As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine. By Harriet Murav. Indiana University Press, 2024. 336pp. $90 (cloth); $45 (paper); $44.99 (ebook).

Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish. By Hannah Pollin-Galay. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 312pp. $44.95 (cloth); $44.95 (ebook).

Journey Through the Spanish Civil War: Dispatches from a Yiddish War Reporter. By S. L. Shneiderman, translated by Deborah Green. White Goat Press, 2024. 166pp. $24.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper); $7.99 (ebook).

Reviewed by Rachel Martin, PhD Candidate, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

When The Space Between Society gathered at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 28-30 May 2025, for its annual conference, presenters and attendees explored the theme, “Peace and Conflict in the Space Between.” The call-for-proposals had cautioned that the relationship between peace and conflict is neither simple nor binary. The practice of moving beyond dichotomies, often in unanticipated directions, began with the opening keynote address, presented by Dr. Marie Grace Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas. Dr. Brown presented her research on the relationships of British officers and male domestic staff in Sudan during the period of British imperial occupation. Although these relationships existed within the context of colonial rule, many factors complicated the power dynamics between employers and employees, including a gender imbalance in British family units, local knowledge gaps, and cultural boundaries around physical spaces and spheres of influence. After making a distinction between caring for (an act of labor) and caring about (an emotion), Dr. Brown reminded attendees that care can exist alongside violence. The act of living alongside one another and meeting each other’s needs interweaves the concepts of physical proximity and supportive or sustaining presence. 

Complications between care and proximity reverberate through the three books reviewed in this article. Together, these works expand the locus of conversation surrounding 20th century Yiddish literature, which thrived in Jewish communities of eastern-European descent, with genres as diverse as newspaper serials, poetry, and theater. In As the Dust of the Earth, Harriet Murav takes us east to Ukraine and the RusJosian borderlands, between 1918 and 1922. S. L. Shneiderman, in Journey Through the Spanish Civil War: Dispatches from a Yiddish War Reporter, newly translated by Deborah A. Green, takes us in the opposite direction, west to Spain, in 1936. Hannah Pollin-Galay in Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish takes us not to a single nation, but into the fractured and rebuilt linguistic landscape in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In each book’s unique temporal and geographic setting, communities struggled in the face of violence and disregard for human life. In response they cultivated peace, perhaps better named as care to emphasize practices that tend to physical and emotional needs, as a generative force for preservation and resistance. Each of these works locates care within violent contexts as an active mode of cultural and linguistic survival: proximity and care as an active peace. 

In Murav’s study, the opposite of peace is abandonment, expressed through the multi-layered religious, legal, and aesthetic term, hefker. Originating in Jewish property law, hefker denotes ownerlessness and vulnerability. The term took on expanded meanings in Yiddish, somewhat analogous to English, where one can “act with abandon” (107). This sense of lawlessness and disregard became an apt descriptor for the exposed and precarious vulnerability experienced by Jewish communities in Russia and Ukraine after World War I. The Russian Civil War (1917-1922) was a period of extreme violence by state and substate actors, with 1919 marking the peak year for pogroms. Murav’s study focuses on how writers engaged with hefker to describe “the pain of being dispossessed and politically abandoned” (229) while acknowledging that “to suffer from violence committed with impunity is different from suffering violence for which there is some possibility of recourse in law” (229). Taking hefker as both a lived condition and a literary motif, Murav explores its use in literary and documentary sources, tests its descriptive potential, and offers it as a meaning-making concept that can be applied to other violent conflicts throughout history.  

As The Dust of the Earth is divided into two parts. The first four chapters explore literary representations of hefker by poets including David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, Kadya Molodowsky, Lamed Shapiro, and Hayim Bialik. Murav’s inclusion of Molodowsky allows for the expansion of the scope of hefker beyond armed conflicts. Murav closely reads her poems about a tuberculosis sanatorium, in which Molodowsky’s mother spent time before her death from the disease, with explanations of the sound patterns that exist in Yiddish but are lost in English translation. These provide sonic representations of crushing loneliness and physical degradation and are offered in support of the application of hefker in situations of social abandonment.

The second half of Murav’s book looks at how Jewish aid workers in Ukraine during the period of peak pogrom violence attempted to document the effects of violence on Jewish communities through interviews and commissioned reports, noting that “documentary methods fail when violence confounds those who experience, witness, and write about it” (13). Yet, by counting and recording the events that occurred, these aid workers tried to bring victims of violence into systems of care that wove memory, accountability, and material assistance. Chapter eight focuses on the effects of pogroms on children who had been orphaned and the use of storytelling as a therapeutic intervention. Murav’s overall argument is that violence becomes an “attack on meaning, coherence, boundaries, and distinctions between subject and object” (15). Although the scope of her book is limited in time and place, Murav’s introduction and conclusion suggest that the concept of hefker may be a helpful lens for understanding care and abandonment in a diverse range of more recent conflicts.

In 1936, S. L. Shneiderman became “the first Yiddish war reporter” with his on-the-ground coverage of the Spanish Civil War (141). Sponsored by ten Yiddish and Jewish newspapers, his articles were reprinted in dozens more and compiled into a volume that was published in Warsaw in 1938. It is this volume that Deborah A. Green, a Yiddishist and retired lawyer, has translated into English for the first time, as Journey Through the Spanish Civil War: Dispatches from a Yiddish War Reporter. Despite the terms of the 1936 Non-Intervention Pact, which prohibited non-Spaniards from fighting in the conflict, nearly 40,000 volunteers from across the globe came to Spain, risking not just the dangers of war, but the real possibility of losing their citizenship in their home countries for violating the terms of the pact. Of these volunteers, “six to eight thousand were Jews” (xiv), meaning that Jewish volunteers comprised between 15% and 23% of the foreign fighters.

Green contextualizes the Spanish Civil War within the wider rise of fascism. In her view, the failure of international powers to intervene emboldened the Nazi party and led directly to World War II. Her introduction moves from the history of the Spanish Civil War and the role of Jewish volunteers to Shneiderman’s biography and legacy. Her introduction’s brevity and lack of citations may lead some readers to question how widely accepted her account is. But as a synthesis of Shneiderman’s writing and Green’s historical concerns, it prepares the reader to approach Shneiderman’s writings not only as journalism, but as a record of the hopes and fears in Jewish communities in Europe, in the years immediately preceding World War II. 

This collection of Schneiderman’s articles from 1936 and 1937 recounts his interactions with politicians, soldiers, and civilians. Organized into short vignettes and often recounting interactions with single individuals, Schneiderman described general shortages, overcrowding, and acts of community sacrifice, alongside his emotional reactions. He experienced the panic of hiding in a bomb shelter, blurring the line between witness and observer. As he traveled throughout the Spanish hinterlands, Shneiderman asked whether Jewish people were truly welcomed there, and whether the country might one day serve as a safe refuge for them. Shneiderman demonstrated great care for his subjects, ensuring they would be remembered as nuanced and relatable human characters. His international audience was hungry for both facts and stories that explained what was happening within Spain. His brother-in-law, David “Chaim” Seymour, a photojournalist, joined him in Spain, documenting in pictures what Shneiderman accounted for in words. Eight pages of his photographs are reprinted in this volume. From a historical perspective, Green’s translation of Shneiderman’s journalism during the Spanish Civil War expands the primary sources that are available in English that demonstrate the role of Yiddish as an international transmitter during the interwar period.

While Yiddish has always connected Jewish communities across national borders, there have been significant, localized regional variations. Pollin-Galay’s Occupied Words traces the remodeling of Yiddish that occurred in response to the Holocaust. Her project documents the development of Khurbn Yiddish -- the term applied to the unique vocabulary and idioms developed during or immediately after the Holocaust. She describes the care with which some survivors collected and organized dictionaries of the new terms, highlights Khurbn Yiddish’s influence on later literature, and argues for the legitimacy of this unique variant as a subject of study. 

The term Khurbn (חורבן) is a Hebrew word meaning “destruction,” and it was used in Yiddish to refer to the Holocaust before the word Shoah (שואה) became the widely-adopted term in modern Hebrew. Before World War II, nearly all speakers of Yiddish were multilingual, and Jews from different communities used regionally specific vocabulary that was influenced by the surrounding dominant-language environment in which they lived. When the Nazis forced entire communities to relocate, Jews from different backgrounds adopted and remixed each other’s vocabulary, leading to unique terms. Other Khurbn Yiddish innovations were ironic or strategic twists on German and Nazi phrases, used to hide meaning from German-speaking guards. Still other terms arose in response to the breakdown in meaning or the perceived insufficiency of pre-existing words, especially to describe criminal acts. When unprecedented acts of violence and deprivation occurred on a normalized basis, Pollin-Galay argues, existing vocabulary was not up to the emotive or descriptive task of narrating the abuses that became normalized in day-to-day life.

Pollin-Galay’s book is divided into three sections. The first tells about three individuals who created separate Khurbn Yiddish dictionary projects from the 1940s to the 1980s. Nachman Blumental, who survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, began recording phrases that were unfamiliar to him upon his return to Poland in 1944. Elye Sprivak, who similarly spent World War II in Moscow, was surprised by the changes to Yiddish that he encountered when he returned to his home in Ukraine, and, “as an attempt at cultural rescue . . .  began to organize folkloric expeditions in 1945, collecting songs, expressions, stories, and other oral material created by Ukrainian Jews under Nazi occupation” (66). The third dictionary-maker, Israel Kaplan, was imprisoned in two ghettos, several Nazi work camps, and the Dachau-Allach concentration camp, making him, in Pollin-Galay’s words, “a native speaker of Khurbn Yiddish” (74), who created his dictionary as part of his process of healing. All three dictionaries were initially well-received, as part of post-Holocaust documentation efforts, but fell out of favor for political and social reasons. Pollin-Galay notes, “Sprivak faced criminal charges [and was killed in prison] in the Soviet Union for including Jewish nationalist sentiments in his language work, [while] Blumental’s and Kaplan’s projects were dismissed in Israeli society because they seemingly failed to bolster the right sort of Jewish national outlook” (91). Pollin-Galay’s work argues against the categorical dismissal of Khurbn Yiddish, which has persisted in the field.

The second section of Occupied Words traces Khurbn vocabulary around the themes of theft, hybrid German-Yiddish expressions, and the female body. The necessities of survival during the Holocaust changed the expectations of behavior around theft, resulting in the need for new terms to describe previously unthinkable commonplace occurrences. The female body as a location of concentrated violence and vulnerability also provoked substantial creation of new words. In the third section, Pollin-Galay analyzes several novels by two Holocaust survivors, K. Tzetnik and Chava Rosenfarb, for their contrasting approaches to the use of Khurbn Yiddish intermixed with standard Yiddish. 

K. Tzetnik, who wrote his first novel, Salamandra, in 1945, included vocabulary that had been created during the Holocaust to mark rupture and dehumanization. Salamandra was written in Yiddish but never published in the language; it was translated, edited, and abridged before it was published in Hebrew. Tzetnik’s notes to the publisher describe a mix of pride and embarrassment over the inclusion of authentic, if “vulgar” (181) Khurbn Yiddish elements. Pollin-Galay argues that Tzetnik’s use of Khurbn Yiddish was more confident and systematic in his later novel, House of Dolls (1953), which is set in a brothel in a Nazi concentration camp. Although House of Dolls was first published in Hebrew, it was likely written first in Yiddish and was later serialized in the Yiddish-language newspaper Der Tog. Rosenfarb, in contrast, incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into The Tree of Life, her more than 2,000-page trilogy first published in Yiddish in 1972, as part of “a process of verbal self-searching and re-storing” (221), that embraced the adaptability of Yiddish. Rosenfarb had included Khurbn Yiddish in her Yiddish-language poetry as early as 1945, but by choosing to employ it in her later work, Rosenfarb both invited readers into the world that had forged the terms and ensured their expansion beyond their crucibles of origin.  

Pollin-Galay's focus on Khurbn Yiddish through dictionary-makers and literary incorporation highlights how attention itself can be a form of care. The careful preservation of a language variation that was created under the most extreme trauma reflects a commitment to staying close to memories that others might prefer to disown or discard. Across these examples, care and proximity have braided the acts of witnessing, recording, and transmitting in the face of violence.

Peace and conflict co-exist in Yiddish writing during the space between. Engaging with topics that align with Dr Brown's keynote address, these books frame language use – specifically the act of retelling – as a modality for peace and for community resistance. These three books are welcome additions to the field of Yiddish scholarship, and I recommend them to anyone interested in the interwar period for their nuanced portrayals of how literary and other forms of writing have the capacity to both reflect and resist violence through acts of care.