fellow Jews) to postwar catchall for looting, stealing, cheating, and dealing on the black market, and with this more general meaning worked its way into the Polish language (116).

In her chapter on German-Yiddish hybrids, Pollin-Galay demonstrates (in one of my favorite sentences from the book) how in Khurbn Yiddish “one vowel sound can take the witness stand” (121). She cites an example of this in the word “Yude,” the Yiddishized version of the German word for “Jew”: “the German word, in Yiddish characters, arises frequently as a way to signal reported speech, to announce that the author is not speaking for herself, but rather citing the way she is being spoken about” (135). The vowel in the middle signifies the distinction between how a Jew perceives himself (Yid) and how a German perceives the Jew (Yude).

Khurbn Yiddish also made note of the many German acronyms used during the war, which were often reinterpreted for comic satirical purposes. And in chapter 7, Pollin-Galay analyzes words for female and effeminate bodies and the ubiquitous coded speech employed to refer to sexual barter (147, Kuzinke: normally, a female cousin; in Khurbn Yiddish, a woman bartering sex for food and privileges in camps) or Pipel, not coincidentally also the title of one of Katzetnik’s books, defined by Kaplan in most serious terms: “Kapos in the Auschwitz ‘academy,’ used to also ‘pick out’ individuals, each, according to his ‘custom’ and his style. Most of the time it was from the younger crowd, who spent their early years without the supervision of parents, ‘trained,’ in Auschwitz, and raised there. Some of them became the personal servants of SS men and were exploited by these masters for their basest pleasures. These young children sadly never knew that they had been denied a normal life. On the contrary, they used to be proud of their ‘rank’ to be a pipel, a kind of fella that was very popular in the camps.” (156). Pollin-Galay notes how Wiesel uses the term in the original Yiddish version of Night (Un di velt hot geshvign) and in the original “defined the term, explicitly, graphically, and then forces the reader to think as much about sexual violence as about faith when encountering the scene [of the hanging of the 13-year-old boy].” Pollin-Galay demonstrates one more meaning lost in translation; not only is Wiesel’s anger at the world and his desire for revenge excised from the English classic, but so too is his judgment of Jewish sexuality and perceptions of deviance in the camps.

The final section of the book examines the uses of Khurbn Yiddish in “literary aftermaths” of the Khurbn. While the work of Yechiel Dinur (aka Katzetnik) might be more familiar to broader audiences, the examination of Chava Rosenfarb’s probably less well known writings is especially welcome. As Pollin-Galay demonstrates, “K. Tzetnik emphasized the horrifying, bizarre side of Khurbn Yiddish words, molding them into an expressionistic scream. He used Khurbn Yiddish to protest the pretenses of a return to literary normal after the Holocaust. Rosenfarb, by contrast, shined a light on the small acts of resilience contained within Khurbn Yiddish words, memories of self-expression and communication against the odds. Her ghetto terms become beautiful in the way they invite readers into scenes of everyday life under Nazi rule, moments from the margins of history that are rarely considered worthy of notice.” While Katzetnik used Khurbn Yiddish to create an impossible distance from the planet of the camps, “Rosenfarb invited readers to come and learn it” (173).

In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Elie Wiesel lamented the limits of language to teach the world to put an end to hatred of anyone who was “different.”

We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic.

And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.

But as Pollin-Galay shows, perhaps the Yiddish language did not fail the Jewish people. The inability of the rest of the world to comprehend or to absorb the meaning of “genocide” was not the fault of Yiddish. The experience of the camps may defy comprehension, but we can work towards comprehending its meaning for the so-called civilized world. As Pollin-Galay concludes: “the vocabulary of Khurbn Yiddish is untranslatable but not unlearnable. Rather than attempting translation, Khurb Yiddish dictionaries proffer an invitation to make progress toward the language of genocide, an almost ritualized engagement with a concrete corpus of terms, as well as the memories that each word contains. They take advantage of the dictionary genre, which invites people into new realms of language, while never promising them full command. To learn Khurbn Yiddish with these texts is thus an ongoing act of solidarity, in the sense Chava Rosenfarb proposed. It means entering the chain of gloss and interpretation that was initiated by those who scribbled down lists in the ghetto, allowing their horrifying and sometimes wonderful words to disrupt our current notions of communication and thinking with – rather than just about – the malekh, the muzlman, the pipel, and the kuzinke” (233).

There are no silver linings; Jewish life and death during the Holocaust was brutal and horrific. Words are insufficient to convey the enormity of the destruction and the devastation. Time may soften certain emotional impacts, but if we are truly committed to fulfilling the obligation to remember, then we should remember every aspect of the civilization that was destroyed, the lives lived and spoken into existence and then lost by the 5 million Yiddish speakers murdered during the war….we can never truly understand or imagine what it was like, but perhaps we can make progress beyond mere slogans like “Never Again” or Remember and approach a deeper knowledge of the depths of the destruction. And in so doing, we can continue to learn Yiddish in all its forms, a fitting response to its near annihilation.