[Marek Szajda]: So. Hello everyone. My name is Marek Szajda and I have the pleasure to say a few words of introduction to
our keynote lecture entitled: "A Rubric of Pain Words: How the Holocaust Changed Yiddish". 
So of course, the lecture is a part of our international conference, "Jewish Languages and Politics. Ideological Choices of Jews in the Modern Era", but it's also an open public event.
So I would like to welcome all of you who joined us now for this lecture. Our keynote lecturer is Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay. She's a Pen Tishkach chair of Holocaust Studies, the director of the Institute for Holocaust Genocide and Memory Studies, and professor of Jewish Studies and istory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work explores East European Jewish Holocaust experience, focusing on cultural production, space, gender, inter-ethnic relations, and language identity. She is the author of "Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony", Yale University Press, 2018, and a book, "Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish", UPenn Press, 2024, which won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award and the 2025 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award. 
Her articles have appeared in scholarly venues such as Jewish Quarterly Review and Holocaust and Genocide Studies, as well as popular venues such as The Nation, Boston Review and In Geveb. Before UMass, professor Pollin-Galay was the director of the Jona Goldrich Yiddish Institute at Tel Aviv University. 
So, please, the floor is yours, and I hope enjoy for all of us. 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay] Thank you so much for this invitation. It's really, really wonderful. It's a tough act to follow all of these incredible papers. It's an honor to be here with you. It's an honor to speak in a museum that is named, has the same name as my family. 
Maybe they did it just to save type or something, save letters. It's really exciting to be here. And really thank you to the organizers. You've done an incredible job and you've been patient with me, and that's a lot. And you've selected fantastic papers of all kinds. So I want to start with a very simple question: Why study Jewish languages or language at all? I don't believe it should be controversial in this room full of language lovers and scholars, to assert that languages and the ways that they change over time are endlessly fascinating to observe. That should be an answer in and of itself. 
Research never has to be useful, expedient, or utilitarian to be valuable. Quite the opposite. Treating language in a non-utilitarian way, delving into its texture and its past an serve as a protest against today's hyper-pragmatic, profit-driven and impatient attitude towards words and language production, exacerbated by AI and writing slop, doing the kind of painstaking scholarship that is being presented at this conference is to insist on the right of language to be soulful, quirky, partizan, ugly, beautiful, historically shaped and filled with human agency and fallibility. 
Building off of these basic reasons to study language, I've also become drawn to wonder about the other ethical values of language study regarding my topic in particular, Khurbn Yiddish, Yiddish of the Holocaust. Of course, Yiddish words invented in camps and ghettos are definitely colorful. There is a voyeuristic fascination in learning how people on the brink of death spoke about topics such as bread or sex or socks. But is there an ethical value to studying and discussing these words? And if so, what is it? I'm drawn to the hypothesis that there is an ethical thrust to studying Yiddish of the Holocaust based on the way that speakers of Khurbn Yiddish behaved during and immediately after the war.

Remarkably, in the years of the Nazi genocide, many ghetto and camp prisoners under conditions of starvation, loss, slave labor, disease and imminent death decided somehow to invest some of their extremely limited strength and energy to documenting what they felt was a metamorphosis of language. For instance, in the Warsaw ghetto, Shimon Huberband, who lived actually in the courtyard next to this very museum. So that's a very uncanny feeling to speak about him and know that he lived right here. Shimon Huberband in 1942, he lost his wife and young son in an air raid, and yet he took a pen in hand and recorded a list of roughly 60 words that he titled: "Naye verter un alte verter mit naye begrifungen" - "New words and old words with new meanings". 
Also in the Warsaw ghetto, Shmuel Lehman reportedly amassed a long list of Yiddish words that were added or reinvented in the ghetto, starting almost immediately upon his imprisonment. 
In the Łódź ghetto, the archivists working on the Łódź ghetto Encyclopedia also compiled new words. And even though the head archivists, the leaders of this project were German speaking Jews, they called special attention to changes in Yiddish and said that there were especially large numbers of Yiddish words changing in the ghetto. Whether that was numerically true or not, I don't know. But that was their impression. And outside of these intellectual circles, there was also language work going on on the street and in the cabarets, there were songs that street singers sang to earn bread or earn money that broadcasts new trends in language.

And there were also more formal performance songs. This is a cabaret song, "ghetto 1942". Filip is a pseudonym, and it has almost every other word, it has, every other line, it has a neologism. So they were also studying language through their own means. They didn't need to be writers or historians or philologists. That is, Yiddish speakers bore witness, I can almost say en masse to the metamorphosis of their language in real time, in ghettos and even in camps. And after the war, when survivors in Yiddish cultural activists had more resources to document and to write, that is, more calories in their body and more likelihood of having light, pen and paper. Many of them threw themselves into the documentation glossing and preservation of Khurbn Yiddish with even more passion.

For instance, there was Nachman Blumental, whose name came up in our last session, but he's not the first one. Oh, here. There he is, yes. Nachman Blumental, a teacher and cultural activist from the Lublin area. And when he he survived the war in the unoccupied Soviet Union, when he returned to the Lublin area in the spring of 1944, he discovered a language gap between him and his friends from Lublin. Even though they were all native Yiddish speakers, he couldn't understand some of the things that they were saying. He was fascinated by that language gap, and he hypothesized that there was something very meaningful in that. And basically, he dedicated decades. He started researching this immediately upon his arrival in 1944. He began publishing it serially between 1956 and 1963, continued researching the topic at least until 1981, when he published a book, "Verter un verterlekh fun der khurbn tkufe" - "Words and Phrases from the Holocaust Period", which contained at least 3000 entries. That is, words that were fully invented wholesale or old words that had changed so drastically in meaning that they functioned as new words. And that is, by the way, in for linguists who study.

I know there's like a couple of real linguists here, but at least as far as I checked, linguists are willing to say that something is a neologism, even if the word itself existed before, but the meaning is completely new.

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]  So at least 3000 of them, in his book, and yiddishists were definitely, also in the Soviet Union, I've skipped him, but in the Soviet Union. So Soviet Union at the time, 1946, there's no real conversation between Elye Spivak, the linguist in the Soviet Union, in Kyiv and Nachman Blumental.

So it's not as if they were working together. And he published a dictionary entitled "Di shprakh in di teg fun der foterlendisher milkhome" - "The Language in the Days of the Great Patriotic War". And there Spivak not only published lists of new words for heroism, which was politically correct, acceptable at that time in Soviet culture. But he also took a big risk and he published, half of his book is a section entitled "A rubrik fun veyverter" - "A Rubric of Pain Words". That was a very big risk because specifying Jewish victimization at that moment, in that postwar moment in 1946 was very, very risky. People told him as much in a meeting about his book, and indeed he was arrested and he died during interrogation. So you could say, and it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration that Elye Spivak died to study Khurbn Yiddish. And along with these extensive dictionaries, there's this okay, this one is Spivak. And along with these extensive dictionaries, there were also at least ten brief glossaries which appeared in displaced persons publications, as well as appendices to early history books. 
Yiddishists were certainly not alone in claiming that the Second World War had somehow reshaped language. We heard earlier from our colleague Refael about Ladino in Auschwitz, and there were at least 40 different languages spoken in Auschwitz. At least. And that's only in Auschwitz. And as far as I know, any time I do a little digging with an expert in a language that's been spoken in the Holocaust, they say that there were changes.

There's somebody now that's studying French and Polish people tell me all about that. So in that sense, Yiddish is not unique. Most well known are the changes in German. The German philologist of Jewish background, Victor Klemperer, asserted that the Nazis had created their own perverse dialect of German, which he called "lingua tertii imperii", the language of the Third Reich, which he cataloged in a personal memoir cum lexicon by that same name. And there was also the "Dictionary of Inhumanity". These studies of Nazi German and of camp language, "Lagersprache", in general, have received widespread scholarly attention for a while, whereas Khurbn Yiddish and Khurbn Yiddish documentation have not received the same attention until recently.

If the compulsion to testify to the reinvention of words during the Holocaust was not unique to Yiddish, and it wasn't, there are, I suggest, nonetheless significant aspects of these impassioned efforts to document Khurbn Yiddish both during and after the war that do seem distinct to this language community.

Let's consider, for example, the way that one survivor named Israel Kaplan, who had lived through the Kovne ghetto and Dachau concentration camp, announced his word collection project to the public. Okay, so it's June of 1945, and Kaplan was actually declared dead a few months previously. So he's not in good physical shape. And he describes himself as still having trouble digesting food. And his face is swollen and bandaged, and he stands in front of a group of people at the Schwabing Hospital in Munich, and he gives them this lecture entitled "The Transformation of Our Folk Creativity" - "Undzer folks-geshafn in gevandl"; and his concluding line and it goes through all those, Hazzanim, cantors, An-sky, Peretz. And the crowning achievement of of Jewish cultural production is, guess what? Khurbn Yiddish. And he says: "People can bear witness. Help save our inheritance!" And then in his lecture notes, which you can read there, obviously, he starts his dictionary.

So it goes from his lecture notes from the hospital lecture notes to a list of words with no definitions. And they are: "klepsi-klepsi", which meant theft, potentially drawn from the Greek klepto, "ofn skoverode", which was specific to Auschwitz, he does note that, you can read that, which meant "to the crematoria", but it meant "in a pan", "skovoroda" is pan in Russian and Lithuanian. "Yazde in koymen" - a ride to the chimney. I don't need to tell this audience that "yazde" was a yiddishization of the Polish "ride". Musulman", more familiar, a neologism from the Holocaust, "Musulman" - an emaciated prisoner. "Vitamin" - special protection. "Mmu-tpruuu?", which was onomatopoeia for beef or horse flesh, respectively. "Knepelekh", literally buttons, here meaning golden coins and "Yushnik", literally pig feed, the name of a soup in some camps. This motley cluster of semi obscenities, lingual hybrids, crude metaphors, and onomatopoeia were, to Kaplan's mind, the culmination of centuries of Jewish creative output and could not be lost to posterity.

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]  Following this brief list, which seems to have been part of his lecture, Kaplan's notebook turns into the first draft of his diary of his dictionary, 43 pages tightly packed with roughly 760 terms of the same sort. Kaplan would begin publishing these terms with full glosses included one year later under the title "Dos folksmoyl in Natsi-klem" - "The People's Mouth Under the Nazi Yoke", as a serial column in the journal that he founded and edited, "Fun letstn khurbn" - "From the last Catastrophe". And then later - that was in 1949, the first version - and then 1982, he republished it under the same name. Okay, so this is different, right?

This is different from the Nazi-Deutsch documentation projects. Victor Klemperer, who recorded Nazi German, sought to illuminate Nazi influence words precisely in order to eliminate them from people's speech. He wrote: "Many words in common usage during the Nazi period should be committed to a mass grave for a very long time, some forever." So he, and also in the "Dictionary of Inhumanity", they documented German neologisms from the war so that you would know what to forget, what not to use. "Treyf, don't speak this way." Whereas Kaplan and he wasn't unique in this. He's saying, no, remember these words, these this is a this is something that we have to have, we have to hang on to. Why? Wouldn't you think people would want to forget these words? 
Here's where I think we are invited to explore the ethical value of, of these words and their study and their discussion and their commentaries. And I want to do that not by going into theory and not by pontificating or letting out a primal scream, we needed one of those today, but by going into the words themselves and the words, Khurbn Yiddish words, yes, I already hear recognition. This is like the popular term, I love talking about this word. I bring this up in an American context.

And of course, most people are like, what are you talking about? But I published a short article as an experiment, and this is all just in reaction to my beloved audience member's reaction to the word, I published a short article in Hebrew about this in Ynet, a popular newspaper, just to see what would happen. And the letters that I got, no one said what is this word? They said: "You don't have the etymology right!" It's such a strong word in memory, right? It's such a very, very strong word in memory for those who know it. And indeed, it was a total obsession. So I'm starting with this word, but really, I could start anywhere because these words are are labyrinthine in shape. They're all connected to one another. You go, it's like a wormhole. You go in in one word, and you can come out in a completely different place, and you're going to run into some of the same problems and questions. So here, "shabreven". 
Let's go. It's a word related to theft and it perplexed and preoccupied Jews both during and after the Holocaust. Sometimes it was "shabern" and sometimes it was "shabreven". Nachman Blumental, one of the prime Khurbn Yiddish lexicographers, whom I've mentioned, defines the word in an exceptionally long gloss of two pages, which begins as follows: "Taking ownerless ('hefker') property, also stealing." Right. Okay, so I hope you're all scratching your heads, your cheeks, your chins. How can something be taking ownerless property and stealing? 
That's a paradox. How can you do both at once? And if these are distinct acts, why are they housed in the same word? The same word means both stealing and not stealing. And he gives more and more examples to try to get himself out of this knot, but he doesn't really solve this contradiction that's contained in the word "shabreven". You know, it's like those undergraduate papers where they just keep writing and writing and writing because they don't have a thesis. It's the same thing with this gloss. It just keeps going and going and going because it's a contradiction and it never stops being a contradiction. To put this word in context.

We should note just the sheer volume of Yiddish neologisms related to theft that came out of the camps and ghettos, "samen" - to poison, "pgire" - an animal carcass, "matan-beseyser" - to give in secret a revered form of charity in Jewish tradition, "vasheven" and "araynvasheven" - often having to do with logging, hauling logs into water, hauling them out of water, all referred to some variant of stealing, smuggling, or black marketeering. I mentioned "klepsi-klepsi" earlier, you saw it in Kaplan's initial list. And then there was another word with a similar ring from the Flossenbürg concentration camp, "komsi-komsa", which also meant theft. So if, as Umberto Eco holds, "dictionaries are a map of how knowledge is organized and prioritized in a given network", then theft and smuggling had become the new capital city of Yiddish during the war. Not only did Yiddish speakers invent a great many words for theft during the Holocaust, but they also discussed those words extensively. In their discussions Khurbn Yiddish commentators employ theft related words as vehicles of ethical exploration, pointing towards a broader problem of language and law under genocidal conditions. If certain groups of people are legally required to be excluded from the law, "abandoned by it" in Giorgio Agamben's term, how can they speak, how can they have words for lawful and unlawful activities or actions, if it's illegal for them to be alive or illegal for them to have law? 
The laws of Nazi occupation essentially made it illegal for Jews to survive, and not just in the camps, as Agamben points out, but Zvenya Bethke has also shown this with regard to ghettos. I'll skip Agamben's well-known quote, which relates to this. Agamben speaks of the "zones of indistinction", places, where law cannot exist. And in these zones of indistinction - ghettos and camps - the impossibility was not just of law, but of words, crime, theft, and property. They all became nonsensical. So when you're looking for something, looking to use a word, and the old words have become nonsense, then you keep inventing more and more and more and more. So back to "shabreven" specifically, there's lots of definitions, they have really many debates. And I think people, maybe friendships ended over different debates over what the meaning of "shabern" and "shabreven" is.

The exact content of them is not as significant as their intensity. But what's even more interesting is that these postwar debates about "shabreven" were actually an extension of wartime discussions that people were having in real time. So back to someone who lived not far from where we're standing right now, Peretz Opoczynski, oh, so we're not at Opoczynski yet, sorry. We're in the Oyneg Shabbes archive. Also not far from here. There's a document that's entitled "Shabrovinkes". "Shabrovnikes" were, of course, the people who engaged in "shabreven". And it starts out with a definition.

[Hannah Pollin-Galay] Okay, so it looks like it's a gloss and it says: "Oyserlekh opgerisene, opgeshlisene, ferkashelt, farfedert, alemol farnumen. A shod di tsayt. Me ken dervayl epes shabreven. Dos heyst, khapn in di leydike heyzer. Ot hot ir etlekhe tipn." - "Looking worn, finished, crumpled, threadbare and always busy. Don't waste time. You can always 'shabreven' something. This means grabbing things from empty houses. Below we have a few personality types."

The term is then exemplified by a "lebnsgeshikhte", a life story of the 18 year old orphan Dovid Bryner, and it's relayed through an anonymous interviewer, transcriber and editor. Clearly, in the eyes of the editor-interviewer, there was a special connection between the neologism "shabrovnik" and this teenager's life, and Bryner at least agrees to this enough to be interviewed on the topic. He starts out, he recounts in detail what the work was like as a "shabrovnik", what he could "shabreven" and he's proud of of the couches and the things that he took. And then all of a sudden he stopped somewhat belligerently and says: "You're looking at me as if I've always been a 'shabrovnik' a 'voyler yung'. I used to go about my business as a quiet, solid kid." Bryner's sudden belligerence could result from the power dynamics of the ethnographic situation. He suddenly realizes that he's being studied as a primitive example of a social ill. But beyond that inequality of power in the interview situation, it seems that his anger also relates to the dynamics of the word itself.

For Bryner, the word signifies the gap between who he was before the war and who he is now, how he sees his own character and how people see him from the outside. The word helps him to tell his story, to present his hard earned survival skills. But the word also denies his story at the same time. Now to Opoczynski: Strikingly, Dovid Bryner was not alone in discussing the word "shabreven" in the ghetto.

The well-known Yiddish journalist and writer Peretz Opoczynski inserted an essay of six handwritten pages entitled "Shabreven" into his diary in the summer of 1942. Okay, so in this room, I probably don't need to give too much detail about what was the summer of 1942 in Warsaw. Okay. This is not like a quiet exam period where you can sit and write essays. This is right after the Great Deportation, in which roughly 270,000 Jews were deported from the ghetto and 35,000 killed. In the midst of all this, as soon as he has some kind of a pause in which he could witness his new state of crisis, this word enables him to do so. He writes: "The words 'tshukhes' and 'shabreven' belong to that special post-expulsion vocabulary that contains the essence of our current economic existence." The other term that appears in this discussion, "thsukhes", is the object of "shabreven". The clothes or rags that were typically taken or looted.
The very fact that Opoczynski has to define one Khurbn Yiddish with another, exemplifies how interconnected these terms were; that Khurbn Yiddish comprised a new system of meaning rather than just isolated additions. Advancing beyond the semantic documentary value of "thsukhes" and "shabreven", Opoczynski also explores how people behaved with this new system of meaning, what it felt like to use words. He writes: "Most of the time, the 'shabrovnikes' themselves are the ones who use this term in order to cover up their supposed shame. At first, people said 'ganeyve', 'ganovim' (theft, thieves) in simple Yiddish. But maybe those who shouted 'thieves' felt themselves accused by the term - they too took things from houses and would never want to bear the title of 'thief', or they simply recognized that it's nonsense to call it theft when you take something that's ownerless."

Opoczynski sees that the word is used to both describe a new reality and to cover up that new reality. It is at once a manipulation to call theft "shabreven", and it is nonsense to do otherwise. In a way, what Opoczynski implies here is that one had to speak euphemistically in order to participate in speech in this moment in the ghetto. Lacking any stable framework of judgment or law, words that describe theft and non-theft could only refer to one another. As he continues, Opochynski provides an apt metaphor to describe the way that the term "shabreven" functioned within the social space of the ghetto, the pragmatics of the term or the sensation of using the word: "People are using the word every which way, whether they need to or not; they roll it and they drop it. They play around with it in this manner like children play with a ball, throwing it in the air." I think that that is really what I see not just in his treatment of the term, but in so many others also, that meaning is on the move and it's bouncing back and forth and that confusion, but also that desire to jump in and insert some agency into that movement of meaning is what these definitions do, what this is about.

And then he writes that he hopes we're going to read this, that he hopes that we're going to be in this room today reading what he wrote. It's really a message in a bottle about Khurbn Yiddish, and even about the term that "these expressions will enter the Yiddish language as a 'simen muvek', a paradigmatic sign of this period, as cornerstones of the ghetto-mentality." That is, Opoczynski hopes that some of this ethical and semantic motion, words and codes bouncing around constantly like rubber balls, will be archived within the word "shabreven" and passed on to the next generation.

So the word is not only an example of the dynamic that Agamben describes as the "zone of indistinction", a simultaneous collapse of law and language, but also an enrichment to that theory. Opoczynski and his peer show us that such zones of indistinction did exist in the Holocaust. They did not, however, necessarily lead to mere silence or lack of speech or meaningless noises - "phōnḗ". But, in the case of ghetto Yiddish at least, to new practices of communication, new modes of language consciousness and behavior with words.

[Hannah Pollin-Galay] Now, I'm sure that many of you are curious about the etymology of the word. I'm not going to go into it because of limitations of time. There were debates in the ghetto. Avram Levin had a very, very passionate idea of where the word came from. There were debates. Does it come from Hebrew? Which it could be from two different words in Hebrew: "shavar" - to break or "shavar" - to procure, from German "schaben", or from Polish "szaber", which was a locksmith term before the war, mostly, for small bricks or tiles.

And according to what I could see, it's actually a combination of these influences; that these different associations all gelled together in the ghetto and became kind of a combination of all the different connotations that were possible, but you'll just have to ask me later or read the damn book if you want more details on that, because we don't have all night here. Okay. All right, next term, more Yiddish words for theft. It goes on and on. We won't do that now. Next word: "oyszidlung". Before the war: to curse or scold someone violently; during the war: to deport someone to a death camp, from Nazi German "Aussiedlung". There's hardly a Yiddish text on or from the Holocaust period that does not include this word.

It is the term most often used to say deportation, an event that happens so frequently and with such great consequence that its discussion is almost unavoidable. "Oyszidlung" imitates the almost identical German word for resettlement, "Aussiedlung", and the difference between the two is subtle sonically: "aus" - "oys". But remember that in Khurbn Yiddish, one vowel change can testify to a big story. And that's also similar to what Franz Kafka said back in 1912 about the difference between "tot" and "toit" in Yiddish and in German: that the words are so close together, he said, you can't translate them because the sonic proximity between the two actually masks a world of difference in history, status and meaning. And obviously in the Nazi context, this is a different kind of proximity than the one hat Kafka was referring to in 1912. 
Indeed, prior to World War Two, the Yiddish word "oyszidln" existed in Yiddish, but meant "to scold" or "to curse". And before the Holocaust, to use the word "oyszidlung" in Yiddish in the sense of deportation, would have sounded strange, if not nonsensical. Yet by the war's end "oyszidlung" had become an accepted, even dominant word for deportation. The word appears in Yizkor-bikher, communal memory books and other writings by nonprofessional writers throughout the postwar decades, and even appears in texts as late as 1997. The word was incorporated in its new meaning as in "to expel" in the 1961 version of Nahum Stutchkoff's thesaurus, where he writes about as "to curse" or "to scold".  And then he has an asterix and he says: "in the Nazi period: deportation". So in this case of "oyszidlung", it's not an exaggeration to say that the Holocaust changed the Yiddish dictionary.

The way this key word changed during the Holocaust, I claim, contains two  overlapping stories. Right, so I'm studying these Khurbn Yiddish neologisms as archives of stories. And there are two different stories that we can tell or read from "oyszidlung". The first story is about euphemism, Nazi whitewashing of extreme violence, using technical, bureaucratic registers to speak of acts that lead to the death of millions, ripped families apart and displaced most of European Jewry.

That's a more well-known story, or easier to tell. The other parallel story that's contained within this word is one of long term cultural hierarchies of convincing Yiddish speakers that their word for something is abnormal or nonstandard, whereas the German word is normal and standard. The second process is the one that relies on and activates the history of German-Yiddish, East-West relations. For the purposes of unpacking the term "oyszidlung", it's worth highlighting a few key oments in the history of German-Yiddish contact zones well known to most in this audience.

So despite roughly a thousand years of distinction and separate development between German and Yiddish, there continued to be various forms of encounter between the two languages in modern times, all the way up through the 20th century, as so many scholars in this room have told us about. So I'm not going to go into detail, but just to remind you of a few points in this conversation between German and Yiddish, that German was typically imagined to be a proper grammatical language of culture or commerce and nationhood, whereas Yiddish was perceived as a backward sublanguage or even anti-language in the early modern period. As Aya Eliada has documented, there was significant interest in Yiddish among Protestant Germans who saw Yiddish as a tool of conversion, a secret language of thieves, or a sign that Jews were simply unable to speak proper German.

And this religiously based stigma from early modernity shaped later conceptions of Yiddish as anathema to modern order, progress and borders. Recall the father of the Haskalah in Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn, in 1750, called Yiddish a "childish jargon" and explicitly campaigned for Jews to abandon the language, instead speak German in their daily lives with Hebrew for certain religious practices and writings. And then there were texts, other Haskalah texts like "Laykhtzin un Fremelay" from Aron Halle-Wolfson from 1796 that were written in Yiddish, but they had the hero character speaking germanized Yiddish to model good behavior, good language behavior. So with this tradition, we can think about the term "daytshmerism", which I know is more complicated than I'm giving you time for here, but to think of it as Marc Caplan does, that "daytshmerism" is "an attempt, however clumsy, to appropriate the prestige and modernity of German for a language and a people seen by themselves as well as their antagonists, as lacking both prestige and modernity."

I promise we're going to go back to Holocaust language, but this background will pay off. It's important. So "daytshmerism" was known, whether people knew the term or not, they probably didn't, but the practice was something that people knew. When a lot of Yiddish speakers would sit down to write a formal letter, they would try to up their register by making themselves sound more Germanic. This was very typical, and in this sense, germanizing Yiddish was not unlike the impulse of other marginalized or colonized cultures to emulate or "mimic", borrowing Homi Bhabha's well-known term, their colonizers. This type of German mimicry was very much alive for European Yiddish speakers of the mid 20th century as a memory and sometimes as a present day practice of making themselves more prestigious, more Western, more European.

So this is one memory that Yiddish speakers hold in the ghetto when they use the term "oyszidlung", but not the only one, because as I mentioned in the beginning, the German that they were hearing in camps and ghettos was not the German that they learned in school or that they were trying to imitate when writing a formal letter, it was much gruffer. It was more euphemistic. It had all these neologisms for all these different Nazi terminologies. And this is actually, I think that Marc showed the same slide earlier. So there we go. Colleagues learn from one another. So they're imitating German, which is a typical practice, but it's an uncanny imitation of German because it's Nazi German. So Yiddish speakers in camps and ghettos were forced to hear and use German. 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay] It was completely surrounding them in their environments. They had no way around German in a way that was sudden, drastic, and blatantly violent. They'd never been in camps and ghettos before, but also familiar. So the multiplicity of associations with using German within Yiddish muddled the agency behind the Khurbn Yiddish language changes vis a vis German, and people might have been asking themselves when they heard someone using a German word, like "oyszidlung" in the middle of a Yiddish sentence: "Is this person just using extra fancy Yiddish, or are they imitating and internalizing the logic of the violent oppressor?" This question seems especially important and difficult to understand when it comes to the word "oyszidlung". As with "shabreven", there was a robust discussion of "oyszidlung" during the war and also in the Warsaw ghetto.

So people, again, just pause to appreciate the fact that amid everything that was going on, a lot of people were sitting down and writing about these words. That's how valuable they felt it was. So Hillel Seidman, the great writer and community leader, he used the word ten times in his dictionary of the Warsaw ghetto.

Most of the times with quotation marks, but not always. So it's as if he's unsure, if this is his word or not. "Is this a quotation, 'oyszidlung', or am I using this in my own voice?" And he actually has a footnote addressing this. He writes: "A strange thing: There were certain expressions that stuck, taking on predefined definitions, masking definitions that don't speak to reality, to the gruesome nature of the tragedy. The Nazi murderers forced these words into use, even among Jews, and even up until now."

This is a postwar footnote to his wartime diary. "We never said pogroms, murdering, massacring, gassing, but just 'oyszidlung', or just 'umzidlung' (just as if it were a matter of moving people from place to place)." Seidman showed frustration with the passive acceptance of Nazi terminology into Yiddish, but perhaps this assessment of Jewish lingual submissiveness was overly harsh. In significant wartime sources people did protest "oyszidlung", actually, Seidman. They did not just accept the word blindly. The most clearest example was actually when in Warsaw, July 1942, the newly formed ŻOB, Jewish Fighters Organization, decided to issue a public proclamation about the word "oyszidlung" to ghetto inmates. This was according to a report that the Jewish Resistance wrote in March of 1944. So it is a little bit retrospective, but only by two years. So I think it's relatively believable. So they write in 1944, March of 1944, and they send this letter to London through underground connections and reporting on their activities. How did they build resistance? And in this report, the first thing, step one: "At that very moment, we decided: 1) To disseminate an announcement to the Jewish population, stating that 'oyszidlung' meant Treblinka and Treblinka meant death."

The other points in this list are all about escaping or gaining arms. So here it's not a figure of speech; lexicography served as a tool of defiance in real time. To redefine clearly and honestly was to make Jews reckon with what truly awaited them. According to the Nazi plan, wartime philology went beyond ntellectual reflection in this case; these resistance fighters felt that glossing this term for the public, defining it, was a critical step in awakening public consciousness and changing reality. Resistance to the term "oyszidlung" was not limited to the ghetto. In a testimony written in Auschwitz in 1945, a young man named Avrom Levite also challenged the term. Okay, he didn't have arms and he didn't have a group of resistors, but he also challenged the term and he writes a long reflection on the challenges of expression in Auschwitz. He's very reflective about speech in general. And then he writes: "And the massacre was humanitarian: A beautiful day, a wagon full of 'oysgezidelte' people arrives. Cattle cars." Clearly Levite is mocking Nazi language. You'd have to believe that a massacre was actually humanitarian, to think that this is a serious quote. So he's mocking Nazi language, he's mocking the violence of euphemism. And that's the sense that he brings in "oysgezidelt" as a mockery of euphemism.

So again, he didn't have weapons and he didn't have a resistance organization. But I too see this as a type of resistance to the term "oyszidlung" in real time. So in all three of these cases, Seidman, Levite and also the ghetto fighters, their resistance is to euphemism, right? They're calling out the euphemism. That's their protest. But none of them talk about the second story that this word contains of East-West, power dynamics, of Yiddish speakers mimicking German. It's not in their commentary. It's not in their protest. This piece of the story would require time and distance to be more clearly articulated. In 1961, in the time of Khrushchev's thaw, of course, a Soviet linguist named Elye Falkovitch wrote an essay about this very word in his column "Vegn Shprakh" - "About Language". Setting the stage, Falkovitch begins by recalling a classic character created by the the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem in 1907. "Israelik Tsivilizatsye". And you know, if you're a lover of Sholem Aleichem, you know that, "tsivilizatsye" - civilization, you know he's about to make fun of someone. 
This is his way of saying that the Western European Enlightenment did not have monopoly on intelligence and ideals. "Tsivilizatsye" was one of his prime tools for poking holes in that power dynamic. So Falkovitch is going right with him. He talks about the "Israelik tsivilizatsye" that sprayed foreign words in every direction. Okay, so he's speaking in "daytshmerish", he's using foreign words. And he considers himself better than everyone else. And he's full of BS and the typical Sholem Aleichem critique of the Western enlightenment. And then in one sentence, he jumps to the word "oyszidlung" and the wartime and postwar usage of this word. So he's making that connection. 
He's connecting the long standing assumption of Western superiority to Yiddish to the intense period of Nazi violence. He writes: "People have grown accustomed to using only the German 'oyszidlung', which has a completely different meaning in Yiddish from in German.' So he's finally the one to point out that "oyszidlung" means "to scold" in Yiddish. And he writes: "You try reading, 'They liquidated the ghetto and 'oysgezidlt' (scolded or cursed) out the Jews'. If only they had just scolded the Jews, cursed out the Jews, it would have been a shame, but we would have not had so many broken hearts and so few Jews in the world."
So with the distance of time passing, I think people can tell that story, the second story of "oyszidlung", the culturaldynamics of East-West. And he was probably also aided by his Marxist cultural criticism training, which encouraged him to point out these kinds of dynamics. He disentangles the cultural backstory of "oyszidlung", along with its semantic one, completing the critique that seemed to be on the tip of the tongue but unspoken for wartime commentators. To conclude, I'd like to return to the question I posed at the beginning: What is the ethical value of Khurbn Yiddish documentation and preservation and debate? Why did people like Israel Kaplan show so much passion and urgency around the preservation of these embarrassing, weird terms? Why did it matter to him to maintain the memory of these words? And why should it matter to us as scholars in 2026? 
Kaplan and many of his peers saw language documentation as a distinct form of testimony, a window onto intangible yet crucial aspects of their history that could not be studied or remembered otherwise. Language was a conduit between material realities of imprisonment and mental and emotional processes. A bridge between the inside and the outside. That was a bridge that bore an especially heavy burden during the Holocaust. Remembering that process was key to remembering their humanity. What is more, both of the words that I have shared with you today tell stories not only of deep disempowerment, but also of unlikely resistance. This is most clearly the case with the Warsaw ghetto fighters taking up the glossing of oyszidlung" in preparation for armed resistance. But there is also a resistance story contained within the word "shabreven", especially in Peretz Opoczynski's commentary on it, we also find that oddity of the word awakened a capacity for self-awareness and analysis of the law under attack. To remember Khurbn Yiddish, was this also a way to remember cognitive resistance staged on the level of speech and communication.

Moreover, as another survivor and Khurbn Yiddish commentator, the author Chava Rosenfarb - she wrote a book, an initial book of poetry using a lot of Khurbn Yiddish words - and she comments on the value and she says that these words, "everyone's going to have to learn them if you want to understand my poetry". And she says that doing that, that act of learning these words will turn them into "undzer aleman's eygntum" - "a shared estate for us all". So Rosenfarb's model is that learning these words, the act of coming closer to them, not mastering them, not reliving Holocaust experiences, but learning these words together is going to create a new type of community when the old infrastructures of community were gone, were destroyed. 
And one last thing, as surprising as it may sound, I also believe that studying an event like the Holocaust through its verbal traces, can enable an especially meaning and mutually dignifying mode of contact with other cultures today. I've come to this conclusion inductively. I've had the chance to lecture on this book for a while, and on more than one occasion, people have come up to me and said, this actually reminds me of something from my culture or my topic.

So on one occasion, a scholar named Sid Naing approached me and told me that he was in the process of creating a "Glossary of Politics, Conflicts and Peace in Burma/Myanmar". And he gave me a couple of words to think about as parallels. And I'll jump to the second one: "jar-pi-ant", which is a word that comes from Chinese and is incorporated into Burmese. And of course, my pronunciation is definitely not precise. So this was for the now notorious Chinese mob-run scam centers along the Thai-Burma border, Cambodian-Thai border, and now spreading across other parts of Myanmar and Southeast Asia. So in this I can see, in "jar-pi-ant" we can see also the interlocking of languages as in "oyszidlung" or even in "shabreven". And we see these new rules for language and new rules for law in these enclosures, like these, these mob-run scam centers. But we can also see difference. This is oppression through the internet, through the World Wide Web and that creates a completely different dynamic than in the Nazi ghettos. So we can see the points of contact, but we can also discuss the differences.

I also was approached to think about connections between Khurbn Yiddish and the language of enslaved Black Americans, especially in the words they created between the 16th and 18th centuries. And maybe we'll skip to the second example here, too, and think about the word "mojo": "Originally a magical charm. By extension, a source of personal magic that one can tap into, derived from 'moco'o', literally 'medicine man' in the Fula language of West Africa." There is again a commonality with the lingual mixing found in Khurbn Yiddish, Fula with English, Fula becoming a part of English or anglicized, not unlike German or Polish with Yiddish. But there is an interesting difference here that every English speaker uses or knows the word "mojo", so the word hasn't been erased, in its shell at least. Which is different than most Khurbn Yiddish words.

Most people have no clue what Khurbn Yiddish words mean, because most of the speakers die and they didn't pass it on. And the Yiddish speakers after the war, like Weinreich, didn't want anyone to be knowing these words or anything. So there's more of an absence with Khurbn Yiddish versus "mojo", but there's also an erasure in "mojo" in that the story of the word has been erased. The shell of the word exists, but we don't use, I don't use the word thinking about Fula language and the medicine an. So there's an erasure of backstory, even if the word exists. And actually "szaber" is potentially a similar case in Polish today.

Polish speakers here tell me that the word haunts the Polish language in the Warsaw ghetto sense, not just in the locksmith prewar sense. So it's in and actually in my book, you can read a little bit, but and people discuss the word in Polish right after the war as being this new word, but they don't mention the Jews in the ghetto. So it actually is similar to "mojo" in that sense. Okay, wrapping up, I promise: There's ample common ground between these three lexica. The ways that the languages of power work their way into speech of the disempowered, the heartbreaking yet resourceful ways that victims use humor to regain a sense of self. But these comparisons also allow us to acknowledge and appreciate points of diversion and distinction. In sum, the study of Khurbn Yiddish, like other atrocity languages or language in general, leads to an encounter that is not about rivalry or forced uniformity, but instead paves the way for empathy and curiosity across difference.

Approaching comparison from a place of particularity allows us the humility to accept that one group's story will never represent victimhood as a whole. That Holocaust survivors or any kind of atrocity survivors are humans embedded in time, place, and history rather than all-knowing prophets. This humility enables more cross-cultural conversations, not fewer. Cultural or language history is also an approach that does not seek to bring traumatic pasts together by aiming for a lowest common denominator, assuming that communities or scholars of other events will only or can only absorb the most metaphorized or universalized versions of Jewish history. So I am having a little primal scream in here for Gil that we don't just have to use clichés about the Holocaust in order for it to be understood by other people or other groups of scholars, we can actually get very, very particular and very, very specific. And that can make it even more interesting. That we as people are capable of learning and appreciating the texture and nuances of someone else's legacy.

Perhaps we could call this approach to memory, the one enabled through language study, "pluralism through particularity". This is the ethical value that I see in this work. Language work starts with curiosity and slowing down the machinery of present day word production, and may also lead to a deeply human mode of embrace, a way to hold both Jewish particularity and worldly solidarity. 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay] Thank you.

The discussion

[Marek Szajda]: Thank you for such a great lecture. And now we have some time for comments, discussion, maybe some questions. If you have any. We can collect some. Yes, please. 

[Speaker 1]: It's not really a question. More like comments. I come from Belarus and this word, this "shabrovnik"-word, sounds to me very much like the word "žabravać" which means "żebrać" in Polish and it's basically to. So in Belarusian it's "žabravać". So it's basically very similar. And it's "to beg", "to sponge". So basically not steal, but more like ask around or something like that; to not have money and just survive by. So that sounded more like etymologically close to me than the others you mentioned and another thing that I was thinking about this using of the German words for description of the experience. But also I noted that in the dictionary people would not mention, people would also create this kind of euphemisms. For example, they wouldn't say, "oh, we're going to the gas chamber". They said, "we're going on the, on the pan". Something like that, right? So I think it's kind of human to not like name very painful things. So kind of maybe the use of this "oyszidlung" was actually meant to kind of cover up for that pain. But yeah, but that's more like my observation. 

[Speaker 2]: Thank you so much for this really fantastic presentation. You have this really exciting set of case studies here and I would just love to hear a bit more about the circulation of these terms. So you bring up especially the sort of the limitations of their travel as well. So how that came up in your research, how that shows up in its own sort of sedimentation of these meanings as well. Thank you. 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: So I think I'll address the idea that people did this, euphemized as a form of self protection.
Yeah, sure. But that's also a way of lying to yourself. I mean, that's also meaning on the move. That's also the rubber ball that's bouncing. Am I euphemizing to protect myself or am I euphemizing because the Nazis require that I lie to myself? It's not one thing. That's exactly what I think Opoczynski is telling us with the rubber ball, it's like this hyperactive movement around words and what they mean and how we're using them. And it's this feeling of meaning on the move that is, I think, a strong feature, the strongest feature of Khurbn Yiddish rather than one psychological syndrome comforting or lying to yourself. It's both, it's all, it's bouncing back and forth. And I mean about Belarusian, it could be, look, as also in Russian, these are the words, these are the routes that they suggest, right? 
The commentators. So I think it's good to take seriously their language associations. These people were speaking it at the time. These are the possibilities that they bring up, which then I check and see how they work out. But also keep in mind that this word really did change after World War Two. So like really we checked and there isn't "szaber" in this exact sense before the Warsaw ghetto. So one would, I'm sure there's a lot of research to be done there that I didn't, but it really does seem like this confluence of different connotations coming together in the Warsaw version. 
And about circulation: you know, it's hard, like, it's hard. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have Ngram searches. And Blumental acknowledged the difficulty of this. He said: "I wish I could trace this down as much as possible. I know for a fact that there were different versions of Khurbn Yiddish spoken in different places." And he tried his best, but also keep in mind - and there were there are clear cut examples, and there are places where really you can tell "shabern" comes from Warsaw ghetto, then it moves around into the DP camps, this is a small fraction of the commentary on it, but anyway.
And there are cases like "khaper". "Khaper" in the Warsaw ghetto meant someone who who helped with stealing something, like grabbed to steal. And a "khaper" in the Vilna ghetto, was a Lithuanian nationalist who was grabbing people from the streets. So two completely different meanings. But keep in mind that all these different dialects or sub-sociolects of Khurbn Yiddish, most of them have encountered one another in camps and then later in DP camps, too. So there was a mingling of these different meanings as well. 
And I did my best with circulation, but it was not my main topic. Again, something that somebody else could take that up and they did their best. It's difficult to unwrap the layers of integration and get to the regional specificities. 

[Speaker 3]: Fascinating, thanks. I was wondering, maybe you have a theory of the life some of these words had in Polish in the Warsaw ghetto. You know, Szlengel wrote this poem "Oyszidlung" in Polish. And then, if I'm not mistaken, "opgebn di bone" became "oddać bony". So I wonder, I'm curious now after your talk, what did it index for Polish speakers, these Yiddish words with this complicated backstories, hidden stories? I wonder what you think. 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: It's a great question. And really, like I emphasize this: neologizing was not unique to Yiddish. It was for sure happening in Polish. And I know that a Polish source where someone is writing in her diary in Polish and she says: "Ah, what am I doing? I'm incorporating all these Yiddish words, bleh." So it's a process of change. And so when we read Ringelblum lamenting the fact that too many Jews were starting to speak Polish and not enough Yiddish in the Warsaw ghetto, it was actually not just more or less one language. 
It was really an intermingling and there's especially in the songs, really, they just go wild with it, mixing and it might be written in Latin characters, but it's mostly in Yiddish or it's written in Yiddish, but most of it's in Polish. So the languages came together and different registers of Yiddish came together too, because people of different social classes were forced to live together.
So what was the register in Polish? I think you or somebody else should take that topic up because it's so good and I didn't get, I don't have lots of answers, but it's there, you know, it's there. And yeah, a lot of this same dynamic in "shabreven" - "szaber" is in Polish sources, too. And "bone" is another one that bounces back and forth. "Tshukhes", right? "Tshukhes", it's a - as far as I understand - it's a Polish word that was yiddishized and then went back from Yiddish into Polish with this difference. So the conversation between the two, it was expedited and intensified, as far as I know. 

[Speaker 4]: Okay, I'm asking a question: Along those lines, you had people from many different language backgrounds mixed together in camps. And I'm wondering how that affects the Yiddish, because you're just focusing on Yiddish, but are there examples of Hebrew words? You had a few examples here. Can you talk about the role of Hebrew and potentially Hebrew as a unifying language among Jews from Yiddish and Ladino and Judaeo-Greek and Judeo-Italian and other backgrounds? 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: Yeah, that, okay. So I'll answer. I'll give my humble, honest answer first, which is that the role of Hebrew is also a topic somebody else should take on. But I can talk about loshn koydesh words in Yiddish. That is important and it doesn't go away because - and why is this important? - Because some people claimed erroneously, audaciously that Yiddish stopped existing in the camps, that it's only "lagerszpracha" - and I pronounce it in the Slavic way on purpose because that's how it's written, with an "a" at the end - that it's just camp language. Once they get to the camps it's not Khurbn Yiddish anymore. 
It's not a sociolect that's specific to Yiddish speakers. It's just a Creole, multilingual, translingual Creole, but I don't think that's right. And that's precisely because there are new words from camps that have loshn koydesh in them, like a "shadkhen". 
Is it Auschwitz or Treblinka? Probably Auschwitz, because more words survived from Auschwitz. A "shadkhen" was the person who sent someone to the "angel of death". So we still see productivity with loshn koydesh words in the camp. Did that connect between Jews of different backgrounds? I don't know. I mean, I think that it could have, Khurbn Yiddish definitely did.  I mean, Primo Levi, whom Refael cited earlier, Primo Levi writes about Yiddish as the lingua franca of of Auschwitz, and that you had to pick up a Yiddish to speak to as many people as possible. And that was Khurbn Yiddish that they were speaking. How big a role Hebrew had there? You got to get one of your students to do that one. I'm, you know. Yeah. 

[Speaker 5]: Yeah. Thank you very much. Really, really fascinating talk. So most of the examples you brought in one way or the other are descriptive. They are attempts to describe very radical, sort of, let's say different forms of violence and its implications and new words that need to fill some kind of void or to just, like you said, some kind of defense mechanisms and so on. I wonder if you could also elaborate on forms of Khurbn Yiddish, which maybe has to do more with the inner world of the inmates or like, was there also a layer of Khurbn Yiddish which was more about the emotional life of people and not just vis a vis violence and displacements and deportation and so on? 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: So, you know, I really hold that these words were a bridge between the inside and the outside. I don't think there is a lot of volume of emotional vocabulary. It doesn't mean that there's not a lot of soul, and not a lot of emotions in these words. There is, but it wasn't just inward. It was in and out. Like, I can give you as another example. And that meaning, it built and it snowballed over time, the inwardness.You could make it very inner, you could make it out. So, well, look at the at Dovid Bryner, the orphan, and he's talking about being a "shabrovnik". And he gets very emotional. You can see it on the page in that handwriting. "What? Why are you talking to me like this? You think I'm just a 'shabrovnik'."It's really insulting to him. So there's a lot of emotional content there, but it's not a word that describes his emotions in a semantic sense. That they didn't, it didn't appear, some things I can't invent, words that they didn't invent. Or in the Łódź ghetto "khanele"; this word that came to mean "scraps of wood that were taken from a tramcar in order to heat your apartment with wood". Khanale, my name. My name was a Khurbn Yiddish word. And there are different etymologies, competing etymologies for this. And Chava Rosenfarb has one that she expands on in her trilogy, in "The Tree of Life". And she says that where did the word "khanele" come from? 
When these men were working to unload the scraps of wood from the tramcar and they would see this furniture that had once belonged to a Rivke or a Khanele. And they remembered these women who took care of this furniture and broke their backs to take care of their families. And then inside these drawers, there were siddurim. There were machzors, there were personal letters, there were newspapers. So she's describing these drawers as like an Aron Kodesh. This is a holy ark containing the history of her people and the kohanim, the priests, the people that are guarding this ark are these housewives that don't exist in the historical record, and that when the wooden scrap, when the wooden furniture is gone, and when the texts are gone, and when the women are gone, and when the men who remembered this word are gone, what's left is the word. 
So there's tons of emotional content in the word, but it's a bridge between the inside and the outside. It's not like a new word for gloomy or depressed. If that's what, if I answered you. 

[Speaker 6]: This is excellent. And I'm sitting here and thinking about, like, I completely buy what you're saying. It was a great book, and I'm thinking about ways I might want to.

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: But... Here it comes. 

[Speaker 6]: No, no, no. It's not that. How I might want to incorporate it into literary scholarship or teaching. And so like riffing off that and some of your responses to some of the other questions, if you had to like think of ways that either you or other people might take this acceptance like this is a corpus that is worth using further. What would be your wishlist of some directions you'd like this research to take? 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: Well, I thank you. And that was a very kind "but". I was expecting, I was ready. Okay. Well, I mentioned one, which is I would really love to work with a consortium of scholars on a dictionary of atrocities and compare across cultures. I haven't gotten there yet, though. Both Sid and Lisa, the people who pointed these words out to me, expressed eagerness and readiness to do it. But, you know, I don't work that fast. That's one thing. In terms of within Yiddish, I mean within Holocaust scholarship, I would like people to look at language as an archive of experience and go there and not just treat language as it was alive or dead. They spoke in Yiddish or they spoke in Polish. 
How? What was the modality of that speech and what did it tell us about the moment? And take that risk to do that kind of emotional, cultural unpacking, phenomenological unpacking. You know, in terms of Yiddish literature, I think that there's a whole corpus of texts that use these words and they become poetry, they become art. Because there is a creative kernel in every neologism. Even the ugliest ones have some creative spark inside them. Even when someone is calling an exploited child laborer in the Kovne ghetto "a malekh", an angel, it's very sad. it's sad irony. But it's creative. There's dark humor in it. 
There's something going on in there. And I would love for people to recognize and incorporate that into their research. And I'm going to go back to kind of what I started to say in not such a coherent way after the last talk, but I'm also really interested in language community and how and why people wanted to rebuild it. And I think did so in an ethical way. Like I am being normative here. I'm saying that this was an ethical way to rebuild language community in a moment, 1948, postwar where it's really, really hard to do anything right. 
I mean, right, okay. The chances of falling into traps of racialization and militarization or assimilation are just so present. So what's the philosophy of language? What could, what could language do right at this moment? What could it do? And I really think that they are on to something. I'm not glorifying them as people who are saying "they never wrote a single word I would disagree with". But it was a modality of, of offering up a connection, saying we would like to be connected to one another. And there is a history, we do share a history, but it's actually quite open. I mean, you could join it, you could leave it, you could join it. But there's a dare there. So to me, it's really deeper than like don't forget those sources. 
It's about what language can do for people and how people can be a part of a community without it being racialized. And Blumental writes about that in 1938 and he says, language, literature - in response to Mises - he says: "Mises with his genetics. This is really bad. Genetics can always go wrong. Just like you can use genetics to prove that Jews are smart, you can use genetics to prove that Jews are evil. Let's not do that. If you want to see connection, let's go to literature and language."
And I think that that's a very provocative and important suggestion for for all time. 

[Speaker 7]: Thank you so much for such a fascinating talk. There's something that struck me as you were listing out some of these new words that I've been thinking about the entire time. And I'd like to ask, and I know how my question is going to sound, but I'm thinking about words such as like "mmu-tpruuu?", or like "komsi-komsa", or these kinds of words: Were these words funny? 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: Yeah, definitely. 

[Speaker 8]: And so I guess my question is, what is the affective relationship of these kinds of words to the people who are using them? And do you have a sense of what's so funny about them and why they're doing that? 

[Hannah Pollin-Galay]: Thank you so much. I thought you were going to, again, like Sonia. "I know how this is going to sound." Okay. I'm ready, I'm ready. Okay. So humor. Well, first of all, as they were presented in that rapid fire forum. That was Israel Kaplan, and he wanted these words to be funny in his different versions, which his son let me read in his kitchen in Jerusalem, in Israel Kaplan's different versions, You can see he's editing for comic timing. That was what was most important to him. Blumental wanted the documentation. He didn't care if he bored you to death. Kaplan wanted you to read this and feel like he was taking you on a tour of the Kovne ghetto, and he was making you laugh. 
So the humor is awakened in Kaplan's presentation, but I would say that it's there, right? The "mmu-tpruuu?"; there's irony, there's reversals, there's deflation. There's so much that could be potentially humorous and that Kaplan invites us to see as humorous. It's form of resistance, isn't it?
Laughing at the, a weaker person laughing at the stronger. It's a form of poetry. It's taking its agency. Kaplan and like the best example with Kaplan of the humor, but actually the walls of humor are not that stable. And he actually lets us in on that a little bit. Or maybe it's with help of Blumental. 
So, okay. NSKK was some, yeah okay, no, NSPP was an actual acronym in a camp. I don't have every single Khurbn Yiddish word memorized, but acronyms are a big deal. NSPP. And he says that "we changed it to NSKK". But then also he cites a moment when the Germans hear the Yiddish humor. They understand Yiddish by this time also, and they make a joke out of it in German. So two can play at that game and they can also take Yiddish, take away Yiddish dignity with their own humor. 
With acronyms it's really funny. So "NDM", it sounds like National..., some Nazi acronym. And then you find out it's "nisht dayn mazl", like "shit out of luck". So there's a lot of trying to deflate the situation. But again, the walls are not stable because either the situation becomes so not funny that it's not funny anymore, or in that example with the acronyms that the Germans pick it up, they play the game and who knows who's going to win, the Spurs or Thunder? Okay, sorry, that was an NBA reference. Genug. Yeah, right? More? So I think people are hungry, to be honest with you. 

[Marek Szajda]: So if not, we can just stop here. So thank you once again.