Ep. 63- Yiddish and the Holocaust with Hannah Pollin-Galay

The Nazis’ physical war on Jews also had important cultural repercussions.  One of these was its assault on Yiddish.  The Holocaust not only murdered many Yiddish speakers and destroyed Yiddish institutions, but it also changed the language itself.

In this episode, I talk with Hannah Pollin-Galay about fascinating work on Yiddish during the Holocaust.  We talked about the new words added as well as the attempts by Jewish linguists (and survivors) to capture and understand the new Khurbn (Destruction) Yiddish.

Hannah Pollin-Galay is the Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts- Amherst.

Pollin-Galay, Hannah.  Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (2024)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.842)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Bourne. And today we are talking about the impact of the Holocaust on language and what that tells us about both language and its uses, but also about how people react to genocide and oppression. In this case, looking at Yiddish with the author of an amazing book on this topic, Hannah Pulling Goliath.

and I'm so happy to have her on the on the podcast. Her book has won, multiple awards, occupied words, what Yiddish did to, excuse me, what the Holocaust did to Yiddish. probably not what Yiddish did to the Holocaust, but that could be a different conversation. Hannah, thanks so much for coming on.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (00:49.41)
Thanks for having me. This is really nice. It's the first thing I've done in the year 5786, aside from pray, eat and sleep. So it's an honor to step into the new year this way. Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (00:58.762)
That's right. Yeah. Cause the new year was yesterday. So yeah. So Shana Tova. Cool. So maybe starting just with how did you get interested in this particular topic or this particular approach to, guess, either Jewish history to the Holocaust, depending on sort of where you're, where you're coming from.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:20.302)
I've been interested in language for a really long time. I was a Yiddish major as an undergraduate and became really fascinated about how I can approach Jewish history, Holocaust history, world history through the study of languages and Yiddish specifically. I came though to be quite especially passionate about the role of language in

both remembering history and the way that history unfolds in real time. After my BA, when I did a Fulbright Fellowship in Lithuania, and I started interviewing survivors in Yiddish, survivors who had stayed in Lithuania, rather some of them had fled to the unoccupied Soviet Union and come back to Lithuania and stayed there until 2004, 2005 when I was there. And the interviews were really interesting and I was really surprised

that I didn't recognize the Holocaust in the way that they narrated the Holocaust. And I became fascinated with the role of language in shaping memory, not in a kind of superficial way of, I don't have the word for it, or I'm gonna censor what I'm saying in English or in Hebrew, though that is also there, but really in a much deeper way of how language informs which parts of the past are relevant or truthful.

and valuable or ethical to remember. And that was the topic of my dissertation. My first book was comparing Holocaust memory in Hebrew and English and in Yiddish. And while I was doing that project, I was listening to, you know, all these hundreds of hours of Holocaust testimony in Yiddish, I started to notice this really fascinating habit that these Yiddish speaking

Holocaust survivors, or rather they were all Yiddish speakers, were the people who chose to testify in the 1990s and the 2000s in Yiddish would do, which is that they were speaking, sometimes they had really weird words that I didn't understand and I would check with my mentors or native speakers and they're like, we're not sure about that word. But even better or even more fascinating than that, they would flag these words. So one example is this word Malik, which in

Hannah Pollin-Galay (03:40.334)
just normal Yiddish means angels comes from from lotion, Koidish from from Hebrew. And a couple of times in testimonies where these Lithuanian Jewish survivors would say, and I became a Malik or somebody else became a Malik with like a wink. And they'd explain that a Malik in the Kovna ghetto was an underage prisoner who was working for pay for an adult, a child laborer. And that these words were

were not only invented and they were part of their reality, but that invention of language meant something to them. And at the same time, around that same time, a colleague, Amos Goldberg, handed me this book by Nachman Blumenthal. I'll tell you more about him later. I think our conversation will lead to him later. Words and phrases from the Holocaust period. And I saw...

that there were 3,000 of these words that I had been hearing by chance. And then I started digging some more and I said, it's not just Blumenthal who wrote a dictionary of this. There's another one and another one and another one. And I was perplexed as to why these words were so important to them that they made this huge effort to record these words in a really thorough and passionate ways.

And also the content of the words. You know, you think of reading a dictionary as something incredibly dry that requires extremely strong coffee. But I started reading these dictionaries and they read like, you know, they read like novels to me. were extremely, there's so much life, so much texture, horror too, very frightening, very sad. And so I started to think about kind of a shift for my first project wherein I was really focused on how language shapes

memory and thinking, well, language is definitely a part of memory, but it's also part of the event itself. That just like, you know, how there are these incredible forensic studies now of Treblinka and different camps where people go through and study material traces that are left in the dirt, you know, of a camp, that this same kind of forensic

Hannah Pollin-Galay (06:03.392)
archaeological dig could be done with words, that could get something new, new insight on events by digging into the words themselves as traces, verbal traces of what happened. So that was how I got into the project.

Waitman Beorn (06:18.655)
Yeah, I mean, and it is really a fascinating project. when I was reading it, I guess one of the, I think one of the signs of a good book is it starts making you reflect on your own sort of life experiences, et cetera, et cetera, as you're reading it. And I kept imagining, are the words? I mean, obviously I haven't lived through the Holocaust, but what are the words in my lifetime that are sort of created or modified to mean different things? Because I think as you rightly point out that

superficially, one thinks about linguistics, even ethno-linguistics or anything like this is kind of like a dry kind of genealogical sort of study. But actually, and one of the things your book does really well is show how it's not. I can certainly imagine sort of how looking at it, because the dictionaries that you're talking about, we'll talk about this later, you know, they're not sort of

Omni dictionaries, you know, just of all words. It's not like the Oxford English dictionary, which, you know, would be probably somewhat dry, perhaps to sit down and just leaf through page by page. But these are sort of topic dictionaries, you know, like about specific words relating to a specific event or something. And generally these words are in Yiddish, which is what we're going to be talking about. And maybe for all of us, you could give us sort of a very sort of short potted history.

of Yiddish. What is Yiddish? Because it's a language, some people say it's not a language in the past or even presently. It's sort of debated between Jews and non-Jews about what is its place in sort of high art, low art, literature, daily use, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe you can just give us a little gloss over what is Yiddish and what role does it play?

Hannah Pollin-Galay (08:00.456)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate that question because in my experience teaching Yiddish and teaching Yiddish cultural history and literature, I have encountered such colorful and amusing at times frustrating misunderstandings about the history of Yiddish that it is actually important to kind of get some basics out there. And you're right that there isn't agreement about when

there are some debates about when Yiddish stops being a dialect and becomes a language, which is always a somewhat subjective question for any language. But with Yiddish, that debate is amplified because it's never an official national language, whereas that's often the marker of when a dialect becomes a language. But in the case of Yiddish and other languages too, Romani,

so forth, if we use that standard, then we would just simply not have a language. And that's clearly not the case. So I'll give you what I think is the best version. And people can see different break-off points. But a real important point to start out is the year 1272. That's the first written evidence of Yiddish. It's in a maqsur for Pesach, a book of liturgy for the Passover.

And we see their writing in Yiddish, it's from Werns. So Yiddish began in what is today Germany between the Rhine and Main rivers. And it was a combination of European medieval, European languages, medieval German.

not modern German, that's one of the greatest misconceptions is that if you just take modern German and you throw in a little bit of Hebrew or Slavic, you get Yiddish, but no, the base is medieval German and there's a lot of also medieval French and Italian mixed in there with Semitic languages. So Hebrew and Aramaic primary among them.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (10:10.254)
So 1272, we see writing, but for something to be in writing, people have had to have been speaking it for a while before then. So most likely, a good starting point is the year 1000. It's a round number. And then the major changes happen in Yiddish after the Crusades in Western Europe, when Jews migrate en masse eastwards towards Eastern Europe. And they bring this language, Yiddish,

or you could say a Jewish dialect of German if you want to be stingy or strict or whatever, to Eastern Europe. And then there's no question because there's no language around them that resembles what they're speaking. And that's when, and at that point too, a Yiddish, because it splits into two major dialects, there are sub-dialects, but there's Western Yiddish that continues to be spoken in Western Europe and Eastern Yiddish.

And there it absorbs a lot of Slavic grammar, Slavic vocabulary, and it becomes very distinct from the languages around it. You can't confuse Ukrainian or Belorussian with Yiddish. it develops. there are other, further, of course, there are changes. Western Yiddish doesn't do that well because it's so similar to the languages around it. Whereas in Eastern Europe,

Jews also historically stayed more in enclosed communities for various reasons. So Yiddish thrived there and became more of the tool of secularization as well, modernization, as well as course, you know, day-to-day life, religious study and so forth. 19th century, end of the 18th century, 19th century, the print materials in Yiddish is part of the print revolution, like any European language. And...

19th century, there's just like in other languages, there's a consciousness towards Yiddish that develops. This is our language, is a national language that was declared in 1904 at the Chernivtsi conference. So a real consciousness around Yiddish being a national language. For our purposes, what's important is that by the time we reach the Holocaust era, Yiddish is a transnational modern language.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (12:27.606)
meaning that there's intellectual life in Yiddish that is not any less advanced or sophisticated than any other world language. It's especially rich in some ways because someone writing about, let's say, the topic of race, important for our purposes in Warsaw, is going to be reading someone writing about the topic of race in New York because they're writing in the same language, they're going to be corresponding. So there's an incredible flow of ideas.

And language itself is extremely interesting to Yiddish speaking intellectuals. So there's the YIVO Institute in Vilna that collects dialects and so forth. that language, Yiddish specifically, is one, not the, one response to secularization and destabilization, meaning who are we as a people? How do we mark what Jewishness is? If by and large there are

Obviously, there's a lot of tradition, but there's a lot of shakiness in that tradition. Yiddish is one way to say, we are a people, this is who we are. These are the lines that we know who we are. On the eve of the Holocaust, there roughly 11 million Yiddish speakers worldwide. Roughly 5 million of them are murdered in the Holocaust. And that's an underestimate because, of course, the Holocaust destroys future Yiddish speakers.

It destroys the environments that produce fluent Yiddish speakers and Yiddish cultural producers. So, five million is the base of that moment. That story, that numerical story of what happened to Yiddish in the Holocaust is known. I hope it's obvious. What I wanted to do though was to go beyond the numbers and to say this is the big story of Yiddish.

And this is obviously the big turning point. This is the tear. This is the breach in this cultural chain that's lasted for a thousand years. But beyond the breach, what's the transformation? Because people were speaking Yiddish as it happened. So what happened within the language as this breach occurred? And how do they reflect on this breach in their own words, in their own thoughts?

Hannah Pollin-Galay (14:55.534)
And how do they take all of this incredible sophistication about what a language is, how language relates to peoplehood, what is race, what is suffering, what is catastrophe, what is oppression that was embedded in this cultural tradition that was so alive, how did they use that to process what was happening in real time and then shortly thereafter?

Waitman Beorn (15:20.623)
Yeah, I mean, and this is something that gives that sort of attention that runs throughout the book, you know, where you have sort of the Holocaust as negative in the sense of destruction, you know, destroying opportunities for Yiddish, destroying opportunities for speech, destroying the people themselves, the culture, and then positive. And I'm using that in sort of a guarded sense, but the creative element where Yiddish is an adaptive language that absorbs events.

and, is able to sort of describe them, you know, using ways that sometimes make sense and sometimes seem out of the blue. and, and, and so that there's, and you see that throughout throughout sort of the way you've presented it, which I think is really, is really useful. before maybe before we dive directly in, there's one, one more sort of thing I wanted to sort of have you expound a little bit on them, because we've, we've both kind of in the book, you, you, do kind of a tongue in cheek nod to this too, that, know,

Hannah Pollin-Galay (16:06.445)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (16:17.277)
dictionaries are boring, right? Now that's not necessarily true. You know, and certainly you show that it's not. But what does it what do dictionaries mean? Because I think one of the things that's really cool about about your work and something that particularly for for folks who may not be scholars and do this all the time is to think about dictionaries in a much different way as a sort of living, breathing documents that tell us something about not only the present.

but also about the people that are creating them and that kind of thing. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, why dictionaries? Why study them? Why look at them? What do they offer us as scholars or just people interested in the past?

Hannah Pollin-Galay (17:01.474)
Definitely. want to talk about dictionaries, but I have to just give a nod to your office mate, Dominic Williams, because of that tension that you brought up that is so important and so hard in this book that it's Horben Yiddish, destruction Yiddish is about destruction. It's about suffering. But there's also a creative spark in it. And Dominic, your office mate at Northumbria kept telling me, I think you're going a little hard on the creativity part.

You know, the Holocaust was not a creative event. So anyhow, we'll go back to that. But I had to mention mention him there, which is it's his debates and discussions with him are present throughout the book. The book is saturated with the intellectual gifts of my friends. So a dictionary. wanted to think about the question because all these, you know, the three lexicographers, cultural activists that I highlight in the book, but also others.

are really into this dictionary genre. Dictionaries were like a popular genre in DP camp newspapers. know, have like, Schmuel Weintraub was an Auschwitz survivor and he's in Bergen-Belsen and he's writing like, it's really cheap paper. It's obviously been produced hastily. These people have nothing. They barely have their bodies together and they're writing dictionaries and people are reading them and people are responding with reviews.

So I wanted to ask why a dictionary? And there are two answers to that question. One is a historical answer, which is that dictionaries were really important at that time in history. There was a dictionary of the Bolshevik revolution. There was a self-produced, was, know, Nazis had words of the day. There were dictionaries, dialect dictionaries were considered, you know, popular reading. Dictionaries, writing a dictionary was incredibly important to, you know,

nationalism, imagine communities, so forth. So it was there. It was a genre that you could catch, that could catch people's emotions and thoughts. But I also wanted to think beyond the historical explanation and think about it just as what does a dictionary do? What can it offer? I started reading other dictionaries and thinking about the history of dictionaries in general, that the first dictionary was actually from ancient China.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (19:27.706)
the area which means towards, towards perfection, towards something but not arriving. And that really gave me some insight into the dictionary genre that it's not narrative. There's no beginning, middle and end. It's like a big web of hashtags, of memes that you can crisscross and you can connect and you can connect different conversations. And it gives you a different opportunity to think about an event, to think about a reality than to say first this, then that, then that's about

taking almost like a pause and saying, what is the map of what's going on here? And that's actually, Umberto Eco, the great intellectual and semiotician who described dictionaries and encyclopedias as maps, maps of a cultural moment. And that map can be torn up and thrown away. But if you map a certain moment, you're able to get into it and get inside what it felt like, what was...

What were the sensations? What were the realities? What were the structures? Who was powerful? What were the references? And I think that that's what dictionaries allowed people to do was to pause and to go in and not, again, towards, master understanding of the Holocaust experience. That's not possible. But to allow people to come in and pause and look at phenomenology, which was a very important.

you know, popular way of thinking there, that is the way that things relate to each other. And there's also a statement of particularity and of self-definition there, that we're in a world now where Yiddish, I I'm like taking on the voice of, you know, someone who has just survived the Holocaust. I guess that's a little bold, but this is just the way I think of it. We're in a world now where Yiddish has been destroyed, right? Avram Tsutsgiver is not allowed to testify at the Nuremberg trial in Yiddish.

Hannah Arendt laughs at Yiddish when she writes Eichmann in Jerusalem. We're in a world, post Holocaust world, where Yiddish is not respected, not in the new state of Israel so much, and not in the Soviet Union, not in the US. And these are people who saying, you know what though? This is our memory, this is our experience. And not only do you need to come to us, you need to learn our language, but we're gonna teach you the way that our language worked then.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (21:49.032)
And this was an incredibly powerful call among Holocaust survivors. This really resonated among them. Outside of Holocaust survivors, it was a challenging message, you know, that you have to come towards a victim's voice. You have to try to learn what they're saying. So I think that that was what the dictionary genre offered was a pause to consider realities as a map of a cultural moment.

and an insistence that the world learn your language. come towards that victim group.

Waitman Beorn (22:28.031)
Yeah, I mean, and I think it's important to highlight the importance of language. And I'm very cognizant of it. I don't speak Yiddish. I don't speak Hebrew. And when I'm using, for example, a lot of stuff that I used in my past work has been interrogation documents or translations of survivor testimony or translations, German translations of

survivors giving testimony in a judicial sense. And I'm very aware of the limitations of that for me as a scholar because I, you know, and this book actually makes me even more aware of it because, you know, I'm missing a level of how they're choosing to describe what they're doing. You know, like can, can.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (23:14.05)
Well, I really didn't mean that the book to be, you know, like scolding, no, no, you know, I, yeah, no, this is out there. That's out there. Like, you know, if you don't read it in the original, you can't get that. I really wanted this to be inviting and to say this was important to them. Actually, they really wanted their work to be translated and published and understood be well beyond their, their community. This is really clear. This is Java Rosenfarb.

Waitman Beorn (23:18.843)
No, no, I don't take it that way, but I mean, I'm just thinking.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (23:43.584)
in writing in 1946, she's just come out of Auschwitz, the Lodz ghetto. She says, no, she's not famous. She's just a young woman. And she writes, she addresses her first book of poems, which has Horben Yiddish in it, to people from our people, Jewish people who weren't there, and to people of all nations, of all worlds.

So she obviously not everybody in all of the world is gonna read Yiddish. So she wanted her work to be translated. She did later translated her work herself. So you're doing exactly what you you can do, you should do. It's about coming towards, right? It's not about perfection and judgment in that sense. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (24:22.235)
Right. No, mean, would just suggesting that there are always limitations once something is translated from the original. And that's OK. mean, it probably hasn't, it doesn't ruin, if I'm trying to find out what happened and when it happened and generally speaking what it looked like, I think that's fine. But also what you show is the richness of certain language that if we're not looking in the original, we miss that.

And again, it's very much as all things historical, it's what are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish with the sources that sort of impacts, is this a weakness or is it just something that's different? But maybe since we're moving in that direction, let's talk about what happens. So you've used this word and used a word in the book, hribin Yiddish, right? As a destruction catastrophe Yiddish.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (24:56.046)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (25:17.789)
And that is kind of the word that you're using for Yiddish words or alterations to Yiddish meanings that take place during the Holocaust. So maybe you talk a little bit about sort of what are the different ways in which this takes place? And then of course, it's worth pointing out, you know, that not only are people Holocaust survivors, you know, immediately after the Holocaust in the the deeply camps, the refugee camps, writing dictionaries, some of them are kind of almost doing this work.

during the Holocaust as well, you know, and so it's worth highlighting that as well.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (25:50.678)
Yes, definitely. That was the amazing thing. And again, my first discovery was the interest in these words immediately post-Holocaust, which was more abundant because people, for obvious reasons, that people could have paper and pencil and they had more calories in their body to write. So there's more writing, there's more documentation from the immediate post-Holocaust period. it was the...

derived from the Holocaust period. This was their idea. In the Warsaw Ghetto, we have Shmuel Leiman, who begins recording new words almost immediately. His list was lost to posterity for reasons that only real Warsaw Ghetto buffs need to know about. records of his list having existed are there. In the Warsaw Ghetto, Rabbi Shmuel...

Shimon Huber Band, that's not lost the posterity, that's in the Oynik Shabes archive, he starts writing a list, new words and old words with new meaning also very, very early on in the Oaji Ghetto, part of the Oaji Ghetto encyclopedia is new words and Yisroel Kaplan recorded new words in the Kovna Ghetto and there are songs, folk, it's not just the work of intellectuals, there are folk songs, street songs from the ghettos and even from

one from Auschwitz that I found with the help of Dominic, that have new words and they're glossing and explaining words as part of the song. And there's a cabaret piece from Warsaw where there's new words. So really there was a self-consciousness about this language change as the events happened. Language use and language reflection were

interpenetrating, meaning people were using these words and they were thinking about their meaning in real time. And this model of witnessing through language existed and inspired much broader projects after the war.

Waitman Beorn (27:59.348)
Yeah. I mean, and I think that's a great, that's a great, you know, segue to some of these people, because you, highlight three people who, you know, undertook this endeavor and it's, they're, nicely judiciously chosen because they, they sort of can stand in for sort of three different national and cultural approaches to, to sort of capturing

the words, but also again, what operates on a different level is it's also how are they received, where they're trying to capture the words, what do the words mean to them. So we're already talking sort of the blending between history and memory working in that.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (28:40.14)
Right, yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you noticing the differences among the key figures that I highlight in the book. And there's actually five, I mean, there three lexicographers and then there two authors. And I just bring that up because the Hava Rosenfarb was really no less of a lexicographer or an intellectual than the other four men that I highlight. So that's important for me to state on the record.

I really, it was incredibly important for me to talk about not just about the words in general and this map, cultural map, but about individuals and the way that they worked with these words, because one of the dangers in language history is to essentialize. So if we look at some of the reflections that George Steiner, for example, made on German in the Holocaust that...

German marched off to the camps, you know, these really big generalizations, essentializations about what happened to German. And that's, you know, that doesn't speak to the multiple, the incredible multiplicity of experiences. And that doesn't do anyone any good. You in the end, it's this pull because there is something to generalize about. There is a collective language is a collective production and reception is a collective activity, but there are individual responses to it. So I wanted to have that push and pull.

Um, so I, I, started out with Nachman Blumenthal. He's, you know, the most, um, he's the most persistent with this project. Blumenthal, uh, was he's fairly well known now, but I guess, you know, in Holocaust circles, inside baseball, he's well known. Um, he was born in 1902 in, in Borscht, which is in Galicia. And he studied.

He was a teacher, he studied philology and philosophy at Warsaw University, and he's in this incredible intellectual environment in the interwar years where there's a lot of experimentation, a lot of thought about the role of language as it connects to psychology and as psychology connects to politics. So you can see this web of thought that he's building there.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (30:52.726)
He's also, worked at YIVO as a sampler. So he did folklore collection. You know, he was interested in language from below and he wrote his dissertation. He was fascinated by this concept which he called metaphorology. Just how does a certain metaphor take hold in a certain cultural moment? How does it shape how we act, how we feel? How does it shape our bodily experience, our sensation?

And he went into the Holocaust with this intellectual equipment. He fled to the unoccupied Soviet Union. He was in the Bashkir Republic. He left his young wife, his young son and his wife behind. They were both shot. He discovered that when he returned in 1944 and he researched that privately, but didn't publish on it at the time. What he published and spoke about publicly was language.

which is an interesting, again, bifurcation. But so he's really interested in psychology, the psychology of language. And he arrives as he tells it multiple times. And he actually has archives in notes in his archive at YIVO to back up this story that he arrives in Poland in 1944. And he starts walking around. can't understand what people are saying. Can't understand what survivors, meaning survivors who were in camps and ghettos. He's also a flight survivor who

fled to the unoccupied Soviet Union, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. And he starts taking notes, and you can see his notes from that year. And he starts theorizing that something really big happened to the Yiddish language and that that something was meaningful. So he starts going around and listening to informal Holocaust survivor. They weren't called Holocaust survivors at the time.

Lebens gib libene, you know, those who stayed alive. He went around and listened to their conversations and jotted down notes. He dug through trash cans, literally, in Lodz, in Warsaw. He discovered a lot of important papers doing that, not just related to Chorban Yiddish, to Holocaust Yiddish. And he starts collecting words. He puts out a call for people to send him words in one of the DP newspapers.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (33:07.366)
And he starts writing about this almost immediately. And his approach, and he writes essay after essay after essay, some of which are published, some of which are never published. And his lens for looking at this enormous change is about psychomotoric reactions, meaning the body reacts.

to suffering and the mouth responds. mean, language is a part of the body, right? We speak with our mouths, we create voice with our lungs, we write with our hands, and actually scholars now say that we even recruit our bodies when we're just thinking about language in our heads. So this was Blumenthal's, one of his bases. Another base that he had was forensic language study because he was

He was working as a translator and a researcher for the Nuremberg trials. And so he was also working on Nazi language. And he's working on language as a form of accusation. was actually his first book was in Polish from 1947 called Innocent Words. was in Polish, it was Nazi terms translated and explained, glossed into Polish. So he has...

this idea that both you can really discover the truth of an event through language forensics and that language comes from the body. And with Yiddish, the difference between his, he's continued his Nazi study of Nazi German for decades. That was the one project he was paid to do by Yad Vashem, not the one, I should say, the one language project he was later paid by Yad Vashem to do. He was not paid by Yad Vashem to work on Yiddish. But that...

That was never really published, never came to fruition. It's good, but he doesn't ever top Victor Klemperer or a native German speaker who writes about German during World War II. His passion is Yiddish and it's coming from inside him, know, his own interests, his own statements. he's also he so he publishes this work in the 1950s and 1960s serially, and then he republishes it in 1981 as a book.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (35:19.904)
And what's fascinating about his project is not only this is where we get the 3000 plus words. It's not just the incredible richness of the research. And I mean, the source work that he did, my God, if any of us could get this number of sources on any topic today, I would just fall off my chair. It's the development of the meaning of this project from really what it meant, you right after.

Holocaust to discover what happened, like what happened to the Jewish body, the Jewish soul, to what happened to, how did these events play out, to then over time becoming a call for a new community, a kind of community around this language, a memory community. And this happens in the correspondences that he has with survivors where he writes to survivor writers like

Rivke Kvietkovsky-Pinchasik from Lodz saying, what does this word mean? What does that word mean? And he builds this conversation in the pages of his book and in his correspondences of people saying, OK, maybe other people have forgotten about this language, but we haven't. Let's talk about this among ourselves. And there's also an element that becomes sort of transgressive about his work and that he moves to Israel in 1950.

And he is hired by Yad Vashem. His intelligence is appreciated. I should say that. That's that's undeniable. But but they are annoyed with his Yiddish ism. They're annoyed with the fact that he writes in just for any topic he writes in Yiddish, he writes a scholarship in Yiddish. If they want it in Hebrew, Yad Vashem has to pay for it. There are other annoying things, you know, that aren't related. But there's there's there's there's tension about his Yiddish ism there. So there's something almost transgressive about this.

alternate memory path that he insists on pursuing all these years in the Israeli context. So there's a project, there's the words that he gives us in this psycholinguistic vein. And then there's the development of the meaning of this project over time from forensics to a communal memory, to a transgressive effort to step outside of early

Hannah Pollin-Galay (37:33.92)
Israeli nation monolingualism.

Waitman Beorn (37:36.448)
I was going say that there's a really interesting moment and it's not necessarily, I guess, central, but I found it fascinating as an historian, as a scholar, that Yad Vashem's Israeli sort of born or I guess more settled Israeli scholars were kind of irritated by the Holocaust survivors that were

At Yad Vashem as well. you know, and they, they, they, they were sort of saying, look, you know, You can't just always say, well, I was there. I was, I'm a survivor. You know, I thought that was that the one hand, on the one hand, as scholars, yes, of course we need that. But on the other hand, it's kind of like, wow, that's pretty early to be, to be telling a survivor in your workplace, you know, that

Hannah Pollin-Galay (38:12.364)
Yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (38:23.828)
Yeah, totally. I'm I'm not the one who, know, Boaz Cohen has really gone deep into some of those early debates. I just I had to tell it as a part of of Lumenthal's story because it's a part of his story. It's a part of these words, too. And what they did and what they meant was this, you know, DAFKA, like against what you want, what you want me to do. I'm really good. I'm going to research these words even more. Right. So it's, you know, it's it's.

Waitman Beorn (38:49.715)
Right.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (38:52.364)
something that comes up all throughout the 50s and it explodes in the case of Blumenthal with these exchange of newspaper articles where he accuses Yad Vashem of sloppy scholarship and his accusations are seemingly kind of minor, there's something else going on and they go firing right back and they say there's a bunch of...

Scholars here at Yad Vashem who think that they're good enough to be scholars just because they're you know They live through it and they barely know Hebrew, know, obviously like talking to you So there's a lot going on here too about a lot of it is about Yiddish and these people are basically they're too diaspora They're too gaullist. They're too Yiddishy and they they know a lot

but they're not knowing things in the way that we want them to know in this institution at this time. Yad Vashem is of course changed. It's not, I'm not talking about the Yad Vashem of today.

Waitman Beorn (39:48.672)
Well, I mean, this is interesting too, because it's also a nice rabbit hole that leads us into the way the Holocaust functioned for the state of Israel politically in its early days. This idea of Hebrew, Hebrew is a language. It's not just a dead religious language to be used in religious services. It's the language of the new state of Israel.

survivors of a certain kind are sort of privileged if they're resistance type, if they're Warsaw ghetto fighters or partisans, you know, and so there's that thing, there's all of that sort of play at this particular moment in time as well.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (40:27.798)
Yeah, well that brings me back to my first book where I did write explicitly about Hebrew Holocaust memory, Yiddish Holocaust memory and the different genealogies there. one thing I should say is that the majority of Yiddish speakers who are living in Yiddish communities and talking to each other after the Holocaust are in Israel.

So there's that needs to be said like that there's a lot of Yiddish going on in Israel. There's a lot of Yiddish being spoken. There's a lot of Yiddish being written. There's there's a lot of Yiddish being read. So that's not there's a difference between the official line and then what's happening on the ground by virtue of Yiddish speakers living, you know, in close proximity to each other. Yiddish speakers in the US are much more spread out or, you know, in Europe and so forth. So so there's a lot of Yiddish going on, but it's not.

at this time, it's not admired or appreciated in any kind of institutional form. It's more than just Hebrew revivalism. there's what I felt, what I discovered in my first book, Ecologies of Witnessing, is that a Hebrew language framework, memory genre at that time, wants, it's not, again, individuals react to it as individuals do.

Waitman Beorn (41:21.94)
Right.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (41:48.504)
but it guides people towards a conversion narrative. I'm a new person now. I was weak and now I'm strong. I spoke Yiddish and now I speak Hebrew. I lived in Poland, now I live in Israel. And that is a coherent framework for memory that's quite potent and powerful for a lot of people.

Waitman Beorn (41:52.713)
Yep.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (42:08.258)
A lot of other people said, I don't want to convert. I want to survive and I want to live in my community. But I still want to remember the way, what I was, who I was. there's people are so there's, this is the Yorub and Yiddish project in the context of Israel is an anti-conversion narrative. It's about remembering who you were. It's about respecting and dignifying and bringing a piece of that victim self.

who said words like malech, the one I brought up earlier, of underage child working for somebody else, who said words like people, a male forced into sexual slavery in a camp, who said words like organizieren, stealing. They wanted to remember that dirty side of their history and to dignify it, so it's an anti-conversion.

peace. in that sense, it was the Yiddish of Yiddish. Yiddish was annoying to a lot of people in official capacities in early state Israel. So Horban Yiddish, which is worse in their minds than normally Yiddish was like, whoo, you know, that's like treif posel really that that even annoyed Yiddishists.

Waitman Beorn (43:18.583)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so maybe because I want to I want to get to the actual words and make sure we don't run out. But I want to talk maybe a little bit about the Soviet Union, because again, in the Soviet Union with Spivak, who is another person who does this work, you have a nation state with an official attitude towards Yiddish, you know, whereas sort of.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (43:24.481)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (43:44.498)
Initially, I've seen it. mean, I'm not an expert, I've seen it. Yiddish is a good language because it's proletarian and Hebrew is not because Hebrew is sort of a nationalist language. maybe that's just what I have come across in my reading. Exactly.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (43:55.969)
Yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (44:00.108)
Well, there's a lot of change over time. The thing that I think that the key to understanding Yiddish in the Soviet Union is to know that there are these wild leaps and changes in Soviet policy towards Yiddish at different moments in time. And that affects the cultural history there. So you're right that in the 1920s in the Koronizatia, the indigenization phase of the Soviet Union,

just like when they were encouraging Ukrainians to explore their Ukrainian roots and so forth, there was also a glorification of Yiddish. And it was a great moment for Yiddish because there's official money, state money going to Yiddish, like good stuff. People could earn a living for being an avant-garde Yiddish writer, for being a Yiddish intellectual. In the 1930s, it dies down. It's still there, but it dies down. Eli Spivak...

survived as a Yiddish cultural activist in the 1930s. He kept writing. And in the 1930s, actually, he writes some of his most interesting work that then helps us frame the way that he responds to the Holocaust. he writes, it's important to think about Elias Spivak not just as a Soviet Yiddishist, as a Marxist Yiddishist, which means that there is like a deep, coherent intellectual framework there. It's not just somebody randomly responding to power.

So he's, before I tell you about how he responds, I'll just give you that right, that thumbnail Yiddish Holocaust. So the Yiddish goes back into style in Stalinist power circles during the Holocaust because Yiddish writers and international jury, their goals align with the Soviet goals during World War II, defeating Hitler and so forth. So there's this moment where Yiddish is back on the horse, so to speak. And then

Starting in 1948, before then actually, but really 1948, that's the murder of Shulmo Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor. Yiddish is cut off. And really, the Yiddish leading figures are arrested and they're executed in 1952. Elias Spivak himself is arrested in 1949 and he dies during interrogation of a so-called brain hemorrhage. We don't know what that means.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (46:23.352)
So there's, it's ups and downs with Yiddish. And then after Stalin's death, there's a thaw around Yiddish too. There's ups and downs with Yiddish in the Soviet Union. So Spivak is a part of that history. He lost his life because he wrote about Korban Yiddish and research Yiddish after the Holocaust, which is, it's big. I mean, this is how much it meant to him. So another reason I wanted to pay him, you know, the respect of writing about this project.

His framework is so different from Blumenthal's. He hates psychology. That's big Marxist linguistic thing. You shouldn't just think about language production as individual impulse. It's a socially produced process. And just like we wouldn't accept survival of the fittest in a social level, you can't accept survival of the fittest in terms of language. You have to jump in and intervene for the weak against the strong. And this gives an end.

He was already clued into this idea of Wortbeschaffung, of word creation from this Bolshevik fascination with language change, and he takes those tools into the Holocaust. Again, it's like there's a deep intellectual tradition that these people are taking into the Holocaust to study Hurban Yiddish. Now he's in Ufa, he goes from Moscow to Ufa for part of the war, and he's publishing boom, boom, boom throughout World War II about how Yiddish is changing through the Red Army. So these are...

hero words, martyr words, words for fighters, weaponry, things like that that he's incredibly proud of and that fit the Soviet line. After the war, he travels back to Kiev and he goes, boom, this is a cultural catastrophe. Kulturelishe Khrubn. This is a real, you know, that's a big statement. And he keeps researching the words.

He has expeditions. He organizes a lot. He's really he's answering. He's accepting testimonies from people that are writing to him. He's a receptacle of testimony. He's researching words and he comes out with this slim volume called The Language in the Days of the Great Patriotic War. And there he splits it between hero words and pain words. So a dialectic, right? Like pain and heroism are going to

Hannah Pollin-Galay (48:43.022)
clash in a Gaelian way and then they're going to produce Yiddish of the future. That wasn't good enough. That wasn't Soviet enough and even his friends warned him in the book, it was ready in 1946 in a meeting. They say, listen buddy, this is a little risky what you're doing here. Are you sure? Why would you? One of the words that he writes about is the name Getale, a girl named Getale like ghetto, little ghetto in Vilna. And they say, why are you reminding people that were

Jewish kids were named Getole. That's really embarrassing. It's not forward thinking, it's not Soviet. And then the record gets a little blurry, so I can't say how he responded, but I know what the result is, which is that he was arrested and died, was murdered, whatever. So that's his story, but it's a different intellectual take than Blumenthal's psychology. It's about conscious...

study for the sake of creation and planning and future thinking.

Waitman Beorn (49:43.816)
And of course, he's also, you know, coming up against the, you know, as Stalin is sort of becoming increasingly anti-Semitic or least increasingly acting on anti-Semitism towards the end of his life. He's coming up onto the don't divide the dead, you know, ideology by, you know, they don't, the Soviets just defy listeners because the Soviets didn't want, particularly when they're being anti-Semitic about it, they don't want any recognition that, you know, there were different groups that suffered differently or that were targeted specifically.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (49:53.091)
Yes.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (49:57.669)
yes.

Waitman Beorn (50:12.617)
for reasons, for example, for being Jewish, right? Because it doesn't quite fit the narrative of the, you know, the peace loving communist citizen, that kind of thing.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (50:15.062)
Yes.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (50:19.212)
This is, I mean, I know we have a lot to talk about, but you hit on something that's very important to me. And it struck a chord with me, especially reading his interrogation records, where whether he was forced to say or he was convinced to say, said, I I'm really sorry that I spoke about Jews suffering as Jews during the Great Patriotic War. All humans suffered just as much. And,

Waitman Beorn (50:42.27)
Right, yep.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (50:44.578)
That really breaks my, that broke my heart because not only is it not true, but it was also, it was so important to him as a Marxist to try to balance his love of humanity as a whole with his passion for the particularity of Jewish experience and culture. He worked on that tension. He was doing that. He was aware of that tension. And then in his last days to be forced to erase all of that intellectual depth,

It's very, it's really heartbreaking to me. And I also, you know, I respond to that in somewhat in contemporary discourse today, meaning 2025, when people say, you know, you have to universalize, you have to universalize. Well, yes, universal human rights and human values are real.

That should never come at the cost, though, of erasing particular experience. And we should be embarrassed to say that someone suffered as a Jew, as a Ukrainian, as you know, and so forth. So I work on that tension, too. It's a point that you brought up that is actually something that occupies, preoccupies, to use the title for my book, Me Today in 2025. But so that's that point.

Waitman Beorn (51:52.704)
Yeah, I mean, and you know, again, I just gave a talk a couple of weekends ago at a festival and I was talking about Holocaust memory. And one of my examples were these monuments to the killing sites that I wrote about in what was then the Soviet Union, where it just says, you know, here, 1200 peace-loving communist citizens were murdered by the fascist occupiers when it's it's all 1200 of them were Jewish, you know, they weren't they weren't murdered because they were communist per se.

But we should talk about some words. And I want to preface this by saying that the book does not overpower you with words. I think that's good. It doesn't try to do, you know, just give you lots and lots and lots and lots of examples, but it picks judiciously, you know, a number of examples, but then goes really deep into sort of what they mean, where they came from, and how they change during the Holocaust. There's a couple that I thought were

Hannah Pollin-Galay (52:21.324)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (52:45.475)
particularly interesting because of either how they come about or what they come to signify. And one of them, and I'm going to try to channel my inner Yiddish here, is it Shabraven? that? crap. was going for it.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (52:55.758)
It's not, but I appreciated that. That was good. Again, no, it's okay because Shabravin, it's not, or Shabran was another variation. It's not a word that Yiddish speakers, normal Yiddish speakers would know anyhow. So that's cool. Yeah, Shabravin belongs to this huge, huge lexicon of words related to theft.

Waitman Beorn (53:05.298)
Okay.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (53:24.334)
which is just, you know, in the ghettos and camps theft or what you can't call it theft anymore. That's the problem because it's not it's not an illegal act or an immoral act if you're taking something for your own survival. Or is it that question mark produces lots and lots and lots of words. like scratching a lexical itch because you can't get the right word for what you're doing. So Shabravin is right in there, comes from Warsaw.

Waitman Beorn (53:39.551)
Mm.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (53:54.266)
And it's a word that is, so Blumenthal, Nachman Blumenthal, after the war, he defines it as looting, but also taking ownerless property. So how can something be both? And he goes on and on. It's like a page and a half of his trying to explain with this word. He's not the only one that runs into these problems. Defining it, Rochell Oyerbach writes about the word.

many others, Hillel Zeidman, it's a really, it's an obsession, this word, like what was it? Was it looting or was it taking, you know, ownerless property? Was it okay? Was it bad? Was it good? And there are debates around this topic. Again, it's like really, it's a meme, right? This hashtag, Shabrovin started during the war. There's an interview with a young man, an orphan named Dovid Briner who,

who's telling his story as a Shabrovnik, as somebody who engaged in Shabrovin, and he's detailing what he does. He says, I went in with my friend into this house and we took, basically, mean, most of the time what it meant was when people were expelled from the Warsaw ghetto, when they were kicked out of their houses, the houses were empty and people came in and took their stuff. But are they actually gone or did they just step out for a while?

Are there family members that are supposed to come and claim this property? There's no rules here. Are you just taking some sweater or a bed or something that really has no use to anyone now and you're saving yourself or not? So, Dovid Briner is a Shabrovnik and he's talking about himself as the word. He's saying, I don't really know, am I still the same person that I am? Don't look at me like that.

The only word he has to describe who he is and the word bothers him. And in the Warsaw ghetto also independently, the great journalist, Piotr Opoczyński, after the summer fall of 1942, the great deportation in Warsaw where hundreds of thousands are expelled and tens of thousands killed, he sits down and writes a six-page essay on this term.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (56:15.694)
And it's also saying, well, maybe Shabbat Vin was invented because thieves didn't want to call themselves thieves. But at the same time, you know what? You can't call theft theft when you're defined as a thief by birth of being Jewish, right? You're a thief, you're a criminal by virtue of being a Jew. Survival is basically illegal, you know? And so what are you doing to survive? How can that be wrong if it's to survive?

rolling all those debates into the word and he's giving these examples and he has this metaphor he calls Shavuvin. He says it bounces around like a rubber ball. People are just throwing it back and forth and meaning is in motion. He and others in the Warsaw ghetto were also fascinated by the words, the etymology of the word, which I was holding off on saying where it came from. People often when I hear they're like, but why did this, it's so weird. It sounds so strange. They thought it sounded strange too.

And they had a debate. Is it from Shavar in Hebrew? Shavar in Hebrew, Shin Bet Reish, has two different meanings. One is to break, which kind of sounds logical, like you're breaking into somebody's house. But another, get this, is to procure, like to buy, to gather grain. know, like Joseph in Egypt, Shavar.

You know, he procured grain from Egypt. So people are debating, is it breaking? Is it procuring, which would be a good thing? Does it actually come from Polish locksmith terminology, which it also does? Or is it from German to shave? And what I could discover, and they didn't have resources to look into this question in the words, but it shows that the history of the word, the stamp of the word was going to help them

solve this ethical debate about the word. If it comes from German or from Polish, know, breaking, it's a nasty word. If it comes from the Hebrew root of procure, then we're okay. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (58:26.495)
I mean, this one of those things that I think is really, again, really fascinating. it's a great example. I mean, not just for Holocaust historians, I mean, really for all historians that can look at language and linguistics, because, you know, and you mentioned this to get a little nerdy. You mentioned Giorgio Agamben, right? And this idea of zones of exception, that camps are these places where camps, ghettos, mean, any one of the number of places of confinement during the Holocaust. they become these places where the traditional rules of really everything

change, morality, economics, know, even art, food, cooking. mean, all these things, they're all effective. They all change in different ways. And sometimes to the point of absurdity, to the point of not meaning the same thing anymore. And this word is a good example of, you know, the example that always springs to my mind is one that I often use when teaching, which is I have, I think it's from Kovner or Vilnius, but

Basically, it's from one of my source books and I showed to students and it's, know, questions that are asked of rabbis in the ghettos, you know, is it okay to kill yourself, you know, if you're going to go to a camp and stay to Auschwitz instead? mean, is it okay? Is it okay to to to eat on kosher food? know, all these things, is it okay to do various kinds of work that would that would be normally prohibited? but they're all they're all.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (59:38.636)
Yeah, very difficult question.

Waitman Beorn (59:53.19)
specialty legal questions essentially that only exist in the context of the the unreality of the Holocaust, right? And this isn't these words are kind of examples of that as well, you know, in any normal situation, we I would say if my neighbor's house was empty, and I knew they had gone away and weren't coming back, it would still be wrong for me to go over there and take things. But in the context of the Holocaust, you know, it's that everything's the rules all change because it's fundamentally different.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (59:59.831)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:22.143)
Everything's operating under a fundamental different set of rules and a lot of the words that you talk about and a lot of the Yiddish words that in general that are changed in many ways reflect that. It's a new way of describing a universe of different laws and rules and the way things work.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:00:33.869)
Yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:00:38.478)
Yes, yes, definitely. And I like that you brought up, you know, the rabbinical, you know, sheilot b'tchuvot, questions and answers, because that's a traditional Jewish way of dealing with a problem is to have this debate, you know, ask in this situation, is it OK? Then people have source text. That's what they were doing with Shabbat. You know, that's so it's taking a traditional way of deal of.

interpreting life and applying it to completely unprecedented circumstances. And then that brings us to Agamben. How do we face Agamben's idea of a zone of exception, of a rule-less zone where it's phoné instead of sounds instead of language instead of logos? When we see this incredible cultural sophistication going on there, where there's history, there's debates and so forth.

Actually, another colleague, which you heard my talk, Darcy Berkeley, put it really well. I'll give her credit. She said, what you're talking about is the fact that the zone of exception had content. That it was a zone of exception. But there were things going on in there. It wasn't just blank and it wasn't just random. Yeah. Another example that, you know, where that comes through is this word people, which is actually a more well-known word.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:49.864)
It's out of vacuum.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:01:59.694)
then Schabrv, P-I-P-E-L is how it would be transliterated. Which it's so, right, the meaning which I mentioned earlier, some people know from great research like, you know, Dorota Glovacka and William Jones is that people was more or less, it was a young man.

not just in Auschwitz, that's most well known in other camps as well, who was forced into kind of slavery for a superior, and he was a sex toy. he, would, people, and, and it's, it's, for obvious reasons, look, it's pedophilia, it's, it's, it's rape, it's sexual abuse. There's lots of reasons why people remember this, it put, give it a lot of attention. But I was really interested in the, the amount of attention and the way that, that

Hurban Yiddish lexicographers talked about this term. Like even Hurban lexicographers who emphasize the humor of these terms, they really get broken up by this word people. And Nachman Blumenthal is totally obsessed. He has boxes of cards on the word. And the actual word, the word itself seems to come from a not so well-known German regionalism for penis or for a small boy. But the Yiddish speakers didn't know that.

apparently, because they overcorrected and often listed it as Pupil. So, right, like in Yiddish, a lot of times there's an E sound where there's an O sound in German. So they thought they were bringing it back to the German original by calling it Pupil, which would bring it to Dal, Puppe. So it was like a little doll. So a doll is also a female prostitute. So these were young sex workers. This is a young boy who is like a woman.

So it's it's a lingual hybrid. It's a gender hybrid. the horror of the term is obvious. But beyond that, there's again this this cultural memory in the term and that in in Jewish liturgy and in Jewish texts and books of the prophets, a defiled female body is a symbol of the downfall of the Jewish people. That's a symbol of catastrophe.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:04:22.862)
If you look at the Book of Lamentations, the daughter of Jerusalem, a defiled woman, the city of slaughter, it's the raped women that signify that this society is done. So they're taking this memory, perhaps not consciously, and saying this is not just a case of defile, just.

of defiled women, I'm talking from their cultural standpoint, but a point where the male body has also been violently penetrated to the same extent. And that is, think, awakens this special fear, revulsion and disgust around the term and the fact that it's both extremely talked about and extremely taboo. I mean, it is the title of one of Kacetnik.

Yichil Dinur's novels in the 1960s, and he actually includes a definition on the cover of the original book, which again speaks to the popularity of word definition as a form of memory. People also, by the way, appears in the English translation, the international translation of Elie Wiesel's Night. So in that sense, it's a Hurban Yiddish word with the most exposure, though in the international translation...

you can really read past it. It's not explained. It just popped in in the hanging scene. by the way, this young angelic boy who's being hung, he was a people with almost no explanation, no mention of his role as a sex slave. And then he moves on. And so it's like a dog whistle calling out this world of meaning for people in the know. In the Yiddish, of course, in the original Yiddish of the book, it's explained amply.

So there we go back to what you bring up, that yes, a zone of exception, but a zone of exception with content, with cultural memory that informs which of these horrors are going to be elevated in memory and discussed and used as a point of reflection and meaning making, even if it's in this very negative and grotesque sense.

Waitman Beorn (01:06:36.285)
Well, and this is also, I I think people is a great example of this, where, you have, you know, and I say this all the time, you know, that when you try to, excuse me, when you try to murder an entire group of people, you know, the victim group will encompass good people, bad people, ordinary people, know, everybody, right. But the people and the sort of phenomenon of people, you know, is something that

highlights a not particularly positive element of behavior in the Holocaust. And that's challenging, right? And that may be one of the reasons why it's of, it's, Kurban Yiddish is viewed as sort of dirty. But again, the word, and the Wiesel example is one that I highlighted because it's so interesting, because clearly he knew or somebody else knew.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:07:24.525)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:33.439)
And this is why again, translation is not, is not always just faithfully reproducing everything that's on the page. know, somebody knew that. Yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:07:41.047)
That definitely wasn't the case in Wiesel's adaptation from Yiddish to French. And then from French, Night, La Nuit was translated fairly closely to that. But it was a major epistemological and ethical shift from the Yiddish version of Night to the French.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:03.039)
I mean, it's almost like a Yiddish is a, can be a specialist inside language, you know, that can be used among sort of,

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:08:09.076)
That's the way they thought of it. I mean, I don't blame Wiesel. mean, the things that he could say to other Yiddish speakers that wouldn't embarrass, they weren't embarrassed among each other in a way that they would be embarrassed to the outside world. He is trying to present a Jewish Holocaust experience for the first time to many people, and he wanted to make it in terms that would bring them in and make this accessible.

And Wiesel in his Yiddish writing, he also reveals his own humanity in that he's also morally imperfect and that there are tones of homophobia in the way that he writes about the people. I don't like excuse homophobia, but he was a person of his time and he was a person with his biases and his misunderstandings of groups that were not like him. And so the urban Yiddish word people.

when it's explained in its full force, it changes his role of survivor from like universal profit to a human in a specific place and time with a specific set of cultural knowledge, facts and biases. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:21.331)
Yeah. I mean, want want to, I want to just highlight one more thing because I want to, I want to move on. I do want to talk about the literature piece. because again, you also, you do really nice things. was kind of a yin and yang there as well. but, the one more, another word that I just found really interesting is, is the right, which, which is amazing. It's amazing because for those of who don't speak German, it sounds very much like a Yiddishization of

which was the word for resettlement, which was also the euphemism of the Nazis used to, when they're talking about deporting people to the extermination centers. And so, you if you looked at it you're like, yes, that makes sense. But actually, what's crazy about it is that it was a word that has a completely different meaning, just happens to sound like and it's sort of like a false friend in that sense. I thought this was really fascinating.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:10:06.488)
Right.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:10:11.978)
Yeah, very false friend. this, yeah, I'm glad you bring this up because that brings me into the important part of the book. We don't have time to talk about it too much, but this gray zone between Yiddish and German, which is not the first time there's a gray zone between Yiddish and German that's existed, you know, since Yiddish.

Since modern German and modern Yiddish became two distinct languages, modern Yiddish speakers were still exposed to German and incorporated modern German words into what they said. There are different stylistic debates about when that's okay and when it's not, but the meaning was clear. Incorporating modern German into Yiddish was taking on errors. Deichmüheism was a way of talking up, making yourself sound fancy.

So people get into the ghetto and they're hearing Nazi German, which is also not the German that they, know, literary German or, you know, governmental German that they heard before. But they're like, but it's confusing because does incorporating a Nazi word, Nazi German word into your speech mean you're just putting on airs and sounding sophisticated? Or is it, you know, incorporating the word of your murderer into your own brain, in your own mouth?

And oisidlung is an example of where this happens. right, auszidlung, the German word for deportation or resettlement, was used, which is already a use of it. There's a lie in the German version. It's not auszidlung, it's not resettlement, it's death. It's deportation to extermination center. Now bring that euphemism into Yiddish and it's even more confusing because oisidlung in...

Typical Yiddish means to curse or to scold. So, Ois Zidlung, mean, people, they're using it, but it's like, okay, are we taking this? What exactly does this mean? Are we taking on the German word because that's kind of more proper and fancy?

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:12:13.086)
What is happening when we're using this new German word? People were angry about the word in real time. Warsaw ghetto fighters, they produced an announcement, least according to their testimony, announcement to the public, going to an extermination camp. The first thing we have to do is everybody has to get on board and understand what this word means. And people, again, they write about this after the war. it's one of the cases actually in Yiddish.

where the dictionaries literally change. I'm not saying the Horban Yiddish dictionary, but the general dictionaries change. add the word, they add an asterix to the word in the general dictionary. The word took on the meaning of deportation to an extermination camp in Yiddish. It's not scolding. And it's worked into the culture in that sense. And it's a word that combines so many layers.

of history in one because it's euphemism, know, Nazi euphemisms, and it's cultural imperialism, right, where you can convince Yiddish speakers that the German word is right and okay because they're used to thinking of the imagined West as superior to them.

So that's another one. And actually, going back to the Soviet piece, it's not really, I mean, there's a lot of glosses of this word, a lot of people talking about this word in real time afterwards. But in 1961, there's a Soviet writer, linguist, Elie Volkovich, who was a peer of Elie Spivak, survived. And he writes about this word and he says, yes, there's a euphemism here, but hello, it's not even Yiddish. And he says,

Imagine, you know, if all these millions of Jews, instead of having been, you know, ois geziedelt meaning exterminated, they had just been cursed out, then we would be a little annoyed, but we'd be a much happier people now. So he points out the cultural history and the cultural imperialism that's built into the word, as well as the euphemism and the Nazi trickery of the immediate power dynamics of the word.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:24.829)
I mean, it's also example, again, the go back to the zones of exception idea that it's not and there's on a vacuum, it's just a different entire different rules of physics and of everything apply in this in this area, you know, like where people are taught for them, you know, it also just makes sense to use the words that they that they know, like selections and I'll see them and, you know, Sonderbehandlung and all the all these words that are

that are German euphemisms, but have meanings, you know, that are important in their daily lives to know, to know what they are, you know, and that's right.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:14:57.57)
This is what's available. This is the language that's available to them. They've never experienced this before. They don't have a word for what's going to happen to them. So what's filling the airwaves is Nazi terms.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:09.715)
Yep, exactly. mean, and you do, we don't have time to talk about it in the episode, but you know, there's also an amazing work that you do looking at acronyms and how acronyms become, become words that sort of have, have larger meanings, that kind of stuff. But we'll, we'll leave that for now. I do want to close by, by touching on literature a little bit, because you talk about two important Yiddish writers who take sort of wildly different

kind of directions with their use of Yiddish. For me as a non-expert, my impressions is sort of that the Katsednik is kind of a dirty, cynical, really hard biting kind of usage of Yiddish. And Hava, what's her last name? Hava Rosenfab is kind of a positive sort of...

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:16:02.179)
Rosenfarb.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:07.295)
you poetry and using Yiddish as kind of a, in any way, I'm using literary and scare quotes because they're both literature people, but in a sort of literary, gilded kind of, you know, more, I guess more positive way.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:16:21.472)
Yeah. literature is, Yiddish literature is one of the places where Khurban Yiddish really survives because it was edited out of newspapers and official documentation and so forth. But authors have some control over what they're writing. And so this is one of actually, you know, it's it's it's this is a place where, you know, history and literature are really intertwined. And you're right. These two authors, there are lots of others that I could have chosen from, but I chose Kocetnik.

and Rosenfar, because Kacetnik is a verbal insurrectionist. He's angry and he's using words to blow everything up and mess everything up. So if you go to his famous Eichmann testimony where he faints or throws himself out of the witness stand and interrupts the whole trial with his body, this is what he's doing with language too in Yiddish. He's blowing things up and even in his...

first manuscript of Salamandra, which he wrote immediately after the war. says, I know you don't want to read this language because it stinks, but this is my language. This is the language I'm going to write in. And there's an artistic purpose to this. It comes from his expressionist roots, know, as a scream, as a form of truth that Yiddish is ugly people. That's why people is one of the, and sexual violence is so important to him.

And it makes a lot more sense in Yiddish because it's a part of his expression is scream and it's not just kind of gratuitous, voyeuristic sex. And it's about disturbing us and making us feel uncomfortable. And Rosenfarb wants to build, you know, she's building a history that's true. She actually uses real words. I never found a word that she made up, Korban Yiddish words.

Kacetnik uses a combination of real words and words that he made up because he's extending the creative process of Horvath Yiddish into his work. He's taking license, but she is, and in her archive you see that she looks through history books and she checks her dates and she really does want to stay as close as she can to history, but she also infuses history with her own ethics and her own imagination. And a lot of that is about letting people who haven't been seen be seen.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:18:40.662)
women especially, and letting their experiences of childcare, of sexual violence, of friendship, of love, let those come into history though they haven't been there before. And in parallel with letting people who haven't been seen be seen, she's letting words that haven't been heard be heard. And that's her ethos towards Horban Yiddish.

And she articulates that quite clearly. I mean, this is a quote that if you, you know, I use it everywhere because I really, I make no bones about it. I think that Hava Rosenfarb is a sophisticated thinker as Hannah Arendt and deserves to be treated that way. And she writes about using these Horban Yiddish words to teach love, that actually there is an ethics to doing this, an ethics of care and ethics of compassion.

about seeing people, about hearing victims in their own words, and she's very clear that that's the theory behind what she's doing. And it's also great reading, in my opinion. So there's the documentary value and there's a theory there of historical memory and research and Holocaust commemoration.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:56.192)
I'm conscious of the time, but I do want to ask sort of a last sort of more reflective question before we move on to sort of our final question, which is what's what is the overall status of Yiddish today? You know, and how does the Holocaust, how has Holocaust had an impact on that? Obviously, the number of speakers is smaller, but

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:20:17.326)
Well, mean, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, there were 11 million Yiddish speakers before the Holocaust. are somewhere around one million today. So it's the actual death in numbers, but also the death of the communities that produce Yiddish, you know. And there are some people who say, Yiddish was going to decline anyway because of assimilation.

I have a word for that that probably isn't acceptable on your podcast. don't agree. But Yiddish is probably not declining anymore in numbers because the majority of Yiddish speakers are Haredi, ultra-orthodox, who have very large families and they speak Yiddish. So there's a stabilization there. There's also a lot of renewed interest in Yiddish among...

secular people or I shouldn't say just secular, but non-Jews, people who want to study Yiddish as a kind of revivalistic spirit or just out of curiosity. I mean, I know that from, you know, running a Yiddish summer program and teaching Yiddish. And there's a lot of people come with curiosity, just like with with anything. If you say don't study this or don't speak this, there's eventually going to be some people who are going to want to study it and are going to want to speak it. So that's that's cool. There's a lot out there now.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:30.27)
Right.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:21:35.458)
You know, some of it's deep, some of it's superficial. You know, it takes all kinds. Come as you are. Yiddish is there for everybody.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:43.956)
Well, and I will just add one more thing because there's another thing that you touch on a little bit. It's not to focus, but where Yiddish is important and that's Yishka books, which I always say this. I'm certainly not the first person. I certainly have not discovered them. But when I was doing my work on really both books, I found them to be actually quite brilliant resources.

And oftentimes they are in Yiddish because they're by these sort of diaspora communities. And I think they've been often sort of pushed aside as kind of amateurish, you know, not scholarly in the sense that a historian might want. But I will just say that I'm very grateful for those folks who translated them oftentimes from Yiddish or Hebrew, because they actually are amazing resources.

If you read them for what they are, there's lots and lots that you can get from them. yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:22:43.008)
and lots of Chorban Yiddish. That's one of the places where, yeah, where it was self, it was autonomous memory. It was self-made memory. And so you could use your own words. I'm also an avid reader of Yisker Bicher. I'm actually using them more in my new project, but that's for another time.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:59.301)
Yeah, they're super great. So if you're a young Holocaust scholar out there and it makes sense to you or exactly or somebody that just hasn't used them before, might, mean, the positive and I suppose the drawback is they're often geographically limited. But if you're looking at a small town, oftentimes, when I was discovering in Belarus, for example, oftentimes the only information I could find about

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:23:04.302)
Or an old one or a middle-aged one just like me. Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:27.325)
what Jewish life was like in this particular place was from a Yishko book because there was no other information out there by anybody. And of course the entire community was gone. Yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:23:31.918)
totally, Historians did not invent history. People are interested in their own histories. And this is a group of people with a very self-conscious commitment to history, to writing history. And Yiskir Biker also have their pre-Holocaust precedents in Pinkacium and community records. So those are definitely fascinating and important sources. And if somebody wants to talk to me, can.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:52.64)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:24:01.549)
I can share with you how to make them go beyond the local by doing a word search, but whatever, that's for another time.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:07.735)
And speaking of writing, you know, the last question we always ask is a Holocaust book that you would recommend to our listeners. You are other people have other people have transgressed.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:24:17.1)
Am I allowed to say two? Okay. I am a, I, know me, I'm a contrarian. I never go with the flow. Okay. So one is a new book, something old, something new. Sven-Erik Rose, Making and Unmaking Literature in the Vilna, Warsaw and Wodz ghettos. It's, it's, it's an incredible piece of scholarship. There's humanity, there's passion, there's unrecognized brilliance that he brings to light. And it's also a book that shows us that

Literature was a part of history. are the people, I'll say, Jews in these ghettos at least, they lived with literature, they thought through literature, they experienced history through literature. And then a book that I think about a lot today is The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust by Carolyn Dean, which is an oldie but a goodie. It's from 2004. And I feel that we're living in a moment where empathy has become extremely fragile.

in our fields and beyond our field and in the world. And she really gives us an intellectual history of that. And it really helps me think through how we got to this moment that we're in today.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:29.971)
Although those sound amazing. and thank you so much for talking with us, about your book. obviously for everybody else, again, I hope you're glad that we're back after our summer hiatus. and if you're, if you're finding the podcast to be, worthwhile, please give us a like, subscribe, leave a comment, shoot me an email if you want. It's always great to hear that there are people out there that are listening and taking advantage. and again, Hannah, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us today.

Hannah Pollin-Galay (01:25:59.705)
Thank you for having me. It was great to talk.