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

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Awakening Lives consists of a dozen or so autobiographies written by Polish Jewish adolescents in the 1930s. These autobiographies, translated from Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew, are not only extraordinarily moving but also offer an incomparably rich, kaleidoscopic point of entry into the life of Europe's largest, most creative, and most bewilderingly divided Jewish community prior to the Holocaust. Selected from several hundred such autobiographies written for contests in 1934, 1936, and 1939, the essays here capture Polish Jewry in all its variety. Some writers hailed from the wealthy, urbane Polish-Jewish bourgeoisie, while others were raised in the grindingly poor, often broken families which crowded the Jewish slums of Warsaw and Lodz or Poland's increasingly depressed small towns(shtetlelkh). Some were steeped in religious tradition (though many rebelled against it) while other grew up in families which had already embraced an idealized secular European modernity. At the same time, however, the essays reveal the shared predicaments and dilemmas which make this period of Polish Jewish history so fascinating and so important for understanding both the modern Jewish experience and the modern European experience as a whole. In an environment of rising anti-semitism, spiralling economic breakdown, and intensifying political conflict across Europe, the autobiographers grappled with the great political questions of the era and the proper response on the part of Jews, the nature of Jewish identity and culture, and the question of their own future (and whether, indeed, they had one). At the same time, they wrestled with tremendous candor with the intimate questions of selfhood, sexuality, and worldview common to modern childhood and adolescence. The fact that almost all of these writers would be killed in the years that followed will no doubt haunt many readers and, perhaps, discourage others; the frankness of these autobiographies may disturb those who idealize Jewish life in the old world. But I know of no more moving, gripping, or honest way of encountering the real, complex individuals who made up that world.

This compilation of autobiographical essays written by teenagers from all walks of Polish life in the 1930s is a rare glimpse into an era which has been largely eclipsed by the Holocaust. While the prose is not always poetic, most are written with stark honesty. The lives of many were very hard, poverty was rampant and survival far from assured. Yet the main thing that struck me was that most of these essays were written by young men and women in the throes of adolescence, struggling to find themselves, to find love, to fulfill their dreams, whether that meant writing or teaching or going into business or going to Palestine. They show a variety of personalities and a cross sample of backgrounds, from fairly well-to-do to the most dismal poverty. Some had great fortitude and endless inventiveness, others were depressed and despondent.
I actually used this book for research for a novel I wrote. It is very difficult to get first hand accounts of the 1930s in Poland. The recollections of survivors are often colored by nostalgia or simply too painful to recount. But these were written contemporaneous with the events they describe, and so present a more accurate picture.
They are, however,difficult to read in the sense that these young people were unaware of what was to come--but the reader is. Most of these young, vital people, did not survive.