When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers

by Ken Krimstein

An NPR Best Book of the YearA Washington Post Best Book of the Year A Chicago Tribune Fall "Best Read"An Alma most anticipated book of NovemberFrom the prize-winning author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a stunning graphic narrative of newly discovered stories from Jewish teens on the cusp of WWII. 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.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Jewish, Comics, Judaism

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 16, 2021

About the author

KEN KRIMSTEINS cartoons have been published in the New Yorker, Punch, National Lampoon, the Wall Street Journal, Narrative, three of S. Grosss cartoon anthologies, King Features The New Breed syndicated panel, Cosmopolitan, Science, Psychology Today, and more. He has written for New York Observers New Yorkers Diary and has published pieces on humor websites, including McSweeneys Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Bellers Neighborhood."

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that this book exists is a miracle, and the stories that are contained within it are magical, and I encourage you to read it for yourself. It's the best way to find out both.

That's my full review.

Bottom line: A book to remind you why you love books.

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pre-review

what a happy-sad read.

review to come / 4 stars

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currently-reading updates

there comes a time in every readathon's life when you just need to pick up a graphic novel.

clear ur shit book 38
quest 18: free space

(thanks to the publisher for the copy)

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book claims to be nonfiction, presenting the autobiographies of six Jewish youths written in the 1930s when they were mostly 19- or 20-years old, but as I read I started to have a queasy distrust of the presentation, feeling that Ken Krimstein's adaptation was intruding upon or standing between me and the original documents. I was able to find a translation of Beba Epstein's actual autobiography online at https://museum.yivo.org/translations/... and as I read through it I could see the massive liberties Krimstein had taken in his dramatization of it. I assume he did the same to the rest of the "autobiographies," and I just wish he and the publisher had been more upfront about that aspect.

I also dislike Krimstein's scratchy and blotchy art.

(On the plus side, with this book I complete one of my many projects for the year. In this case it's reading all the books on NPR's "Books We Love 2021: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels" list.

Check my Goodreads list to see how many you've read:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1... )

[Daniel Chaikin · Rating 4 out of 5]

17. When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers by Ken Krimstein
published: 2021
format: 232-page graphic hardcover
acquired: March read: Apr 9-24 time reading: 2:27, 0.6 mpp
genre/style: graphic nonfiction theme random (LibaryThing inspired)
locations: 1930’s Yiddish Europe
about the author: A Jewish American cartoonist for the New Yorker, who teaches as DePaul and the Art Institute of Chicago.

It‘s amazing these stories exist. During a cleaning of St George‘s Church, a decommissioned church in Vilna, Lithuania, in 2017, a trove of hidden papers were found in the organ pipes. These were Yiddish biographies of teenagers from the late 1930‘s. They had entered a competition that was never awarded because of WWII. Of course there are no more Yiddish teenagers in Europe. The works were hidden from the Nazis and then the Soviets. Krimstein has illustrated 6.

Krimstein calls these stories voices of a lost world. They are not deep elaborate stories, and they of course were not composed under the duress of Holocaust or any awareness of what was over the horizons. So they feel lighter than we might want with our hindsight. They are optimistic, and also on the problems of their lives and era. They touch on tensions with the religious traditions, on Jewish youth groups associated with communist and socialist ideals, your membership largely reflecting your family's economics, and, of course, on teenage crushes. The stories were anonymous, based on the rules of the competition. But not everyone followed this rule. One girl who provided her name and photograph was recognized by her American children. She had emigrated to the US. I felt the graphic aspect was mixed. Some pages felt very unfinished to me, but others are memorable.

After writing this I saw a review on LibraryThing that highlights that Krimstein seems to have changed the spirit of these letters. It worth noting.

You can get a feeling for Krimsteins work here: https://www.heyalma.com/the-skater/
And here is one of the original letters translated to English: https://museum.yivo.org/translations/...

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a truly special book with an incredible backstory. These are the personal stories of a handful of Eastern European Jewish teenagers who submitted their memoirs as part of a writing contest—right before Hitler’s armies invaded and laid waste to so much life and culture. Against all odds, their stories survived, although, it is horrible to contemplate, most of the writers probably did not. How these manuscripts were rescued multiple times, hidden, and finally re-discovered is a remarkable tale in itself.

Readers will recognize themselves in these stories—some of the content is very specific to time, place, and culture, but much of it is universal to the young person’s experience—hopes and dreams for the future, struggles with school and parents, crushes, attempts to forge an identity, friendships made and broken.

The illustration was a scribbly style which actually positively contributed to the book’s diary theme. (There were some odd illustration choices: For example, a hen weeping outside a closed-down butcher shop after its proprietor has passed away. I know we humans like to engage in magical thinking--but surely we can acknowledge that animals don't enjoy being slaughtered?)

I liked this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about history and the lives of young people in this time and place. The author’s own story about his grandmother at the book’s conclusion was amazing and touching, and worth the price of admission alone.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a powerful read. That this book exists is a miracle: originally written for a contest in 1930s Eastern Europe (in what is now Poland and Lithuania), these six essays were among hundreds hidden from the Nazis multiple times and eventually discovered in a church organ in 2017. Krimstein shares and illustrates these slice-of-life stories from teenagers encouraged to be truthful in their anonymous entries for a 1932 contest. Their work shows the universality of growing up and introduces readers to a new piece of history. And the reader knows what these writers do not: the looming horrors of Holocaust and World War II.

Read this book and these beautiful stories. Suggest this for readers of Ruta Sepetys and hidden histories, and to those who have finished (or are waiting for) Maus.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2017 when cleaning out of a decommissioned cathedral in Vilna, Lithuania (formerly part of Poland), workers discovered hundreds of handwritten student notebooks. In the 1930s, an autobiography contest was conceived by a Yiddish Institute to define what it meant to be Jewish by having youths anonymously write of the lives. The grand prize of 150 zlotys (@$1,000.00 U.S. Dollars in 2021) was to be awarded on September 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland and World War II began. New York Cartoonist Ken Krimstein remarkably illustrated and penned in a palate of oranges, blacks, grays, and browns the lost autobiographies of six of these Yiddish youngsters.

As a child, the 8th daughter of a Kosher butcher loved to read, began to write, and aspired to follow in her beloved daddy’s footsteps. At 19, she wrote of her father’s death questioning her faith when she could not mourn like the men and why it was hard to be a Jew.

Forced to quit school because he was Jewish, a 20-year-old from a wealthy family wrote of organizing a Zionist group, celebrating Bar Mitzvah, and his global writing campaign to emigrate to the U.S.

Having an ear and passion for music, she played the mandolin, sang, and dreamt of enrolling in the Music Conservatory until at 19 years old, her hopes were dashed and her music became mournful. Her family was in turmoil having been torn apart by drinking, abandonment, divorce, theft, and imprisonment.

At eleven years old, she was impetuous, naughty, and mischievous. She did not believe in following the rules that she was too young to submit her essay on her love of movies.

A 20-year-old boy wrote of his infatuation with a girl before immersing himself into his faith to become a Bokher and lamenting his lost youth.

At 19 years old, a young woman skates dreaming of Palestine.

So many lives shared, lost, and now remembered. What a wonderful discovery and achievement to share the stories of these departed youth. It is a travesty that likely many of the contestants did not survive the war. 4.5 stars.

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers by Ken Krimstein is a difficult book, for me, to review. Do I talk about the six stories? The artwork? Or, what makes the work so powerful, the contrast between the optimism and future-looking nature of these young people's stories and the knowledge of what likely happened to most of them and their families?

The autobiographies are wonderful glimpses of a specific place and period in time. Looked at simply as that, they are valuable as historical documents and are enjoyable for readers in the sense that we can feel the exuberance and optimism of youth. It is in the harsh juxtaposition of those youthful feelings with what happened next in all of their lives that the reader can feel gut-punched. So much lost, both on personal levels and for the world. These intelligent young people for the most part didn't survive the next five years (I am speaking of the entire recovered collection, not just the six presented here). How can one come away from this collection without a heavy heart?

I don't want to overstate the dark aspect, the shadow that hangs over it. The artwork is very good and presents the stories with humor and compassion. And the recovery and, hopefully, presentation of more of these autobiographies can only do more good than bad. But good isn't always painless. Sharing the human loss, putting human faces to the numbers, keeps the Holocaust from becoming some abstract chapter in history. Real lives, real futures were cut short or profoundly altered and we need to remember both for their sake and for our future sake, we have to remember what can happen when hatred and prejudice becomes institutionalized and government sanctioned.

I highly recommend this to readers of history, the Holocaust, and cultural history.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to the heroism of the "Paper Brigade" (Vilna librarians) who salvaged and hid hundreds of contest entries, we have this priceless glimpse into the lives of Yiddish teenagers in the 1930s. The essay prompt? Write the unvarnished truth of your life. In these six surviving narratives, young anonymous people, their entries illustrated by Krimstein in a nonfiction graphic form, write of a culture and a place that will soon be annihilated. The reader can see in these scenarios what is both singular and the same about teenagers everywhere. It is a recognition that is both breathtaking and heartbreaking.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since I read Dara Horn's collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews, I have been on the look-out for books that highlight how Jews lived, not just how they died. And when a book does depict the Jewish experience before and during World War II, I want it to include rich descriptions of Judaism, Jewish practice, and Jewish culture. And, this is exactly the kind of book I'm looking for! When I Grow Up is a graphic nonfiction book based on never-before-published autobiographies of six eastern European Jewish teens in the 1930's that were just discovered in 2017 in a Lithuanian church cellar. Krimstein's two-toned gray & orange illustrations bring the words, thoughts, feelings, and personalities of these young adults to life. Stunning, powerful & poignant - highly recommended!

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this because I really like Krimstein's work, and at first I mainly appreciated this book in that context. However, as I dipped in to more of these autobiographies, the mundanity of these experiences highlighted and heightened the tragedy of what was to come.

[kieren · Rating 5 out of 5]

just wonderful.

[Relyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was completely fascinating. The art was amazing, the stories were powerful, and the way the book came to be was incredible. I think this book needs to be on the shelves of every high school library in America.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this more than five stars if I could!

[Katie Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal! A must read for anyone studying the Holocaust.

[Diana Flores · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn on this review...

The stories in When I Grow Up are important. People worked to keep these documents preserved, and I appreciate their significance as a piece of history.

This particular graphic novel style didn't wow me. Each story seemed practically the same in tone and style; the graphics could have been used to create more distinction. I also lost track of some characters because the style was a bit messy and unfinished. The stories themselves seemed to jump a bit as well, and I wonder how much was original text and what was edited.

Overall, these lost autobiographies are important pieces of human history. I would have preferred to read them in their original form (translated to English), but feel this graphic novel format didn't suit them or give the reader the impact of their full potential.

[Nancy G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the idea of reading stories written by teens shortly before the Nazi invasion. It felt like sorting through a treasure box. Five of the six authors are anonymous and their fates are unknown. Perhaps these stories are the only remainder of their lives?

[Jaclyn Hillis]

These (mostly) anonymous stories are translated and illustrated from per­son­al essays sub­mit­ted to con­tests spon­sored by the Yid­dish schol­ar­ly and cul­tur­al orga­ni­za­tion, YIVO, in the 1930s.

The day the grand prize was to be awarded was the very day that the Nazis invaded Poland.

In 2017, the essays were found (for the third time) hidden away in a Lithuanian church cellar.

The art is rough, but I think the style goes well with the stories — like rough sketches in a diary. The stories are beautiful and I’m glad they were found. It’s nice to read stories about Jewish teens just living their lives, but harrowing to know what was to come.

I learned a lot about Yiddish culture and words. The footnotes were very helpful.

The stories:
The Eighth Daughter — a 19-year-old girl’s role with­in her large fam­i­ly, her lit­er­ary aspi­ra­tions, and her emerg­ing fem­i­nism
The Letter-Writer — a glimpse into the Yid­dish press, as well as the Kafkaesque ordeal of a 20-year-old Jew fight­ing Amer­i­can legal restric­tions against immi­gra­tion
The Folk Singer — a 19-year-old girl’s bond with her father and their love of music, even though he betrayed their family and left to be with another woman
The Rule Breaker — a 11-year-old girl enters the contest even though she isn’t old enough, and she is the only one of the six in which we know their fate
The Boy Who Liked a Girl — a 20-year-old boy is tor­ment­ed by the con­flict between his roman­tic feel­ings and his spir­i­tu­al aspi­ra­tions, and by the irrec­on­cil­able dif­fer­ences between sec­u­lar and reli­gious Jews
The Skater — a 19-year-old girl receives a pair of ice skates from her sister, and she longs to attend a school for elite students

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully drawn rendition of the autobiographies of six Yiddish teenagers all written just before the outbreak of World War II. The preface explains that a Jewish organization launched a contest for autobiographies that were supposed to highlight the ordinary, everyday lives of people. The winner was supposed to be announced on September 1, 1939. Instead the hundreds of biographies were hidden first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets, forgotten, and recently rediscovered. Cartoonist Ken Krimstein picked six of them and told their stories with illustrations evocative of the world they lived in. Note that almost all of the autobiographies were anonymous so little is known of the fate of the writers (beyond one who signed her name), but one can only guess.

I appreciated, however, that this was not about how these people died but how they lived. In one case a multi-generational tale of a family with eight daughters, in another someone writing letters to be admitted to the United States, in still another a folk singer. Much of what they recount is ordinary teenage stuff along with some of the clash of modernity vs. tradition. In this way it both recreates a lost world and also shows how similar that world is to our own.

I should also note that (like many graphic novels) this is a very fast read. You get a lot for not a whole lot of time. Strongly recommend reading it.

[Zoë Fruchter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book in one sitting and immediately consider it among the best I have read in my life. I am so grateful to read their autobiographies; I felt each story viscerally. Throughout my formal education, I was taught Jewish history in Europe, the Before, but I never felt myself as experiencing the vibrancy or culture of a shtetl in Yiddishuania until now. A must-read for every single Jew, teenager, adult, human.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story of how these texts, hidden upon the invasion of Poland in 1939, were hidden and saved until just a few years ago, is breathtaking and worth reading for that alone. But it’s also a moving portrait of a particular time and a bittersweet reminder that some things about being a teenager don’t change. I love books like this and A Bintel Brief, slices of Yiddish culture, a world that is the same and different all at once.

[Susan Morris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting read of 6 autobiographies submitted to a contest by young Jews in Poland just before WWII. Told in a graphic novel format, the notes section also added more to my to-read list.

[Estibaliz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those cases where the background (the story behind the story) turns out to be more interesting and meaningful that the story itself. So, beyond the fact of the historical and human importance of this collection, as the voice of some ordinary teenagers that, for the most part, didn't have the opportunity to have a future and a normal life, 'When I Grow Up' ends up being quite monochromatic on its art and narrative, and I'm ashamed to say I didn't really get emotionally invested on it.

[Cook Memorial Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 2022 staff favorite recommended by Sonia. Check our catalog: https://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore...

[Zea · Rating 5 out of 5]

instant cry

[Tracymarksseglin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teens on the very precipice of WWII are as you’d expect—sweet, angry, provocative, passionate, angsty. And Krimstein’s graphic novel interpretation brings them to life. But it’s the story behind the stories—decades safeguarding these precious historic documents, the tragedy of lost hope and lives that is utterly fascinating and heartbreaking.

[Pat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing itself is quite poignant and moving. The art itself would have been more effective with greater variation.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a rich and moving book. The six youth autobiographical essays touch on different parts of Eastern European Jewish life just before WWII.

[Betty-Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a treasure. ❤️

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a truly phenomenal graphic novel. I’m not even sure it’s a novel because these were short stories written by children who were mostly murdered in the Holocaust. Magnificent beautiful stories, which further emphasizes how great the loss was. One woman survived, and the story of how the stories were hidden and saved is also pretty amazing.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me tear up, so much. I think maybe I've been particularly emotional lately because I have been tearing up a lot while reading, an out of the ordinary occurrence for me.

This graphic novel was beautiful, so beautiful. It carries the story of 6 teens from Poland, right before Germany invaded. The essays were part of a contest that was of course never judged because of the events that soon came after. Only rediscovered recently as they were hidden to keep them safe from getting destroyed.

So as you can imagine the stories of teenage dreams, hopes, and hormones were particularly haunting knowing what was to come next.

Oof my heart hurts after that one.