The core of Hannah Pollin-Galay’s painstaking and excellently written book is built around the lexicographical projects of three remarkable students of Yiddish neologisms created in response to the Holocaust (khurbn in Yiddish) and, generally, World War II. Of the three, Israel Kaplan (1890–1950), who suffered confinement to the Kovno and Riga ghettos and later to Dachau, was the only surviving “native speaker” of what Pollin-Galay suggests calling the “Khurbn Yiddish,” or the Yiddish spoken in ghettos and camps. The other two lexicographers did not experience such incarceration. Nachman Blumental (1902–83) was one of the tens of thousands Polish Jews who lived during the war in the Soviet-control territories and later repatriated to Poland before moving on to Israel. Elye Spivak (1890–1950), a well-established Soviet scholar, headed the Kyiv-based academic unit, devoted to Jewish studies. He was among those who did not survive imprisonment during the repressive campaign unleashed against Jewish cultural figures in the final years of Stalinism.

Spivak’s 1946 book on Yiddish language innovations during the war differed significantly from the field research undertaken by Kaplan and Blumental. While the latter focused on vernacular linguistic items, Spivak paid more attention to the language used in Soviet Yiddish publications. Given the Soviet ideologues’ taboo against the concept of “Holocaust,” it is hardly surprising that Spivak’s research does not fully fit into the concept of Khurbn Yiddish. His selection of words aimed primarily to stress the participation of the Jews in fighting the enemy and being Soviet patriots. Hence, for instance, his argument that the word heymland, “homeland,” became particularly popular during the war. It is no coincidence that a short-lived Moscow Yiddish literary almanac carried the name of Heymland (1947–48). Pollin-Galay surmises that a misspelling of the word Treblinka in Spivak’s book “perhaps underscored the word’s newness” (67). No doubt, it was no more than a typo. Vasilii Grossman’s The Hell of Treblinka came out in Russian and Yiddish in 1945.

The word heymland was not a Soviet-era coinage. In 1917 it was widely used, for instance, in the American Yiddish press discussing the future of a “Jewish homeland.” A significant number of existing coinages were used in a different way also during World War II. Thus, beginning from late nineteenth century, the Yiddish press employed the German word Appell (as apel) in the meaning of “appeal.” During the war, it entered the language with another—also German-derived—meaning of “roll call,” as it also became present in wartime Russian literature (appelʹ) and most probably in other literatures. Similarly, aktsye, “roundup” (1, 68, 192), occurs in both Yiddish and Russian (aktsiia).

Pollin-Galay lists maline (168) as one of the most often mentioned terms in Khurbn Yiddish. While its homonym, meaning of “raspberry,” derived from Slavic, maline as “hiding place” etymologically originated from the Hebrew מלון, meaning “lodging, hotel.” Many decades before World War II, maline as a hiding place found currency in the criminal argot, in Yiddish and even more so in Russian (as malina). “Once upon a time, only a thief took to hiding himself in a maline…. But now every inhabitant of the ghetto required not only a place to live above ground, but also a secure hideout below ground” (Abraham Sutzkever, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremburg, 2021, 119). Katshke (213) is an example of a homonym that has come from a homonym in another language. Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and some other languages had calque-translated the French (and English) canard, “hoax” or “fabrication,” as “duck,” the main meaning of this word in French. The word katshke as a false rumor appeared in the Yiddish press long before the Holocaust.

The section on “The Khurbn Yiddish Dictionary” is followed by “A Short Study of Words that Mean Too Much,” which includes chapters analyzing three thematic categories of neologisms: “Theft: Civilized or Dirty?,” “German-Yiddish Hybrids,” and “Words for Female and Effeminate Bodies.” A literary scholar, Pollin-Galay concludes her book with two chapters devoted to “Slang Turned Art: Literary Aftermath,” namely to works of Ka-Tsetnik (1917–2001) and Chava Rosenfarb (1923–2011).

The subtitle of the book—What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish—describes the Holocaust as a language planner, whereas in reality the language and—in the Soviet case—language planners reacted to what the Holocaust did to Jews. However, this is just a hairsplitting comment about a solid and useful academic work.