When I Grow Up
The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
A Chicago Tribune Fall "Best Read"
An Alma most anticipated book of November
From 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
