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Book Review | A Language Forged in Fire

JL;DR SUMMARY Hannah Pollin-Galay's "Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish" explores the transformation of the Yiddish language during the Holocaust, highlighting how it became a unique dialect known as Khurbn Yiddish. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HolocaustYiddishLinguisticsCultural HeritageLanguageKhurbn YiddishNachman BlumenthalElye SpivakIsrael KaplanHannah Pollin Galay

Places mentioned

Poland
"Nachman Blumenthal and Elye Spivak returned to Poland after surviving World War II, they found not just a changed world but something stranger: an altered language."
Riga, Latvia
"Israel Kaplan, who had been imprisoned in the Riga and Kovno ghettos, all reacted by immediately setting about the task of compiling dictionaries to study this new language, seeing itas does the author of this fascinating new book about their workas a perverse form of cultural heritage."
Kovno, Kaunas County, Lithuania
"Israel Kaplan, who had been imprisoned in the Riga and Kovno ghettos, all reacted by immediately setting about the task of compiling dictionaries to study this new language, seeing itas does the author of this fascinating new book about their workas a perverse form of cultural heritage."
Lodz, Łódź, Poland
"In the Lodz ghetto, for instance, stealing wood from the workshops was called khale nemen, to take challah, referring to the ritual obligation to remove a piece of dough while baking bread."
Warsaw, Mazovia, Poland
"The book quotes the last stanza of the folk song, sung by children begging for food in the Warsaw Ghetto and later recorded in a postwar 1948 film, Our Children, by scholars who heard it from orphans after the war."
Israel
"The writer and Auschwitz survivor Yehiel Feiner, who emigrated to Israel after the war but struggled with the tension between his native Yiddish and the pressure to publish, speak and live in modern Hebrew, chose to write under the name K. Tzetnik, a Hebraized version of the term ka-tzetnik, adding a Slavic suffix and including his tattooed number, 135633, in his byline."
Canada
"Pollin-Galay also considers the poet Chava Rosenfarb, who emigrated to Canada and who employed Khurbn Yiddish writing as an act of assertion, claiming her language for fellow victims: It is ours, undzer alemens eygentum, a shared estate."
Maryland, United States
"Miriam Isaacs is a scholar of Yiddish language and linguistics whose work includes sociolinguistic studies of Yiddish in Hasidic communities in Israel and America. She taught Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland. "

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