Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust

This never-before-published collection of autobiographies written by young Polish Jews in the 1930s is extraordinary. Their candid and passionate writings not only reveal the personal struggles, ambitions, and dreams of fifteen young authors, they also offer remarkable insight into the nature of ordinary Jewish life in Poland during the years between the world wars. Later authors often view this moment through lenses tinted by nostalgia or horror. But these young writers, unaware of the catastrophic future, tell their life stories with the urgency and fervor of adolescents, coming of age during a period of manifold new opportunities and challenges.
The autobiographies presented in the volume are selected from hundreds that were written for contests in the 1930s conducted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, then based in Vilna. Nine male and six female authors write from a variety of circumstances that reflect the great diversity of interwar Polish Jewry - some of the authors are ardently secular, and others devoutly religious; some are impoverished and others come from the working class or middle class; some are highly educated, and others self-taught. They come from big cities, small towns, and villages; they are Zionists, Bundists, communists; they espouse multiple political affiliations or none at all. Taking up the unusual task of writing an autobiography at the threshold of adulthood, these young authors also display different personalities, writing styles, and views of life. Originally written for a pioneering research project that hoped to address the challenges facing Polish Jewish youth, their words now speak across the chasm of history, providing unique testimony on Jewish life in the final years before the Holocaust.