Language, Holocaust Memory, and Marxism: Elye Spivak’s Risky Yiddishism

• In Event: Yiddish Holocaust Memory in Eastern Europe: New Insights

Abstract

The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish as they found that their prewar language was incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah. Many victims and survivors felt compelled to document these language changes as a critical form of testimony. Among them was the Soviet linguist Elye Spivak (1890-1950), who had built his career as a pedagogue, editor, and researcher in Kiev. Before WWII, he had articulated a vision for a Yiddish future that incorporated Marxist principles of social equality and enhanced consciousness. As a scholar of “vortbashafung” or “word creation,” a process that catalyzed social re-creation as well, Spivak argued that language must serve as the first tool of political consciousness. Events of the Holocaust, however, complicated Spivak’s philosophy of language. The genocide did not trigger the purposive, constructive kind of “word creation” that Spivak had hoped for, but a regressive and unwilled revolution in words. Nonetheless, Spivak studied these Yiddish words created in the Holocaust, publishing them in a 1946 dictionary entitled _The Language in the Great Patriotic War_. As a result of this and other publications, Spivak was arrested in 1949 and died during interrogations. This paper studies the challenges and insights of framing Holocaust memory through a Marxist linguistic lens, and what Spivak uncovered through his risky Holocaust research endeavor.

Author

• Hannah Pollin-Galay, U of Massachusetts Amherst