Learning to Read Yiddish for Holocaust Research
By M. Benjamin Thorne
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
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(Indiana University, Bloomington)
Thank you for your interest in the Yiddish
Summer Institute for Holocaust Research. Please be advised that the program requires reading knowledge of German. In this class you will study Jewish literary culture and learn to read Yiddish, but there will not be a spoken component, as it is a dead language.
(Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin)
This city is a museum of tongues
and faces you cannot hear or see. But everywhere their bodies crowd about bearing witness to passersby’s indifference, the maze of obelisks a stage for Instagram or games of tag. German, French, Japanese, Italian all get absorbed in the wave of stones, but not one vort of mame loshn.
(Bloomington)
Beware false friends in German that mean
something very different in Yiddish. E.g.: Ich darf leben 
(Berlin)
Swaying in zigzags down Duisburger Strasse
like a drunk, stopping abruptly at each plaque: Stolpersteine, stumbling stones, arranged like a Tetris of despair, each bearing the name of a German Jew divorced from meaning, every plaque a shtumer aleph. Kurt Stein lived here, over there the Hoffmanns. Their last place in the normal world. But it doesn’t record their last normal words before being dragged out, hanging in the air, then fading like a train’s whistle.
(Old Jewish Cemetery, Berezivka)
It took ten tries to find someone
who’d tell us the cemetery location, to even acknowledge it exists, nine erasures from the map, nine holes pretending to be filled. Very few graves from after the war.
I read the headstones, but what to say?
Some plots are prefaced by
freshly upturned earth; thieves searching for lost gold. More names slowly process before my eyes in Hebrew and Cyrillic, moving left to right, right to left. It’s a different kind of wealth that lies buried here. At one grave, fresh flowers. Not a Jewish mourner for this not-a-Jewish space. Perhaps the best translation for what cannot be said. |
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A Pushcart Prize nominee, M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Thimble Lit Mag, Last Syllable Lit, Salvation South, Willawaw Journal, Pictura Journal and Heimat Review. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.
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Author’s Note:
By day I work as an historian of the Holocaust, and some of my most moving—not to say disturbing—experiences have been visiting sites where there is a palpable tension between the dictum to remember and the desire to forget. This was especially true while conducting field work in southern Ukraine, from which the final scene of this poem derives.