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- [00:01]
Samuel Kassow
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Julia Rothkopf
Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Julia Rothkopf and I am the Program Associate at yivo. Today we have Hannah Polungolaj and Samuel Kassow joining us for a discussion about Hannah's new book, Occupied what the Holocaust did to Yiddish. For those who do not know Yivo, we are a very special place for the celebration, contemplation and exploration of of Yiddish and Eastern European Jewish culture. We're located in New York City where our library and archive contain over 24 million documents, 400,000 books, and these resources are used by researchers from all around the world. We also have lots of classes on Yiddish language and culture, exhibitions, public programs just like this one, where we aim to bridge the worlds of Jewish culture in our vast archival and library collections. Thank you for joining us today. Hannah Polunga Lai is Associate professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University where she is also the head of the Yona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. She researches and teaches primarily in the fields of Yiddish literature and Holocaust studies and all the way these two fields intersect. Her first book, Ecologies of Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony, asks how place and language shape Holocaust survivor testimony. In her second book, Occupied what the Holocaust did to Yiddish, explores the thousands of Yiddish words that were invented or reinvented during the Holocaust and why they served as a potent means of testimony. She has published articles in journals such as Holocaust Genocide Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies, among others. The 2024-2025 academic year, she's Senior Scholar at the Fortunoff Archive for Video Testimony at Yale University and a Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow focusing on Yiddish Echo Poems of the Holocaust and Samuel Kassow is the Charles H. Northern professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and he has been a visiting professor at many institutions and was on the team of scholars that planned the Pauline Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications is who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Sick Ghetto Archive, which received the Orbis Prize of the aaass, the Demos Prize in Germany for the best monograph of the year to the finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. It's been translated into eight languages and he's on the team of scholars chosen by Yad Vashem to write a one volume history of the Holocaust in Poland. And now I will hand it over to our two panelists.
- [02:35]
Hannah Polungolaj
Thank you so much, Julia.
- [02:37]
Samuel Kassow
Okay, thank you. I just want to say, Hannah that I learned so much from reading your book. It's really one of the most important books to appear about Yiddish, about Jewish culture in the time of the Holocaust. And I highly recommend it to anybody with an interest in the subject. So I'd like to begin with a very simple question. How did you come to this book? What inspired you to take on this topic, which is not an easy topic, and it presents all kinds of challenges? So how did you decide to do this?
- [03:28]
Hannah Polungolaj
Thank you, Sam. And thank you for your interest in my work and for agreeing to have this conversation. The origin story of this book is actually quite interesting. It started out with confusion. I was researching oral and audiovisual Holocaust testimonies for my first project, which was my first book that Julia mentioned. And I was listening to hundreds of hours of Holocaust testimony in Yiddish, much of which was recorded in the 1990s. And I was listening, analyzing, transcribing, and I kept hearing these words that I didn't understand and that weren't in any dictionary. And I would go to some of my Yiddish, you know, native Yiddish speaking mentors and ask them about these words, and they say, you know, not sure. And not only did I notice that these words, these strange words were appearing, but that also the. The witnesses, the survivors were, would often share these words with a kind of wink or, you know, a little emphasis, leaning into the camera, and that they seem to be doing something special with these words or that these words seem to have some kind of special meaning in them. So, for example, one example was Malech from the Kovna ghetto, which I. Which I understood from their explanations on camera, was a term that didn't mean angel as it usually does, but it meant an underage kid who was paid to do the work of a privileged adult in the Kovna ghetto. And this word came up a bunch of times. And there were others, though, that were just thrown out, like I was supposed to understand them, like steppen as a word for working. And I was confused. And I kind of held that confusion at bay. And around the same exact time, a colleague from Hebrew University, Amos Goldberg, handed me this book by Nachman Blumenthal. Werther und verte lech van der Gubent Kufe. Words and phrases from the Holocaust period. And I open it up and lo and behold, it's an actual dictionary with 3,000, over 3,000 entries of words just like those that I had encountered, neologisms that were invented in the Holocaust, new words that either changed their meanings radically or had just been invented whole cloth. And I said, Whoa. There's a lot more words than I had heard in my small sample of Encounter. And then I realized there were a lot more dictionaries. It wasn't just Nachman Blumenthal who sat down and recorded how Yiddish had transformed in ghetto's camps and in hiding. There were others too. So I'll show a couple slides for a minute just to give you a little bit of a visual of what's out there. So this was Nachman Blumenthal who actually began recording new Yiddish words right after liberation 1944, when he came back from the unoccupied Soviet Union, from Central Asia. He came back to Lublin, where he was from, and he heard words he didn't understand. So he started recording them. And initially he published them in serially from 1956 to 1963. Werther od Werte lech von der Ruben Kufe. And I guess we'll talk a little later about the content and approach. But he was not alone. There was at the same time Yisroel Kaplan, who wrote a short dictionary, but extensive dictionary, but initially it appeared serially, also under the title De s Volksmoil in Nazi Klem, the people's mouth under the Nazi yoke. He was a survivor. And he also started recording words immediately, as soon as he could, while he was still physically unwell, in fact, and over the Soviet border. So that means these Blumenthal was from Lublin and Kaplan from Kovna. So, okay, it's realistic that they had some overlap. But here over the Soviet border, Elias Spivak, who's in Kiev, so he didn't have interactions, firsthand interactions with the DP camp cultural activists. He did the same thing. He created this dictionary, the language in the days of the Great patriotic war, Kiev 1946. And if that weren't enough, these are the full length dictionaries. There were also attempts in the ghettos camps is another matter. But in ghettos there were attempts in real time to record what was happening to Yiddish. As an example, Rabbi Shimon Huberband in the Warsaw Ghetto, Nye Werter un alte Werter would meet Naye Bagrifungen. And in the Lodz ghetto, the well known encyclopedia of ghetto Lodz also contains word entries that are like dictionary entries, many of which are in Yiddish, also in Polish and in German. And there were shorter pieces, there were appendices to early history books, and there were newspaper columns. In DP newspaper columns, people publishing word lists of new Yiddish words that were from the Holocaust. And so it was almost like a popular genre of memory. And I then decided that I wanted to know more about two things at least I wanted to know more about the words themselves. How did they come about? What did they mean? What were their themes? What was the dynamic that people felt when they were speaking them?
- [09:00]
Julia Rothkopf
And.
- [09:00]
Hannah Polungolaj
And I wanted to know why. Why the heck these so many people were so dedicated to recording and glossing Yiddish words when that is not at all considered an intuitive or typical response to hearing about. To surviving catastrophe or learning about the murder of one's family members? What drove these people to do it? So from that small mystery of not understanding a few words and Yiddish testimonies, I ran into something that I felt really passionately that I had to understand a whole lot better. So that's why I wrote a book about it.
- [09:37]
Samuel Kassow
I'm wondering, when Blumenthal and Spivak and Kaplan were doing this, were they getting a lot of encouragement or the opposite in the Soviet Union or in Israel? Were they being met with indifference and even pushback on the project?
- [10:01]
Hannah Polungolaj
So we have to. So I'll speak separately about Blumenthal and Kaplan from Spivak, because those are different spheres. You know that since Spivak was in the Soviet sphere, it was in the Soviet Union. Blumenthal and Kaplan, they had similar projects, but they were different. Blumenthal was more interested in psychology, the psychology of language. He was trained at the University of Warsaw, where there was a very strong experimental milieu where people were experimenting across the intersections of philology, philosophy and politics and psychology. So the psychology of speech, the psychology of art, were all things that Blumenthal had trained on discussing before the war. And he came to his project that way, and he theorized about psychomotorics so that these new words, in a sense, emerged from bodies, from the suffering body. People couldn't help but respond to starvation and deprivation through speaking and listening differently. He wanted to trace things back to the body. And Kaplan had a much more personalized theoretical approach since he was a native speaker of Korban Yiddish. Right? He was. He survived the Kovna ghetto, and he was in Riga, Dachau Allah. And he came out of this very, very badly hurt in every way. You can see it in his diary, which his son. One of the most interesting, exciting Indiana Jones moments of this book was getting to go into Dr. Sholem Elati's kitchen, that's Israel Kaplan's son, and read his father's diaries in his kitchen. So I got to see this. This man suffered a lot. And he came out. His handwriting was Very, very traumatized. And he was insistent that he wanted to record these words. But it's much more of a personal journey and he wants a lot of humor in it. And you can understand, I mean, really seeing, seeing his handwriting, I understood how much he'd suffered and why he would want urban Yiddish to be funny. So those are those two. And they both initially received extremely positive responses to what they were doing. I'd say especially Copland. I mean, Kaplan, he got a really long positive review from Israel Karubakh in Tel Aviv, who's like a right wing journalist at the time, Hebraicist, saying, you know, this is so enlightening. And he's like teaching himself Korben Yiddish. From Kaplan's book, they got praise, both of them got praise from Argentina, from Argentinian Yiddish leaders, from Yivo, from Weinreich. They got a lot of very positive feedback initially. And there was interest. You know, people were writing in, they were sending in words to Blumenthal. You can see in the Yivo archive, which, thanks to Yivo, this project wouldn't have happened without Yivo. I know that, you all know that. But I should say that in the Yivo archive, you could see people writing in to Blumenthal with extra words and so forth. Then when they get to Israel, Blumenthal and Kaplan, not so much. You know, making aliyah, of course, saved their lives and allowed them to have families and roofs over their heads. But in term. But in professional terms, it was very hard. Coplin was never offered a position as a professional Holocaust researcher. So he worked initially as a bureaucrat at a hospital and then as a schoolteacher. He didn't get to pursue his Holocaust research until he retired. He went back to it, and Blumenthal was at Yad Vashem. And he fought with Yad Vashem over trivial things like, you know, how many times he needs to show up at the office, but also about the value of Yiddish. Yad Vashem was not interested in his Yiddish work. They thought that that was a waste of time. They wanted him to focus on other things. And their projects were not well received at all. Not to mention the fact that there were other Israeli cultural leaders, Yiddishists, who were embarrassed of Korben Yiddish, like Yaakov Zurbubavil, who came to the DP camps and heard the Yiddish that people were speaking and said, this is how you're talking.
- [14:32]
Julia Rothkopf
Please.
- [14:33]
Hannah Polungolaj
This is corrupt. Okay, so that's their story, which is sad, but not as frightening, of course, as Elias Spivak. Spivak he published his dictionary in 1946. In 1949, he's arrested. One of his last publication before he was arrested was Defense of his Language Work, in which he described his. His dictionary, among other things, as being Soviet research. So he's trying to say this was okay, this was kosher. That did not fly. He was arrested and he died during his interrogations. So it's perhaps not that hyperbolic to say that Elias Bivak died for his Horpengir research. So that is not a warm reception. And even though. So those are the different tracks.
- [15:24]
Samuel Kassow
Okay, before we proceed, just for those who haven't read the book, could you explain very briefly how you organized it, what's in it, the kind of the interplay of cultural history, foundation, philology, literature. Just a short description of what's in the book.
- [15:50]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yes, we dove into a lot of details about those three figures, which are important, but it's good to back up. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is about the people who collected words. The philologists, linguists, folklorists, street singers. Street singers were also important in collecting and commenting words, all those folks who did that work during and after the war. So it's about language consciousness. Why was language important to them? Why were neologisms an important form of testimony to people? And how did they differ in what they saw in them? That's the first part of the books. You could call that the cultural historical part. And the middle part of the book is about the words themselves, which is probably what most people are interested in hearing about today. Since that is truly fascinating. I go into some words, some keywords, make my best effort to unravel their etymology, usage, the issues that they raise. And then the last third of the book was one that I didn't expect to write at first. That's about slang turned into art. And it's about writers who saw these Horban Yiddish words, these slang words, Creole, sociolect, whatever you want to call it, and said, this is poetry. And this or this is. This is. This is interesting on an artistic level for prose. And there I focus on Chava Rosenfarb and Katsatnik, who both turned Korban Yiddish into art in different ways.
- [17:24]
Samuel Kassow
One of the things that. That really fascinates me is the issue of reflexivity. How was it that in the ghettos, people of various ages and various backgrounds were telling themselves these new words that are coming into the language, the changes in the language? This is something important. This is something that we have to think about and write down. There was this 15 year old kid in the Vilna Ghetto, Yitzchak Rudoshevsky, who wrote an amazing diary. And in November 1942, in his diary he's writing this in the ghetto before our own eyes. Dozens of sayings, curses, good wishes, terms like Vashanen to smuggle in, are being created. I feel that we must research this. The wonderful ghetto folklore, etched in blood, must be collected and preserved as a treasure for the future. And a couple weeks later, he's writing in his diary about Jewish women who are embroidering clothes for the wives of the Germans in Vilna. And they're making monograms using Jewish letters. Gimel al Gazera, Persecution. Tzadik Atzoreh, Affliction. Samech Asrefeh, Conflagration. Qaf Akapohe, Expiatory sacrifice. I'm still quoting from Rudiszewski. All these acts are thumbing your nose, covered up. In reality, they live in fear of the Germans. Still they allow themselves to curse, to play a trick. We see, as you just mentioned in the Ringelblum archive, they're studying the way the language changed. One of Ringelblum's closest collaborators, Menachem Linder, devoted much of his activity in the ghetto to this subject. Shmuel Lehmann, the folklorist in the Lodz Ghetto. The Lodz Ghetto Encyclopedia to your mind, we understand why after the war, Spivak and Blumenthal and Kaplan would be collecting these words. But in the ghettos, where people were not in touch with each other, what do you think was impelling them to understand the significance of what they were hearing? What was behind that?
- [20:17]
Hannah Polungolaj
The example that you shared from Rudoshevsky is wonderful. And I believe there are many more examples out there that I've never seen and that I could encounter. Because this was such a widespread phenomenon. I would say that this interest, that first of all, Hobon Yiddish is real. These words really are happening. Material changes demand an unprecedented reality, demands new words in a very material way. Layered on top of this material reality that they're noticing is a philological Zeitgeist. The first half of the 20th century is a time of philological consciousness. This is beyond the Jewish realm specifically. I mean, this is a time when Franz Boise is making what the time is, a very radical argument for the equality, the inherent equality of different world cultures. By studying words, collecting words and arguing these words are valid ways of describing and categorizing the world. At the same time, we have the Nazi Party The Nazi movement is a. Is a language rights movement. They're saying German. Study the German words. If you want to know about a support superior race, look at German. Look at the German words. And we have. On the opposite end of the. Of the political spectrum, we have the Soviet. We have the Bolshevik Revolution that publishes a dictionary of. Of new words in Russian from the Bolshevik Revolution, how to use them. People are fast. And there's more. In World War I, soldiers are writing home about new words that are invented on the front. So this is a time when people are attuned to language in a way that we are not today. Which is why I think that these projects are so surprising to us now because we don't necessarily have that philological attunement that they did then. And this philological attunement was in the air. And it gave people a way of processing and coping with a material reality.
- [22:24]
Samuel Kassow
I'm wondering if you could talk about differences between herb and Yiddish in the ghettos and the issue of herb and Yiddish in the camps. In the camps, Jews from different areas were being brought together in the ghettos. People were there mostly from the same locality. So in terms of language formation, there were clearly some important differences. I wonder if you can comment about that.
- [22:52]
Hannah Polungolaj
Thank you. There's, first of all, there's a lot more real time documentation of language change in the ghettos, for obvious reasons. People were more like. Even though it was difficult, but more people could have a pen, paper, sometimes even a typewriter to write things down, write down their thoughts, their observations about language as it was happening. You brought up the Vilna ghetto, there's the Warsaw ghetto, there's a large ghetto. Kaplan's doing this in the Kovna ghetto. Camps are not the same in that sense. So there's a lot less real time documentation. It's more about recalling the words. And then we can also get into the words in real time through some of the songs and through some of the diaries that were written there. But I can say this. The camps, first of all, the exposure to Nazi German is even greater in the camps than it is in the ghettos. So there's a lot more Nazi German. There are a lot more Nazi German words that make their way into Yiddish. And there's a overall Germanization. In fact, Blumenthal writes about this. When Yiddish speakers are forced to sing German songs in camps, they're forced to sing these songs, but they might not even understand every word. So they're playing with the title of my book. They're. They're forcing themselves to be occupied. They're occupied by these words, in a sense, or they're occupying words that aren't theirs. And, and, and there's a kind of disconnect between what they get used to speaking and what they understand or how they'd like to speak. But these words do make their way in. And there's a huge number of. There's a huge. They're more, more and more languages that could be incorporated into Horban, Yiddish in. Depending on the camp at Auschwitz, it's estimated that There were around 40 different languages spoken there. That includes Romani, Hungarian, French, Greek, of course. So there's a lot, there's a lot more. There are a lot more different languages that work their way in at the same time. Yiddish, as you just said, Yiddish becomes important in a different way. Now all of a sudden they're, instead of having a Yiddish Polish speaker living next to a Yiddish Polish speaker so they can both speak Polish, there's a Yiddish Polish speaker next to a Yiddish Hungarian speaker. So they don't have a common language except Yiddish. So Yiddish is going to be spoken more and it's going to become wilder and more multilingual in its composition at the same time. So those are some of the differences that I can retrace in retrospect between ghettos and camps.
- [25:44]
Samuel Kassow
Yes, there was another thought that I had about language in the ghettos and the camps, that in the ghettos and certainly in the camps even more so. Access to radios are practically nil. Access to newspapers are very, very limited. People are living in very crowded conditions. Much of the human interaction takes place in the streets. And so you have rumors, you have street singing, you have the creation of, as Smirke Katriginsky says, somebody begins a song and the next day everybody in the ghetto is singing the song. And it's the folksmoil. It's no longer that individual. The whole folk takes it up. So it's this orality which becomes the major medium of communication in the ghetto. And the transformation of the language through trauma, uncertainty, it requires the coining of new words and new expressions on a daily basis. And, and it, and the, and people commented on this, on the, the speed with which the language changed so that when people went, say after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and people who had been in the Soviet zone, like Shia Perla, are returning to Warsaw, they're amazed at the way the language has changed. They're amazed at the fact that even though they had lived in Warsaw, they don't recognize what they were seeing, what they were hearing anymore.
- [27:37]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yes. And Oskar Rosenfeld also writes about that in Lodge. Rosenfeld was himself. He was a German speaker from Austria and Prague, but when he listened, he wrote that people were hungry for stimulation and any word that was. That was floating around the street would. Would wake people up and they would be. Be interested in it. They would not just use it, but they were fascinated by it. And he said, though he himself was a German speaker, he said especially Yiddish, and he related that to the orality of Yiddish. I don't know if that's a perception or if that's. That's provable, but the perception at least was that Yiddish had an association with orality and street singing and that therefore the word invention took on an especially rapid pace in Yiddish. I want to go back to the street singing because I think that's interesting that you bring that up. That was another surprise for me. In studying the book, I knew that intellectuals who were exposed to, you know, 20th century linguistics and philology, I understood why they would be so interested in these language changes. But I was surprised that non elites, street singers, cabaret singers, seemed to be no less fascinated by the words that were being invented around them and that they sang about them on the streets and their songs uplift and shine a light on these words, almost like a dictionary does. We could think of the song Muis from the Warsaw Ghetto. Mues is it was in use before the war as a slang for money. But almost every line has some new horban Yiddish word in it. Or the famous. The song that was made famous by Jigen and Schumacher in the film Our Children und Rekindl Oy di bone. Bone is a urban Yiddish word. It means in Polish, a coupon. So it was a food coupon. Then the word coupon was incorporated into Yiddish, but it didn't just mean a food coupon anymore. Bona meant life because the food coupon was your ticket to life. So opkemdi bone. Giving up the coupon meant committing suicide or giving up on life. And this, this, obviously there's. There's a lot that we could do to unpack that word. And the street song Oy di Bone, it does that. I mean, they. They're reflecting the recording for posterity. Why do you think that non elites were so attuned to these language changes as well?
- [30:15]
Samuel Kassow
Yeah, this is a subject which preceded World War II. During World War I in Vilna, there were various publications about the history of Vilna during World War I and in the War Pincus, which was a huge collection of articles which appeared in 1922. There was an entire section on the folklore that appeared during the war by Bastomski, who was the editor of the Greening Kebemelech, a children's book. But he paid a special attention to what he. He believed was the spontaneous reaction of what he called the folk, that is, that for the elites. For the elites, they needed. On the one hand, they felt that they were teachers and they were mentors and they were guides. But I think they had to feel that they were getting their legitimacy from the authority of this entity called the folk, that the folk was this entity that was united by culture, by language, by a healthy instinct, formed in part by literature, in part by songs and the reactions of the folk to the war, that is, the various folk songs. This was something that had to be collected, had to be studied, and in turn, I think that gave the intelligentsia a sense of justification for what they were doing, that the Evo was getting a great deal of its authority from this notion that there's a folk language, there's a folk culture that is legitimate, that is creative, but that has to be described and has to be made accessible to the wider world.
- [32:38]
Hannah Polungolaj
You know, I realize that we've been talking for a while, and we haven't discussed the words themselves that much. Maybe. Maybe we should take it some time and talk about our. I hate to say favorite, because these are not words that represent positive reality at all, but they are fascinating and they are beautiful and creative in a way. So should. Maybe we should take some time and talk about our favorite Horbanidish word. Shabravan. Right.
- [33:04]
Samuel Kassow
Abravin.
- [33:05]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yeah.
- [33:05]
Samuel Kassow
Now, this is a word which I think illustrates the moral and the cultural dimensions of Hurban Yiddish. You're in the Warsaw ghetto. There's been a deportation. The apartments all around you are empty. You go in and you help yourself to the belongings of people who've been deported. Are you a thief? Are you simply doing what you have to do to survive? Are you transgressing moral rules in a time of catastrophe? Do moral rules even apply? Are you a Ghana, or are you something else? So one of the words that became very, very common in Horban Yiddish was to, was to Shabbar and to, and to be a Shabrovnik and to Shabraven. Maybe, Hannah, you could take it from there.
- [34:04]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yeah, yeah. I just see that someone asked me to type the word in the chat, so I'll go ahead and do that. Okay, So I did that. So that's right. It's a. The word represents. The word speaks to the moral dilemma of being a Jew that wants to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto in any, in any situation, but specifically from the Warsaw Ghetto. And that how can you be a thief if you're born a criminal according to Nazi law? So you can't just say I stole something because you know, you're not. That, that, that does, that's nonsensical. At the same time, people want to keep their stuff. And if you're taking something from your neighbor, they need a word for it. So what word? Filled in the gaprevin and the number of debates about this word in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the Warsaw Ghetto, I can't even count it. So we have, in 1942, we have Perico Pucinsky writing a six page entry right after the great deportation, right? So he has nothing, the world's been destroyed. And he sits down and writes six pages about this word. And, and he describes the word as being used almost like a bouncy ball that kids throw back and forth because one day it means theft and it's moral opprobrium, the next day it's a good word. Back and forth, back and forth. And there Avram Levine writes about the words. They debate whether the word means looting or not, whether it's legitimate or not. And they debate the etymology of the word, whether it comes from shaval in Hebrew, not necessarily to break, but to procure food, as in yerdu achay, yosef, asaram, yitzrayma, alishbo baal, to acquire grain in Egypt in biblical Hebrew has that root. Or if it's from Polish, which meant it was a minor word in locksmith vocabulary at the time. So they debated whether it's from Polish, it's from German, it's from Hebrew. Where is this word from? As far as I could tell, oddly enough, the word actually had its stamp in all of these languages at different periods of time, which gave the word this incredible ambiguity in the Warsaw Ghetto because it sounds a little bit Polish, it sounds a little German, it sounds a little Hebrew, it sounds a little bit moral, it sounds a little bit immoral. And this movement around those different associations was actually what they needed at the time, because they didn't know. So they needed a word that moved and captured the uncertainty of the moment. And they were obsessed with it. They wrote about the word, they used the word. And after the war, the same thing went on. This was a word that Zerubbabel, when he visited from Palestine, said, this is It. Now that I've learned this new word you've made up, Shabravin, it's over. It's bankrupt. That's bankrupt. That's the title of his chapter. Get out of here. You have to leave Poland. Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe is over. Why Shabravin? Lord Chetzanen also said the same thing. So the word works its way into Polish. It haunts Polish after the war. And apparently to this day, the Polish speakers among us can tell us about how the word appears in Polish. The word is fascinating on all those levels and how it was important to people and also about the movement of meaning that people were chasing after. The meaning of words in the ghetto.
- [37:49]
Samuel Kassow
I'm wondering if you could discuss another word which had all kinds of context. Organisms.
- [37:58]
Hannah Polungolaj
Oh yeah. So this is all in the theft chapter, which is 1. One chapter in that philological section that I told you about in the book. Organizirim is also a big one, right? You can barely. You can't really read a lot of Holocaust testimony in Yiddish or even in other languages without coming across organizirum. Organizirm obviously means to organize in normal Yiddish. We're not in normal Yiddish anymore, so. So this is in Yiddish. It means something else. It. Actually, I can show you a few slides if. If that'll help me. I happen to have a few handy at the moment, so. And then we'll have to have time for questions. We got our eye on the time. Don't worry, it's just visuals. So Victor Klemperer, who was actually who, the German philologist of Jewish background, was also right fascinated with words on the German side of things. And he was skipping a few things here. He had an interest in the word organiziern from the German angle. He wrote about organizerns actually beginning to take hold before the Holocaust with the rise of Hitler. And it replaced, according to him, the word system from the Weimar period. So under the Weimar regime, system, rule, government was systematic. Under the Nazis, rules were organic or gal, coming from the body, meaning race. That was the draw towards organic. And it had a magical aura. And then it became, around the time of the battle of Stalingrad, a word for stealing and wheeling and dealing in Nazi German. In Yiddish, the dynamic is different. They debate, they. They all. They don't know about the Weimar system, them versus organic power and so forth. They debate organizatia, organizirm, whether it's moral or not. And here I find this one really fascinating. Shmuel Weintreub, he's writing a DP Camp column of words, new words. And he describes organizatia as leitishkeit, like polite being. You know, respectability meant stealing, organizing. And this again, this speaks to similar moral debate about how do you survive and where is law? Where there is no law, this is the zone of exception, if we're thinking in Giorgio Agamben's term, this is the zone where there is no law. And then people nonetheless want to have a way to communicate and say what's right and what's wrong. And to do that they have to invent new words or re. Semitize, redefine words. And that's where origin is iron and shabraven and other words come in. And they don't just replace old words, they work differently. There's a movement, there's an ambiguity to them, and that's part of the reason why they're in fact more appropriate to this state of moral ambiguity.
- [40:59]
Samuel Kassow
You mention in your book two writers in particular, who for. For whom Herb and Yiddish is a central issue. Katsetnik and Chava Rosenfarb. I. I know that we're running low on time, but is there anything that you want to say comparing and contrasting these two writers and, and how they approach the subject?
- [41:26]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yes, both Chave Rosen, for Akatsehnik, is world famous. You know, he was, he's a sensationalist. Some people consider him, you know, semi pornographic. He has his famous fainting slash jumping out of the witness stand incident at the Eichmann trial and bestseller in many world languages. Whereas Chaver Rosenfire was largely ignored until very recently. But so they have very different life tracks. But they both had something really important in common, which is that they saw these Horban Yiddish words as a key to their post war artistic projects. They wrote about this to each other. I actually, thanks to Goldie Morgenthaler, Rosenfarb's daughter, I saw correspondences between Katsutnik and Rosenfarb which confirmed my hunch that they had a kind of artistic affinity between the two of them. Kaczechnik uses these Horban Yiddish words to disgust people, to protest normalcy, to wake them up. And by the way, I do claim that Katsutnik wrote his work in Yiddish in the original. You'll have to follow up with me in the book or at another talk to hear why I make that audacious claim. I'm very humble. And Rosenfarb proudly wrote in Yiddish, didn't hide that. And she says, and this is one of the most powerful explanatory statements about why use Urban Yiddish that I heard is that she says you need. She says this is about teaching love. The world has forgotten how to love. You've left us in the trash cans of Germany. You don't care about us as survivors. You've forgotten what compassion is. And, And. And I'm gonna. I want you to learn these words. And that, that somehow is a. Is an act of teaching love because it's coming towards the victim, it's coming towards her language. And so they have these very different attitudes and emotional backdrops to their writing, but they both see artistic inspiration in the Korban Yiddish word. So actually, I'm going to give a talk, an online talk in the spring through Colombia that will focus just on that, on the comparison between Katsetnik and Blumenthal. So those who are interested, I invite you to follow up with that so that we can have some time for Q and A. But I did want to set it up there that this is a really incredible conversation, that the literary conversation between the two of them about how do you use this Holocaust, dirty, vulgar Holocaust word to create something beautiful and artistically valuable after the Holocaust.
- [44:06]
Samuel Kassow
Thanks. I remember that in another conversation, you once said that you saw your book in part as an outgrowth of the whole issue, say, of the Onyx Shabbos, the Ringelblum Archive, the research into real time writing during the war as opposed to post war writing. One of the things that strikes me about your book is that I keep thinking of Rochel Auerbach, whose Warsaw Ghetto memoirs I've just translated. And Oyerbakh focuses not so much on the history of the ghettos, but of the phenomenology of Jewish responses, how people are responding, how they express fear, how they communicate, how they allow themselves to be tricked by German ruses, the. The. The delusions that, that, that they have. And I'm wondering if, if you could comment on Horban Yiddish as a way of also getting at the phenomenology of, Of. Of Holocaust reactions.
- [45:28]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yes, I, I think that that's a great way of putting it, that the phenomen, the relationship between things, the lived experience, is what we can get at through these words. And that was that. In part, that was why. I could answer the question of why a dictionary? Because a narrative, you know, which is the usual way we think of Holocaust testimony, this happened and that happened and that happened and that happened. That's going to tell you about, you know, this rush of events, roundups, losses, deaths, escapes, all of these, these different. And it's not going to have a pause to explore the experience of, of. Of how different things related to one another. What was the structure of a day, what was, what was eating like, what was starvation like? What was sex life like? What were, what, what did all of these things, how did they work in that specific moment? Freeze. Umberto Eco calls dictionaries and encyclopedias, maps of a certain moment, maps of a cultural moment. And I think that that's a really powerful way of looking at these dictionaries. They're maps of a given moment, which is another way of saying phenomenology. And I do think that that's what the dictionaries get out. That's what I try to elevate and illuminate in going and extending the work of the wartime and post war like psychographers with my own language research on the words as to try to go into that, to the experience, the phenomenology, the ways of being, the ways of living, the ways of surviving in these different moments.
- [47:15]
Samuel Kassow
Given what you've said and given the obvious importance of hurb and Yiddish, why do you think it was that great scholars and poets like Binyamin Harshav and Aram Sutzkever, they kind of went there and then they said, nah, nah, this isn't for us.
- [47:37]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yeah, Harshav is one of, one of the only, I never want to say the only, you know, major world renowned scholars to even mention urban Yiddish in a major publication. So it's in, in the meaning of Yiddish. I kept thinking of the title in Hebrew, the Meaning of Yiddish. He has like three sentences and he calls, he says, you know, the, the language, the Yiddish spoken in the camps was sub, sub grammatical baby talk that showed, you know, the obsessive admiration of the master race. The pathetic admiration of the master race. That's a very loose paraphrase. You can see the quote, you know, in the book, in writing. So he basically said this is, it was a footnote to, to, to the pathetic desire of Yiddish speaking Jews to emulate German, Western European, non Jewish culture. That was his reading of it. Kaput. Goodbye. I hate it, let's not talk about it ever again. Which is actually, it's a small statement, but it's a very, very big one meaning. This is so awful. I do not want to study it, I do not want to talk about it. I do not want it to be seen. It was there, I heard it and we're done. Which was also, hey, Levik's response too when he came to the DP camps and he heard this language and he Has a short essay on the word prisoner, which is horban Irish word. And later the author's pen name. He says, okay, I get it. It's about letting the victim speak in his or her own language. But it lacks euphony, meaning it's not beautiful. Let's just move on. And yeah, Sutskiver started out with these words in his writing, and then he let them go, and he transcended them and moved them into a different realm of his memory. I think that these words are very painful. You know, it's different for me to look at these words and analyze words that really contain within them the experience of theft, starvation, sexual abuse, loneliness, of feeling like you don't have control over your own speech. I have some distance. I can look at this. I think it was just extremely painful for a lot of people who were close to it. Some survivors really, really wanted these words to be out there. They wanted that pain to be recognized. Like Chava Rosenfarb. You hear this thing, these words, they're ugly. I want you to hear them because they were part of my experience. Some were embarrassed. And then the cultural milieu that had control was disgusted. I mean, they didn't let the words into Yiddish newspapers. Yad Vashem didn't want to fund them. It was embarrassing. Korban Yiddish was the Yiddish of Yiddish for some people after the war.
- [50:27]
Samuel Kassow
Yiddish of Yiddish, Yeah. I really like that. Okay, we have about. Thank you so much for these wonderful insights, and I guess we'll now turn it over for questions.
- [50:42]
Julia Rothkopf
All right. Thank you, Hannah. Thank you, Sam. We have lots of questions in the Q and A. Unfortunately, we will not be able to get to all of them. One question. I don't want to get too far away from the topic of the actual words in the book. There's a whole glossary of words at the end. And of course, we were only able to discuss a few during the course of this conversation. Hannah, are there any other words that you think are worth mentioning?
- [51:13]
Hannah Polungolaj
Lots of them. No, I get it. People like, you're nice and all that, and all these stories that you have. But tell us about the words. They're here for the words. So let's see. I think another word that's really important to talk about is. Is pipu word, mostly from Auschwitz, both from other camps. That meant a kind of male sex slave for usually for Kapos, for some kind of functionary in the camp. And the word has also interesting etymology. Is probably. Just. Probably comes from a German regionalism for a penis or a small boy, but was envisioned by Yiddish speakers as coming from the German word puppe for doll. So that effeminacy of a. Of a. A boy in. In forced into sex labor. So they. They. Yiddish speakers often wrote the word as puppe, like combining German doll with the puppet, with the people. And so the combination. So it's a gendered hybrid, and it's a German Yiddish hybrid. And both of those. Both of those hybrid dynamics are very frightening to people because it's about incursion, cultural incursion, lingual incursion, and bodily incursion at the same time. This was a word that was really, really important to a lot of people. It's also the title of one of Katsetnik's book, Snow Chants. It's also the word, one of the most famous Korban Yiddish words. And then it appears right in the middle of Elie Wiesel's night. Even in the international English edition, though, most people don't notice it. So it's there, but people are allowed to kind of move past it. That's kind of. I think that's what Wiesel wanted. But if you open it up, there it is in the hanging scene of. Of night. And it's. It's there. It's a painful memory. It's a complex memory that it contains all kinds of cultural baggage about looking at female or effeminate bodies as a metaphor for the downfall of the Jewish people. It's about homophobia. It's about loss of intergenerational links that instead of parent, child, you have abuser and abused. A lot goes on in that word.
- [53:29]
Julia Rothkopf
Great, thank you. And we have a bunch of questions just throughout the program about the word Corbin, what it means in Yiddish, and why you're using that as the descriptor instead of just saying Holocaust Yiddish. So would you like to say a few words about that?
- [53:46]
Hannah Polungolaj
Sureban. It's, you know, it's a word for catastrophe in Hebrew and in Yiddish, and it's one of the words, though it's not definitely not the only one of the words that Yiddish speakers use to describe the event that we call the Holocaust. In English, that's not true across the board. I know. I mean, in my research, I heard a lot of Yiddish speakers who just referred to dimilchomeh, the war, or they would refer to one specific event, Die groise aktie, the great action. They didn't have a Holocaust equivalent at all. But if they do have a Holocaust equivalent, it's often Kurban. So I wanted to use that as a nod to my interest in indigenous concepts, that I'm. That this is the point of the book, right, is that people are always saying, oh, there's no language to describe the Holocaust. Well, have you asked the people who are speaking during the Holocaust? So using Corbin Yiddish is my. Is. Is. Is my way of gesturing towards what Chava Rosenfarb asked us to do, which is come towards her language. We'll never master it, we'll never use it, we'll never be in her shoes, but we can make an attempt to, even in a limited and choreographed way, come towards the language of the Holocaust. Having said that, when I speak to people who get, you know, freaked out, don't understand the word Kurben Yiddish, then I just say Holocaust Yiddish. I mean, I'm not a fanatic. It's just the word.
- [55:19]
Julia Rothkopf
Great. Thank you. We only have time for a few more questions. We have one in the chat. Did Horban Yiddish extend into the Soviet Union and Siberian labor camps carried by Polish Jews who fled the ghettos? Good question.
- [55:32]
Samuel Kassow
I don't know.
- [55:34]
Hannah Polungolaj
Somebody would have to look that up. I know that obviously, in the occupied Soviet Union, there's Kurban Yiddish. And this Spivak really does a good job. Elias Spivak really does a good job of describing how Yiddish is changing in the Soviet sphere. In fact, during the war, he's publishing articles in Einikite in the Soviet Yiddish Yiddish newspaper about word changes. But he's focusing on changes in the Red army, like how Yiddish is changing in. By. By its use, by the way that soldiers are using it on the front. And then he goes back and he sees what happened in Kiev, and then he incorporates the disaster side of this change in addition to the heroism side. So Spivak would be the place where these words would. Would be found. And in fact, he and. And Moishe would say Beregovsky. They. They did a lot more research beyond what I had the time and space to describe. So if someone went in, well, their archive is in Kiev, but there are people out there who could expand this study and ask that question in a more systematic way.
- [56:45]
Julia Rothkopf
That's great. So what I'm hearing is that there's more work to be done.
- [56:47]
Hannah Polungolaj
Oh, my gosh. So much more work. That's a lot of people. Why didn't you look at this?
- [56:50]
Julia Rothkopf
Why don't you look at.
- [56:51]
Hannah Polungolaj
I have to. Gotta leave. Just like Sam left something for me. I mean, what if Sam had written not just, you know, who will write our history, but also then went on to write about Horban Yiddish. What would I have done? Just gave me the tips, right?
- [57:04]
Julia Rothkopf
There's always more to be done. We have a couple questions in the chat about how Horvan Yiddish entered the other languages and if any of these words survived in modern day Yiddish.
- [57:18]
Hannah Polungolaj
So I saw someone in the chat talking about the Hebrew equivalent of organism, which I think might likely influenced by the Horban Yiddish word organism, though I can't prove it. I mentioned shabir in Polish, which I know is there, and you can trace that in dictionaries and so forth, although they don't know enough of the Yiddish history themselves. But together you can put, if you put together a bunch of sources, you can see that there, the within Yiddish. Like I said, a lot of the people who are in charge of publications, especially newspapers, don't let these words in. They're in the yeast Kirby. They're in the Yiddish novels, poetry and so forth that people write. Memoir, you know, low level, non elite memoirs and diaries. You'll see it, but you won't see it in informal publications too much in Yiddish because people were embarrassed, disgusted and so forth. There is one word, though, that they couldn't, somehow couldn't escape, and that's O, you know, in normal Yiddish before the Holocaust, means to curse. Oh. And in, in the, during the Holocaust, it became combined, the Yiddish oyster became combined with Ausiedlung, the German word for relocation, which itself is a euphemism for being sent to a camp and killed. So the German itself, Ausiedlung is a euphemism, and then that's mapped onto Yiddish and Yiddish comes to mean deportation and that actually changes in the dictionary. So you'll see, you can go to Nachum Stuchkov, O sprach, and you can see a note that says this word changed its meaning during World War II. So that was one where they, whatever, the gatekeepers of language, threw up their hands and said, this is a new word now. There's no way we can go back on it. So it survives orally a lot. You can hear it in Shoah, Claude Lanzman's Shoah. You can hear bits of Ruben Yiddish. You can hear it at the Eichmann trial recordings and Yiddish, you can hear it at the Frankfurt trials a little bit, Auschwitz trials. You can hear them in the 1990s in the Shoah foundation recordings. That's how I came to this topic. So orally, it survives. It survives where Holocaust survivors can publish what they want, but it's pretty much cleaned out of a Lot of formal publications after the war.
- [59:50]
Julia Rothkopf
Great. I think we will end with one more question. Perhaps some homework for the people who are watching.
- [59:58]
Hannah Polungolaj
Someone's wondering, sam, Sam, have you don't do your homework?
- [60:02]
Julia Rothkopf
Exactly.
- [60:05]
Hannah Polungolaj
That's not true. Sam reread my book for this and he remembers more about the book than I do. So if there's any person on this earth that does his homework, it's definitely Sam.
- [60:15]
Julia Rothkopf
Yes. If there's one takeaway, it's that Sam Casanow does his homework.
- [60:19]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yes. So we have.
- [60:22]
Julia Rothkopf
So let's end with one question. In the chat, someone's asking if you can suggest any salient works of poetry or prose of writers who have written in Corbin Yiddish either during the war or in the post war period.
- [60:38]
Hannah Polungolaj
Yes. I'm assuming that this is in Yiddish, right? Because these words are translated out when they get, you know, translated into other languages. So Chava, Rosenfarb and Kacatnik would be really high up on my list. Reading Katsatnik in Yiddish is a completely different experience experience than reading him in any other translation. In addition, Yachs makes wonderful use of Kurban Yiddish. Very, very thoughtful, very creative. Who else? Mordche has chapters where he narrates the stories of a story of a Yiddish. Kurban Yiddish word is another one. Rivke Pinchaski Kwiatkovsky Pinchasic is a memoirist who uses Kurban Yiddish words. So those will be my recommendations here. You can get the rest, you know, by flipping through the book. Yeah, there's a lot that's out there. That's a starter pack.
- [61:43]
Julia Rothkopf
Well, thank you so much, Hannah. Thank you, Sam. Occupied Words what the Holocaust did to Yiddish is available in the Givo store for purchase and you can learn so much more that was not covered in today's discussion. And we thank you all for joining us today. Yes.
- [62:03]
Hannah Polungolaj
And thank you so much to Yivo, not just for organizing this event, but for making research like this possible. Really, it's just amazing the day to day work that the folks at Yivo do so that scholars can come and discover things.
- [62:15]
Samuel Kassow
Thank you, Hannah.