AUTHORS FROM HOME PRESENTS

Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish with Hannah Pollin-Galay in conversation with Eddie Paul

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.

Join Eddie Paul, JPL’s Associate Director of Special Collections, and Hannah Pollin-Galay, Associate Professor of Yiddish and Holocaust Studies in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, as they discuss her compelling new work on Khurbn Yiddish and its cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation.

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