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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting to me. I think the first time I stumbled upon this when I realized that Martin Indyk is not automatically a Polish last name ( despite Martin's family having immigrated from Poland ). Indik is very much Yiddish. And when you think of it, it should not be a surprise, Poland used to have a vibrant Jewish community before the war.

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50% of Minsk and other major Belarus cities were Jewish pre ww2.

90% of that Jewish population was killed. Property and belongings still haven’t been returned to the Jewish families it was taken from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Belarus

> still haven’t been returned

I’m willing to bet that, at this point, they never will be.

As a Jew from Belarus, I don’t feel bad about it. I generally feel trying to correct such large scale injustices is an ineffective way to heal and move past things. We all get born into random circumstances.

  > As a Jew from Belarus, I don’t feel bad about it. I
  > generally feel trying to correct such large scale injustices
  > is an ineffective way to heal and move past things. We all
  > get born into random circumstances.

Then what are the effective ways to heal and move past things? Or to help others heal and move past things?

Despite Jews moving past things, there exists a large population today who wasn't taught by their grandparents to move on, but rather to demand restitution for perceived injustices of the 1940's. Are their claims invalidated because your family healed and moved past things? We was your family able to heal and move past things when they cannot?

My family was lucky & took advantage of opportunities to escape to the West in '91. In terms of healing, just time. Focusing on the future, building a family, improving ones own situation etc. Belarus is a distant memory for my family. My dad's passing is a more memorable & traumatic event in my life than any systemic injustices my family faced.

That being said, I don't claim to speak for all Jews & telling people to "get over it" would be tone deaf. I can only try to present my own life experiences, limited as they are. Open to hearing others of course.

Thank you for your insight. I'm glad that your family was able to overcome the tragedies that they've experienced.

"Indyk" is Polish for turkey.

Many languages have similar words for the bird, including Turkish itself, where it is known as 'hindi'.

1. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/thanksgiving-turkey-bird-wi...

Adam Rasugea's video "Why the turkey is named after Turkey (and India)" is extremely informative and fun on the etymology of 'turkey' as applied to the bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2XZiREio4I

in hebrew a chicken is a tar-ne-gol. A turkey is a tar-ne-gol ho-du (almost literally an indian chicken).

And similar in Russian "Индюк". It even funnier in my language (Lithuanian): "kalakutas", so named not after India, but its city, Kolkata.

For what it's worth, "kalakutas" happens to sound (mildly) obscene in Polish, since "kutas" means a dong/dick :)

Pre-20th century Poland and the Jewish “Pale of Settlement” were essentially the same area.

There was no pre 20th century Poland! The pale is the same as the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth (mostly), minus Habsburg Galicia and the Prussian part of Poland. The nobility of the polish Lithuanian commonwealth were mostly polish or German speaking (and thus there is very little lithuanian or Belarusian in Yiddish even though a huge number of Jews lived in the Lithuanian part of the commonwealth)

Of course there was. The commonwealth was established in 1385, while Poland as a state came into existence effectively in 966, when Mieszko I adopted Christianity.

1385 was one ruler - two states kind of a deal. Commonwealth was established in 1569.

It changed with time and successive personal unions. By 1569 the Commonwealth was already functioning in practice before it was formalized.

This is false. "Pale of Settlement" refers to part of the Russian Empire and, while some of what is today Poland was then controlled by the Russian Empire, other parts of Poland were under Prussian or Austrian control (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland).

The Pale and the Partition are contemporaneous. How is it false? lol

Prussian and Austrian areas were not part of the Pale. Pale was a subset of the Russian Empire.

The Russian empire contained Poland up to and beyond Warsaw. That is by any reasonable definition a large part of Poland. This is a ridiculously pedantic and pointless argument

10% of Poland citizens were Jewish. Not it is like half a percent or something like that.

Interestingly, only around 3% of German citizens were Jewish. Holocaust is mostly eastern Europwan Jews, because Germany did not had that many of them.

> Martin Indyk

Had to lookup this person; never heard of him before

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