WHEN I GROW UP

A moving work of literary archaeology, rescuing Jewish texts from the oblivion of history.

“Es iz shver tsu zeyn a yid.” It’s hard to be a Jew. History has proven that countless times, with particular fury in the place New Yorkercontributing cartoonist Krimstein calls Yiddishuania. There, in 1939, a linguistic and cultural institute mounted “an ethnographic study in the guise of a meagerly funded autobiography contest.” By cruel irony, the winners were to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Poland. The Gestapo seized many of the documents, but librarians spirited some away—and then hid them again when Stalin launched a Soviet pogrom after the war. The first essay, by an unidentified 17-year-old girl, is a record of repression: She was discouraged from reading religious and secular texts thought inappropriate for women and was forbidden from saying kaddish after her father died. Another essay recounts the efforts of a 20-year-old man who spent his time and money writing letters to Franklin Roosevelt pleading for asylum, a request that the State Department declined. Another young man questions traditional religion, not least because he was in love with a young woman who did not return the affection. “Was it because I didn’t become a Communist and start eating pork?” he wonders. “Was it because I couldn’t go to the dinner dance her socialist youth group had on Yom Kippur?” The ordinary travails of adolescence and young adulthood become more sharply pronounced against the background of descending terror. In this excellent follow-up to The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, Krimstein, whose illustrations recall both Chagall and Art Spiegelman, closes by affirming these pieces as “voices, garments, smiles, years, laughter”—in short, living documents in the face of death.

Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah.