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The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers
by Ken Krimstein
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.
"[D]eeply affecting yet often joyful...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A moving work of literary archaeology, rescuing Jewish texts from the oblivion of history...excellent...Affecting records of a world at once familiar and distant—a welcome addition to the literature of the Shoah." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Poignant…Ken Krimstein's latest book sketches a powerful portrait of Eastern European Jewish youths, full of angst and optimism, on the eve of the Holocaust…Yearning is, in fact, the collection's dominant emotion." - Chicago Magazine
"Ken Krimstein is a brilliant graphic artist and caricaturist-but above all he is a master storyteller. His new graphic narrative on the Holocaust is destined to become a classic. When I Grow Up is one of those haunting lost stories." - Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus and Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography in New York
"A remarkably salvaged history brought fully to life by Ken Krimstein's humor, sensitivity, and vibrant ink drawings. These autobiographies are a rare and special glimpse into the life of six bright, bold, Jewish teenagers-artists, scholars, and activists waking up to their world just before it ignited. Brimming with details and definitions, When I Grow Up is an important contribution to the preservation of Jewish history and culture." - Amy Kurzweil, author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir
"Poignant and haunting, the stories of silenced voices are beautifully drawn back to life. These lost autobiographies could not have been found by anyone more perfect to tell them." - Carol Isaacs, author of The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland
This information about When I Grow Up was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and also of Kvetch as Kvetch Can. He lives and writes and draws in Evanston, Illinois.
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