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

Like all good books, When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers starts with a map. The map is of a region that author Ken Krimstein coins ‘Yiddishuania’, including the territory of countries like modern-day Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine – an area that was a centre of Jewish life before the Holocaust. 

Six young inhabitants of Yiddishuania form the heart of When I Grow Up. The book is a nonfiction graphic narrative divided into six sections, each of which illustrates the life story of one young Yiddish-speaker in 1930s Europe.

As Krimstein explains in the foreword, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research ran a youth writing competition in the 1930s, asking young people to submit short autobiographical stories in Yiddish. YIVO encouraged the writers to be honest (suggested topics included “you and your family,” “boyfriends, girlfriends,” and “political party affiliations”), and to that end the submissions were anonymous. Unfortunately, the start of the Second World War prevented winners from ever being announced.

The autobiographies were saved from the Nazis by the efforts of the Paper Brigade, Jewish inhabitants of the Vilna Ghetto who hid Jewish cultural objects (such as books and paintings) at great personal risk. The autobiographies were then saved again after the war, this time from Soviet repression, and ended up hidden in an abandoned church in Vilna. They were rediscovered in 2017, which is where Krimstein enters the picture. In When I Grow Up, he has adapted into comics six of these stories – translated from Yiddish to English by Ellen Cassedy – by writers ranging from 11 to 20 years old. 

Krimstein’s art paints a vivid picture of pre-Holocaust Jewish life. While the autobiographies were written before the war began, this book very much sits within the context of the Holocaust. Most of the people mentioned in these stories would have perished only a few years later, and it’s impossible not to see the contrast between the Europe presented in the book and what we know will come after – as Krimstein puts it: “the complete and utter annihilation of Yiddishuania, its towns, its cities, its stories, its treasures, its language, its people. A hole in history.”

This context is made explicit in the foreword and afterword, where Krimstein explains background information like the recovery of the YIVO archives, and how the fate of most of the autobiography writers remains unknown. 

Krimstein’s voice is also present in the book through his art, which intertwines with the young writers’ words in inventive ways: for example in ‘The Letter-Writer’, a boy sends letters all over the world in an attempt to emigrate, and Krimstein draws the famous figures on his postage stamps making witty remarks. Krimstein also makes his presence known in the footnotes: inserting humour, translating culturally specific terms mentioned by the young writers, or explaining the eventual fate of a particular town during the Holocaust. Occasionally, it is unclear whether the words in the footnotes are Krimstein’s or the young writers’, but luckily this isn’t a frequent issue.

Largely, the anonymous writers – the Eighth Daughter, the Letter-Writer, the Folk Singer, the Rule-Breaker, the Boy who Liked a Girl, and the Skater – speak for themselves. Each section opens with an image of what looks like the young person’s original handwritten letter to YIVO in Yiddish, and their stories are poignant, funny, and heart-breaking by turns. They fight with siblings, have problems at their schools and youth movements. They watch movies and read books, play musical instruments and ice-skate. A girl isn’t allowed to say Kaddish for her father, a boy can’t forget his unrequited love. 

Reading this book provoked a lot of thoughts for me about seeking a connection with pre-Holocaust Jewish Europe. There’s something important in a book like this, that both acknowledges all that was lost, but still goes to such effort to bring the world, emotions, and dreams of these young writers to life. The title itself, When I Grow Up, encompasses that simultaneous grief and longing for connection, since we know that in all likelihood most of the young writers never got the chance to grow up – but still we read about their teenage hopes and uncertainties and longings. 

When I Grow Up is a powerful read. It connects the reader to pre-Holocaust Jewish Europe by intermingling the past and present: the teens’ voices mingling with Krimstein’s; the English translation alongside the Yiddish and other languages peppered through the background; the Paper Brigade’s efforts to save Jewish cultural documents alongside Krimstein’s efforts to convey these stories to a modern audience. 

And thanks to those efforts, these autobiographies which lay unread in an abandoned cathedral for almost 70 years are now finally being published and read. As a young Jewish writer myself in 2022, reading the words of young Jewish writers from the 1930s feels profoundly right. 

The Holocaust left a hole in history. With When I Grow Up, Krimstein’s goal was “to allow these people without names to once again speak their words, the words of youth, to fill that void”. I’m glad I had the opportunity to listen. 

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Olivia Shenken is a writer and editor from Melbourne, and is currently working on her Yiddish. Her writing has been published in Verge, On the Street: A Melbourne Anthology, Voiceworks, and elsewhere. She is a fiction editor at Voiceworks, and tweets at @oliviashenken.