What We’re Reading: ‘When I Grow Up’ is a graphic novel created from discovered stories of Yiddish teenagers, just before Hitler’s invasion

I’ve been reading the diaries of teenagers.

Or rather, not diaries, but autobiographies, most of which were written anonymously, scribbling into notebooks that had been locked away for decades. Some of these stories were long, some were short, some exuberant and some anxious. Of the six recounted in “When I Grow Up” (Bloomsbury, $28), most of their authors died soon after writing. They were Jewish and living around Eastern Europe. World War II would start shortly. Most of these authors would be at the end of their adolescence, unknowingly writing life stories.

Ken Krimstein, New Yorker cartoonist and Evanston, Illinois resident, came across these notebooks a few years ago. He was hunting around for a new project. It was a Sunday in February. “I said to my wife, ‘I need New York Bagel and Bialy, I just need it’ and while waiting I’m reading a Jewish newspaper and I saw a notice about a talk at a synagogue in Skokie. The talk was on ‘recently discovered books,’ but also, it said coffee would be served. Sounded good. I said to my wife, ‘Let’s go,’ she went ‘Ehhhh ...’ We went anyway. The synagogue was on Dempster, and this guy gets up and starts talking about these books, and I just start to get excited. I was feeling like I stumbled onto something remarkable.”

The man who gave the talk was Jonathan Brent, executive director of YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, established in a part of Poland that became Lithuania; when Hitler invaded, YIVO moved to New York City, and today has a Chicago chapter. (If Brent sounds familiar, his father was Stuart Brent, whose eponymous bookstore was a staple of Michigan Avenue for decades; Stuart died in 2010 at 98.) Anyway, as Jonathan Brent explained during that talk: In 1932, YIVO created a series of ethnographic studies that doubled as competitions. At a time when asking a teenager’s opinion of the future seem frivolous, they asked Yiddish-speaking youth (roughly ages 13 to 21) to write about their lives in notebooks. To offer hints of the future. Sex, politics, family — nothing was off limits. To ensure candor, entries were anonymous, coded obscurely so the prize (about $1,000 in 2021 U.S. dollars) would find its winner. YIVO got 700 entries, full of angst, love, confusion and ambition. The one problem: The winner was set to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939.

And Germany invaded Poland that day.

As Krimstein recounts in the introduction to “When I Grow Up,” the Nazis plundered the YIVO library but made one mistake: They enlisted YIVO staff, who quietly smuggled out many of the teenager’s entries. In 2017, a trove of notebooks was found by workers cleaning a church in Lithuania.

“When I Grow Up” is too thoughtful to lean on gathering shadows or premonitions. Instead, Krimstein focuses on the kids and their joys, their ordinariness, their hassles at school, relationships with Judaism, first romances, going to movies, dances; the back-cover copy promises, “It’s as if half a dozen Anne Frank stories have suddenly come to life,” but what comes across is not threat or fear so much as promise and possibilities. “Daddy, I have something to tell you,” a daughter says. “Are you pregnant? Do you owe someone money?” he gasps. No, but she has now read every book in the children’s library.

“For this news I creep out of bed,” he says, “thinking maybe a burglar has broken in ...”

Oh, perhaps the most important part of all this: “When I Grow Up” is a graphic novel, or rather, six translations of six autobiographies culled from the YIVO contest, each story drawn with a wistful impermanence that recalls Jules Feiffer. Each panel appears to almost fade off the page.

Krimstein told me that he flew to Lithuania and received access to the notebooks. “Some were busted up, some were perfect, some were in pencil, some in pen.” Some kids wrote a couple dozen pages; one wrote 125 pages. He gravitated to legibility, and decided on a mix of urban and rural autobiographies, focusing on highlights. He said he does not speak or read much Yiddish, so as he scanned pages, sent them to a translator of Yiddish literature, Ellen Cassedy; it took six months to translate the entries.

“As I got pages back, I was speechless,” he said.

He said it was like feeling cold drafts through the crack of a very old door.

Krimstein grew up in Rogers Park and Deerfield, son of a Chicago ad executive. His great-grandmother, his bubbe, came from Lithuania. His family migrated to the United States in 1900, arriving on the Lusitania. (“A successful voyage!” Not the one that sank in 1915, torpedoed by a German U-boat.) They skipped past New York City to settle in Chicago.

For a while, he worked in New York advertising, before breaking into the New Yorker. He had a love of Charles Addams’ gag comics for the magazine, but just as influential: Classics Illustrated, that midcentury comic book milestone often credited with introducing postwar children to the canon. It pointed him in the right, prescient direction. John Lewis, the Kent State massacre, Frederick Douglass, Japanese-American internment camps — each has been handled with grace in recent years by thoughtful cartoonists turning to graphic novels to relay history both minor and major. The first and only comic to win a Pulitzer Prize, Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” is itself a Holocaust story. Indeed, Krimstein’s first graphic novel, “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt,” a well-received critical success in 2018 (and a bestseller in Germany), took on the daunting task of illustrating the creative process of a legendary political philosopher.

He saw the notebooks as a chance to tell the history of ordinary people.

What he found, he said, was “evidence of life, vibrancy, resilience. Some would note how things looked bad in Europe, or how a father lost his job. Some wrote of resistance. But these were teenagers, and they were mostly worried about if someone liked them, if they were dancing well, a dad ran out on a mom so they are losing themselves in music — they were kids.” One of them broke the rules of the contest and entered too young: 11-year-old Beba Epstein, who left her name and even included a photo. We see a picture of her in “When I Grow Up” as an old woman, with grandkids. But Krimstein doesn’t know the names or faces of the others. To draw them, he studied images of teenagers from the area, then guessed. Within a few years, many of their towns were razed and their residents murdered.

There was nothing left to go on.