Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust

by Jeffrey Shandler (Editor)

This never-before-published collection of autobiographies written by young Polish Jews in the 1930s is extraordinary. Their candid and passionate writings not only reveal the personal struggles, ambitions, and dreams of fifteen young authors, they also offer remarkable insight into the nature of ordinary Jewish life in Poland during the years between the world wars. Later authors often view this moment through lenses tinted by nostalgia or horror. But these young writers, unaware of the catastrophic future, tell their life stories with the urgency and fervor of adolescents, coming of age during a period of manifold new opportunities and challenges.

The autobiographies presented in the volume are selected from hundreds that were written for contests in the 1930s conducted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, then based in Vilna. Nine male and six female authors write from a variety of circumstances that reflect the great diversity of interwar Polish Jewry -- some of the authors are ardently secular, and others devoutly religious; some are impoverished and others come from the working class or middle class; some are highly educated, and others self-taught. They come from big cities, small towns, and villages; they are Zionists, Bundists, communists; they espouse multiple political affiliations or none at all. Taking up the unusual task of writing an autobiography at the threshold of adulthood, these young authors also display different personalities, writing styles, and views of life. Originally written for a pioneering research project that hoped to address the challenges facing Polish Jewish youth, their words now speak across the chasm of history, providing unique testimony on Jewish life in the final years before the Holocaust.

Genres: History, Jewish, Poland, Judaism, Nonfiction, Biography

496 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2002

Reviews

[Jean Meltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little known fact about me: I have an obsession with saving Jewish books. Books that have gone out of print. Books that I believe have value for the Jewish people but have long since been forgotten. I find them on eBay, and from third-party sellers at Amazon—and I rescue them, bringing them home to live safely on my shelves.

Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland, edited by Jeffrey Shandler, is the prize of my collection. In the 1930s, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna decided to engage with Jewish teenagers by hosting an autobiography contest. Hundreds of autobiographies were submitted, by both young Jewish men and women, culminating in the final selection presented in this book.

What results are a vivid and diverse picture of Jewish life in pre-war Europe, told through the eyes of nine males and six females. From growing up in rural communities to living in big cities to interactions with Zionists, to struggles with being Jewish, to experiencing antisemitism in public school, to sex amongst yeshiva students, to experiencing a parent's divorce, or being born into poverty, or the death of a parent—each essay is remarkably timeless, and human.

It’s also a beautiful reminder of the tenacity of the Jewish people. Despite being a generation born between two world wars, the teens are hopeful. Optimistic. They struggle to hold onto, and make sense of, their Judaism in a rapidly changing world.

It eats at my soul that this book is not in every Jewish library in America—and that every Jewish teenager isn’t tasked to read, at least, one of the essays presented in this book. It’s also why I’m recommending it here. Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland is an important and valuable piece of our Jewish literary history. If you happen to find yourself in front of a copy, I highly suggest you save it, too.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is heart-wrenching to read these essays, expressing the hopes of young Polish Jews, knowing that all of them would soon be murdered. I have read several, and will expand this review as my reading progresses.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For three years during the 1930s, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research asked Jewish youth between 16 and 22 to write their biographies and send them in for research purposes. They offered a substantial cash prize to the author of the best one. Mostly it was Polish Jews who responded. Fifteen of these autobiographies are included in this book. The writers were anonymous, using pseudonyms and disguising details like their hometowns so they could write frankly without worrying what others would think.

What made the biggest impression on me was the sheer difficulty of life in Poland during that time. Most of the biographers in this book were poor, some abjectly so, experiencing hunger and outright starvation. It was difficult to get an education -- elementary school was free but textbooks were not; high schools charged tuition and were only in large cities, so students from villages had to leave home to go. Workers were paid low wages and often mistreated. I could understand why Communism held such great attraction for people in the thirties.

Of course, it is hard to read these accounts and not think of these young people's eventual fate. The epilogue says they were able to identify a few of the authors and most did not survive the war.

They will probably not interest the ordinary reader, but they are invaluable for people who want to know what Jewish life was like in Poland between the wars. Those few Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and wrote their memoirs tended to wax nostalgic about their prior lives and their murdered families; the young people who wrote their autobiographies for YIVO had more reason to be honest. This is a very important historical document.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-edited volume of primary sources, a collection of submissions to an autobiography contest that YIVO ran in the early and late 1930s. The reflective perspectives of smart and ambitious Jewish teenage Polish writers in the final years before the Holocaust offer a view that is worlds different from postwar memoir literature, and every chapter tells a very distinctive and unique story. Various themes that emerge from all the chapters are the very real impact of material poverty on stunting young people's ability to fulfill their dreams; the intense existential power young people saw political ideology to have; and the sense of overwhelming crisis, of too much dynamism, of a world that was rapidly changing and was still going to change rapidly, that almost all of them describe. (Were they prophets? Were they just overdramatic teenagers?)

Granting every limitation that ego-documents have in their value as primary sources, these are some of the most revealing interwar primary sources I've ever encountered. And many of them are just great fun to read, even when the writers are trying way too hard to be pretentious--that's also part of the fun.

Jeffrey Shandler's introduction is excellent, as well.

[Chaim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always been intrigued about the lives of Jews that lived prior to WWII and the types of lives they lead. When you lose 6 million, you've got to wonder how many flavors have been lost forever. Especially when they lived so decentralized and disconnected from large cities and central bodies. They all must have had their own idiosyncrasies and nuances, and this is why I found this book so enriching.

Awakening Lives tells the story of a group of young, Polish Jews who came of age between WWI and WWII. The stories are told in their own voices as they submitted their autobiographies to YIVO, an organization that preserves Yiddish culture.

The writers hail from a variety of backgrounds, all the way from Chasidic to assimilated. The vast majority of them seem to have lived horrendously difficult lives; lives even our most downtrodden today would consider too harsh.

You've got the Talmudically-obsessed, pious father who simply walks away from his three kids - girls ages 14, 11, and 8, IIRC - after his wife's death because he can't afford to support them any longer.

There's the brilliant woman who is exploding in frustration after realizing how little the world cares about her brilliance, and how it's really all about "class".

The one thing these writers all have in common is the intensity with which they lived their lives. The way they fought for the tinniest of "luxuries". You know, like bread, milk, going to school, having a normal pair of shoes. Or, when you're a little boy and want your own winter coat so you don't have to wear your mom's and be the butt of jokes in class. When you're a little boy at the age of
7 and don't want to wake up 5AM to help your grandmother shlep milk cartons to the market, so you can all survive.

At the age of 20 they have already lived through what most of us never will. They also all seemed to have fallen into the same trap: if only they did what they were supposed to. If only they worked hard, went to the Gymnassium, studied and adopted the Polish culture, they would be rewarded with opportunities. Not even one of them succeeded, being that they were of the Jewish proletariat. Unfortunately for them, after all their struggles, most did not survive WWII.

My favorite was Esther, a brilliant girl that grew up in a Chasidic home, with her father being a chusid of the Gerrer rebe. Like the rest of them, her struggles too were materialistic in nature, but her intellectual struggles is what stood out for me more than the others.

Highly recommend.

[Lauren Hopkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible compilation of 15 of the autobiographies written by Jewish Youth in 1930s Poland for a contest sponsored by YIVO. I'm writing a thesis about shtetl youth and what they considered to be pressing, with the argument being that normal elements of daily life - school, sex, parents - were on their minds just as much as the pogroms/anti-semitism that seem to define the lives of most living during this period. I visited YIVO in NY to get my hands on some of the several hundred autobiographies written for the contest, which a friend helped translate from their original Yiddish. Seeing the actual autobiographies written on the long pieces of brown paper was an incredible experience, but the work of translating was very tedious, so a staff member recommended this compilation for me. It contains a great mix of individuals- males, females, ages ranging from 17-23, from poor families, from wealthier families, educated in Polish universities, educated through a few years of kheyder only, live in tiny shtetls, live in larger cities...definitely a surprisingly diverse group among the fifteen autobiographies chosen. If you're interested at all in Jewish Eastern European history, or Eastern European history in general, this book is a MUST in terms of primary source material. Of course, seeing the original autobiographies at YIVO is an experience in itself, but this book is so well-done with a fantastic introduction, it's a great substitute for the original.

[Susan Lerner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This compilation of autobiographical essays written by teenagers from all walks of Polish life in the 1930s is a rare glimpse into an era which has been largely eclipsed by the Holocaust. While the prose is not always poetic, most are written with stark honesty. The lives of many were very hard, poverty was rampant and survival far from assured. Yet the main thing that struck me was that most of these essays were written by young men and women in the throes of adolescence, struggling to find themselves, to find love, to fulfill their dreams, whether that meant writing or teaching or going into business or going to Palestine. They show a variety of personalities and a cross sample of backgrounds, from fairly well-to-do to the most dismal poverty. Some had great fortitude and endless inventiveness, others were depressed and despondent.
I actually used this book for research for a novel I wrote. It is very difficult to get first hand accounts of the 1930s in Poland. The recollections of survivors are often colored by nostalgia or simply too painful to recount. But these were written contemporaneous with the events they describe, and so present a more accurate picture.
They are, however,difficult to read in the sense that these young people were unaware of what was to come--but the reader is. Most of these young, vital people, did not survive.

[Chanii · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1932, 34 and 39, YIVO in Vilna held a competition for autobiographies and awarded prizes for individuals ages 16 to 22. The purpuse was sociological, and driven by the ideology of "doikeyt" which believed that Jews in Poland had a political and cultural future, and should not emigrate to Palestine, or completely assimilate. 


What surpised me in reading these 15 autobiographies is how wretched, impoverished and chaotic life was in Poland prior to the holocaust. They speak of complete family disintegration, homelessness and filth, and accompanying vices we can hardly imagine as Jews today in America. Because nothing could have been worse than years 1939- 1945, holocaust memoirs may romanticize pre-war Poland. It also might help explain, for those of us who ask, why there wasn't more resistance in the face of annihilation.