Jewish Culture and Contexts
What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish
- 328 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Jewish Culture and Contexts
What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish
About This Book
How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the Holocaust The Holocaust 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 â Khurbn Yiddish, or "Yiddish of the Holocaust" â 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 intellectualsâNachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye SpivakâPollin-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, the German-Yiddish encounter 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. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into artâhighlighting 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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Thinking and Living the Khurbn Yiddish Dictionary
- Part II. A Short Study of Words That Mean Too Much
- Part III. Slang Turned Art: Literary Aftermaths
- Conclusion
- Glossary of Khurbn Yiddish Terms Used
- Archives Referenced
- Notes
- Index
- Acknowledgments