Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish
By Hannah Pollin-Galay
University of Pennsylvania Press, 312 pp.
When the noted Yiddish linguists Nachman Blumenthal and Elye Spivak returned to Poland after surviving World War II, they found not just a changed world but something stranger: an altered language. Yiddish-speaking Jews who had spent time in the concentration camps had developed so many new expressions for what they had experienced and witnessed—hundreds or even thousands of unfamiliar words and phrases—that it amounted to a whole new dialect. Blumenthal, Spivak and a third scholar, Israel Kaplan, who had been imprisoned in the Riga and Kovno ghettos, all reacted by immediately setting about the task of compiling dictionaries to study this new language, seeing it—as does the author of this fascinating new book about their work—as a perverse form of cultural heritage.
The words and phrases offer frightening glimpses into what the prisoners suffered, but also into their creativity and resiliency. Some were jokes and euphemisms about atrocious conditions, such as blondinke, little blondies, meaning lice, or shadkhen, the Yiddish word for matchmaker, used for kapos who would “marry” people with their deaths. Others came from jokes or from Hebrew expressions guards wouldn’t understand: In the Lodz ghetto, for instance, stealing wood from the workshops was called khale nemen, to take challah, referring to the ritual obligation to remove a piece of dough while baking bread. This was only one of a vast array of creative terms for stealing, including the well-known organizirn (to organize) and more complex and ambiguous coinages such as shabreven and paseven, used to refer to the looting of abandoned property.
Hannah Pollin-Galay’s Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish brings long-overdue attention to the fate of the Yiddish language itself in the Holocaust, seeing it as a victim in its own right. Yiddish was spoken by the vast majority of the six million Jewish victims of the Khurbn, the Yiddish term for the Holocaust (which, like “holocaust,” carries the connotation of a sacrificial burnt offering). Much of the book is about the devoted linguists who tried to understand what the altered Yiddish signified. Blumenthal, before the war, was a scholar associated with the noted Yiddish academic institution YIVO. When he returned to his native Poland and encountered words he didn’t recognize, he began gathering them, eventually producing a dictionary. Spivak, a Soviet linguist, focused on the political dimensions of the changed language, but his focus on Yiddish fell out of favor with the Soviet government and he died in a Soviet prison. Kaplan, who was left for dead after his experiences in the ghettos, passionately collected material throughout his ordeal and later published a glossary, Dos Folksmoyl in Nazi Klem, (“The Mouths of the People Under the Nazi Yoke”). Collecting and writing in the ghettos, camps and in the postwar displaced persons camps, these scholars documented a language that came to be called Khurbn Yiddish, or Holocaust Yiddish.
Such committed Jewish bibliophiles and lexicographers grew out of a larger culture that had long valued literacy, documentation and memory. In the context of unspeakable horror, they saw it as essential to understand and record what had happened to their world through the lens of language. Yiddish is a fusion language, dating back more than 1,000 years and consisting of Hebrew-Aramaic, Slavic and Germanic components; the Germanic constitutes by far the largest. This makes Yiddish and German mutually comprehensible, a serious problem at times for inmates of the ghettos and camps. Kaplan’s glossary includes many words meant to hide what the Jews were saying to one another from the surrounding guards, at times using Hebrew-Aramaic words, for example lekhem for bread. Khurbn Yiddish also absorbed German Nazi lingo (itself containing words not found in regular German) that was forced onto the inmates, who at times had to sing in German to entertain their captors.
In the ghettos Jews could speak their local Yiddish, but in the camps, they were thrust together with Jews from other regions. As a result, Yiddish speakers adapted their language, adding or reinventing words to describe imprisonment, death and dehumanization in the Khurbn’s altered reality. One section of the book analyzes selected words and is also a scholarly exploration of the intersection of language and ethics. There are neologisms, acronyms, adaptations of existing words to the needs of people who were starving, stealing or selling their bodies to survive. Painful circumstances required and generated terms to cushion the unspeakable reality.
With no access to writing, Yiddish increasingly became an oral vehicle. Songs became important for Yiddish speakers as a means of recording reality, often documenting new words in the process. Pollin-Gallay offers the heartbreaking example of the song “Oy di bone,” in which the “bone,” the term for the ration coupons in the ghetto (pronounced “bo-neh”), comes to symbolize life, with the expression “giving up the bone” meaning death. The book quotes the last stanza of the folk song, sung by children begging for food in the Warsaw Ghetto and later recorded in a postwar 1948 film, Our Children, by scholars who heard it from orphans after the war:
Oy, di bone, di bone. Kh’bin nokh ying,
Yach vil nisht avekgebn di bone.
Yach vil nokh epes gits derleben,
Die bone, bone nisht avekgebn.
Oh, the bone, the bone. I’m still young,
I don’t want to give up the bone.
I still want to live to see something good,
The bone, the bone, I’m not giving it up.
Another section, “Slang Turned Art,” examines how writers later employed ghetto and camp slang as elements in their literary creations. Inmates of concentration camps sometimes called themselves “KZ-niks,” pronounced “ka-tzetniks,” based on the acronym KZ for Konzentrationslager, the German word for the camps. The writer and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Feiner, who emigrated to Israel after the war but struggled with the tension between his native Yiddish and the pressure to publish, speak and live in modern Hebrew, chose to write under the name “K. Tzetnik,” a Hebraized version of the term ka-tzetnik, adding a Slavic suffix and including his tattooed number, 135633, in his byline. He wrote the semi-autobiographical novel Salamandra in Yiddish, but it was later published in Israel only in Hebrew, heavily abridged and redacted. (Zionist ideology urged survivors to abandon Yiddish as soon as possible. But most survivors did not speak modern Hebrew, a situation that stifled their ability to express themselves, at least at first.)
Pollin-Galay also considers the poet Chava Rosenfarb, who emigrated to Canada and who employed Khurbn Yiddish writing as an act of assertion, claiming her language for fellow victims: “It is ours, undzer alemens eygentum, a shared estate.” In her postwar writing, Rosenfarb consciously invoked the lingo of the ghettos and camps as a means of creating a collective memory and refusing to be silenced; she brought aspects of the experiences to others by incorporating definitions of the terms in her poems. Like many other survivors, she responded to the destruction of her culture by digging in and insisting on a continued identity in Yiddish.
After the war, uprooted survivors scattered across the globe continued to speak Yiddish, but most couldn’t or wouldn’t return to their European homes. They had to adapt to new linguistic environments in places where Yiddish was not spoken and often not welcome. Yiddish was repressed or marginalized in the postwar years in the Soviet Union, Israel and America. For Holocaust survivors assimilation was a thorny issue. With whom and how could they talk about what they had seen? Only with one another. Kaplan and Blumenthal, like many other survivors, emigrated to Israel and faced difficulties related to the official insistence on modern Hebrew, particularly in working with Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial museum.
Yiddish has a sizable literature and a venerable history of collecting new words—the first Yiddish dictionary came out in the 1500s. It also continues to evolve and produce subcultures and dialects: Most of today’s speakers are Hasidim, many themselves the descendants of survivors. Still, the language continues to struggle. This excellent and important volume is a tribute to those who devoted themselves to preserving, recording and reinvigorating the language of the victims, who passionately threw themselves into their work of trying to recreate a collective culture in Yiddish and who chose to assert the power of Yiddish through creative work in that language. The very existence of Khurbn Yiddish demonstrates profound truths about what Jews endured.
Miriam Isaacs is a scholar of Yiddish language and linguistics whose work includes sociolinguistic studies of Yiddish in Hasidic communities in Israel and America. She taught Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland.
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