When I grow up The lost autobiographies of six Yiddish teenagers

Ken Krimstein

Book - 2021

When I Grow Up is New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein's new graphic nonfiction book, based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teens on the brink of WWII-found in 2017 hidden in a Lithuanian church cellar. These autobiographies, long thought destroyed by the Nazis, were written as entries for three competitions held in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, just before the horror of the Holocaust forever altered the lives of the young people who wrote them. In When I Grow Up, Krimstein shows us the stories of these six young men and women in riveting, almost cinematic narratives, full of humor, yearning, ambition, and all the angst of the teenage years. It's as if half a ...dozen new Anne Frank stories have suddenly come to light, framed by the dramatic story of the documents' rediscovery. Beautifully illustrated, heart-wrenching, and bursting with life, When I Grow Up reveals how the tragedy that is about to befall these young people could easily happen again, to any of us, if we don't learn to listen to the voices from the past.

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  • Preface: Crossing the abyss
  • The before
  • The eighth daughter
  • The letter writer
  • The folk singer
  • The rule breaker
  • The boy who liked a girl
  • The skater
  • The after.
Review by Booklist Review

In the 1930s, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Poland held an autobiography contest for Yiddish teenagers and young adults. They wanted truthful stories (which would remain anonymous) that conveyed a sense of Jewish life. They received over 700 entries, but the day the grand prize was to be awarded, the Nazis invaded Poland. Through the foresight of those entrusted with their care and the understanding of their cultural significance, the stories were preserved and in 2017 were discovered by workers cleaning out the church where they had been hidden. The six stories collected here, all but one still anonymous, demonstrate what life was like in "Yiddishuania" (a concentrated area of Poland turned Lithuania) before the war started. Each story is a mix of amusement and sincerity, each showing life as it was for young people, with topics including the experience of being the youngest of eight daughters to the infatuations of a young man with a girl he knows. The illustrations are roughly drawn in black and white with orange accents throughout, evoking the feeling of hazy memories while not detracting from the stories. The background of this project is just as fascinating as the stories themselves, and readers will undoubtedly feel conflicted about the innocence these stories convey while knowing what the authors would soon endure.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

As Krimstein (The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt) explains in his deeply affecting yet often joyful graphic narrative, the question of "How can one live as a Jew?" undergirded daily life in what he calls "Yiddishuania"--a region in Eastern Europe that included nine million Jews in 1939. Linguist Max Weinreich launched "an ethnographic study in the guise of a meagerly funded autobiography contest" for Yiddish-speaking teens in 1932; these recovered works form the basis of Krimstein's narrative, and the fact that almost all of the young writers perished at the hands of the Nazis casts an ominous shadow. Yet the six young people who come alive in pencil and watercolor are hopeful, defiant, lovelorn, and smart. They see their dreams deferred: "It was as if on a beautiful summer's day a wind blew and rain fell and... destroyed... everything around," remarks a 20-year-old forbidden from continuing his education because he's Jewish, who goes on to pen missives to the likes of FDR and the mayor of Tel Aviv. Krimstein's loose-lined drawings shift between sobriety and humor, while footnotes provide context, such as describing a Yeshiva "bokher" as "distinguished by their obsessive commitment to intellectual 'cage-wrestling'... and a tendency to squint" (though some language choices may still be debated, such as where German is used instead of Yiddish). By depicting the personalities of youth lost--with easy beauty and a lack of preciosity--rather than how they died, Krimstein conveys the depth of human and cultural loss that much more profoundly. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A moving work of literary archaeology, rescuing Jewish texts from the oblivion of history. "Es iz shver tsu zeyn a yid." It's hard to be a Jew. History has proven that countless times, with particular fury in the place New Yorkercontributing cartoonist Krimstein calls Yiddishuania. There, in 1939, a linguistic and cultural institute mounted "an ethnographic study in the guise of a meagerly funded autobiography contest." By cruel irony, the winners were to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland. The Gestapo seized many of the documents, but librarians spirited some away--and then hid them again when Stalin launched a Soviet pogrom after the war. The first essay, by an unidentified 17-year-old girl, is a record of repression: She was discouraged from reading religious and secular texts thought inappropriate for women and was forbidden from saying kaddish after her father died. Another essay recounts the efforts of a 20-year-old man who spent his time and money writing letters to Franklin Roosevelt pleading for asylum, a request that the State Department declined. Another young man questions traditional religion, not least because he was in love with a young woman who did not return the affection. "Was it because I didn't become a Communist and start eating pork?" he wonders. "Was it because I couldn't go to the dinner dance her socialist youth group had on Yom Kippur?" The ordinary travails of adolescence and young adulthood become more sharply pronounced against the background of descending terror. In this excellent follow-up to The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Krimstein, whose illustrations recall both Chagall and Art Spiegelman, closes by affirming these pieces as "voices, garments, smiles, years, laughter"--in short, living documents in the face of death. Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant--a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.