Hannah Pollin-Galay: The Microhistory of Words

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish.

Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization they were enduring, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths, 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 her lecture, Pollin-Galay will focus on two key terms of this new sociolect, one related to the topic of theft and one related to German-Yiddish encounters.

Hannah Pollin-Galay is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at Tel Aviv University, where she is also head of the Jona Goldrich Institute for Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture. Pollin-Galay researches and teaches primarily in the fields of Yiddish literature and Holocaust studies, and has recently begun to foray into ecocriticism. Her first book, Ecologies of Witnessing: Language, Place and Holocaust Testimony (Yale 2018) asked how oral testimony is shaped by the language and geography of the survivor. Her most recent book, Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish won the 2024 National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Studies.

To participate in the event, please register vie anmeldung@vwi.ac.at by 26 March 2025.

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