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

by Ken Krimstein

Hardcover, 2021

Status

Available

Call number

922 YID

Genres

Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels and Comics

Comics

Collections

ADULT COLLECTION, 92X Biography

Publication

Bloomsbury Publishing (2021), 240 pages

Description

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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member pomo58

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 Looked at simply as that, they are valuable as historical documents and are enjoyable for readers in the sense that we can feel the exuberance and optimism of youth.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.

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LibraryThing member villemezbrown

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/BebaEpsteinEnglish.pdf 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.

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LibraryThing member froxgirl

This remarkable graphic novel tells the almost lost stories of six Jewish teenagers from Vilnius, Poland, in 1939, who were competing in a writing contest. Their manuscripts were part of an ethnographic study, with a prize of 150 zlotys ($1000 in current US dollars) for the best discourse on the

writer's chosen topic, which included family and religious life, the war, friends, family, political organizations, and occupations. As war broke out and Jews were removed from Polish life, the manuscripts were hidden away, along with many others from the YIVO (a school without walls) collection, and these six stories were found in pristine condition in the organ pipes of a derelict cathedral, having been rescued not only from the Nazis, but also from Stalin's troops. The author, a graphic artist, has brilliantly illustrated each story, by two girls and four boys who seem older than their years. They have the same difficulties known universally to all teenagers: recalcitrant parents, unfaithful boyfriends and girlfriends, disillusionment with teachers and schools, mean girls, political rivalries, and unfulfilled yearnings - all made more poignant by the reader's knowledge that all the writers are doomed (there is one gratifying survival). The illustrations, in orange and charcoal black, bring vivid, striking drama to the sometimes mundane writings. This collection would make an excellent anthologized series for stage or television. Note: the footnotes are way too tiny to be legible.

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