Yiddish Holocaust Memory in Eastern Europe: New Insights

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Is there a distinctly Yiddish Holocaust memory? If so, how does it intersect with the trajectories of Soviet Holocaust memory? Recent scholarship highlights the unique contributions of Yiddish-speakers to documenting, commemorating, and interpreting the Nazi Genocide of European Jewry. The panel spotlights the role of survivors, community activists, scholars, and writers to try to comprehend the experiences and legacies of the _khurbn_ (Yid.: destruction), as many of them referred to the genocide, from the perspective of those targeted by the violence and in their language. The analyses make a case for greater recognition of these works as crucial contributions to understanding the genocide but also as forms of memory itself as they exemplify a continuity of Jewish culture that was slated for destruction. Eliyana Adler shows that early _yizker bikher_ (Yid.: memorial books) are essential to probe how the postwar Polish Jewish diaspora simultaneously commemorated and constructed the _khurbn_; Hannah Pollin-Galay turns to the life and work of Soviet linguist Elye Spivak to analyze wartime and postwar studies of Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory; and Anika Walke demonstrates the role of Yiddish as a central tool to grasp the nature of the postwar Soviet shtetl and survivors’ experiences in the aftermath of Nazi violence and Stalinist antisemitism.

Sub Unit

• Jewish Studies

Chair

• Diana V. Dumitru, Georgetown U

Papers

• Commemorating and Constructing the Khurbn in Early Postwar Polish Jewish Memorial Books - Eliyana R. Adler, Binghamton U

• Language, Holocaust Memory, and Marxism: Elye Spivak’s Risky Yiddishism - Hannah Pollin-Galay, U of Massachusetts Amherst

• “Untern fridlekhn himl”: Hirsh Reles and the Postwar Soviet Shtetl - Anika Walke, Carnegie Mellon U

Discussant

• Harriet Lisa Murav, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign