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How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the Holocaust
The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.
Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.
"Pollin-Galay brings long-overdue attention to the fate of the Yiddish language itself in the Holocaust, seeing it as a victim in its own right. . . .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."
— Miriam Isaacs
"Pollin-Galay’s dissection…supplies penetrating insights into the mindset of a man enduring extreme suffering and the language such circumstances can beget"
— Mark Glanville
"Occupied Words is beautifully written and intellectually exhilarating, a richly deserving recipient of the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category, and the 2025 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the Jewish Literature and Linguistics category."
"[W] hen one pays attention to the weight of words in the way Hannah Pollin-Galay does, every word counts."
— Avinoam Patt
"By studying how Yiddish speakers responded to the Holocaust, Hannah Pollin-Galay takes us into the underground of language. A moving and captivating book about the devastating power of words."
"Occupied Words is a landmark in Yiddish scholarship, an unrivaled study of the interplay of language and catastrophe. Anyone interested in the Yiddish language, Jewish folk culture, and Jewish reactions to Nazi persecution should read this book."
"An important and original study that makes a significant contribution to the fields of Holocaust, Yiddish, and gender and sexuality studies."
"A profound work without parallel . . . this is an excellent book."
"In her magnificent study, Pollin-Galay proves wrong the longstanding truism that the Holocaust was so terrible that it could not be described. Survivors fought to talk. Occupied Words offers a trenchant translation handbook – and a powerful window into the world of Holocaust society."