Coming of Age in Poland: Jewish Life Stories from the 1930s

Location: Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10029

Presented by YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York.

Presented in connection with Letters to Afar, an immersive video art installation co-presented by YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York (October 22, 2014-March 22, 2015).

My mother tells me that on the day I started to learn to walk the Bolsheviks arrived. It was a beautiful day, and I was taking my first steps, chasing a rooster around the yard.
—G.W.

I am writing my biography…because I would like those young people who are now awakening from childhood to know what path to take in their lives, so that they may be better situated than I am when they reach my age… May my life, such as it is, serve others as a guide.
—“The Stormer”

What was life like for Jews coming of age in Poland during the interwar years? In the 1930s, scholars at the YIVO Institute set out to study Jewish life in Poland through an innovative approach—holding a series of autobiography contests for Jewish youth. Over 600 hundred Jewish adolescents responded from across the social spectrum: religious and secular, rich and poor, from large cites and small towns. In this talk, Jeffrey Shandler (Rutgers) explores the insights that the resulting stories provide into the rich, complex lives of this singular generation. Excerpts from several autobiographies will be read during this program.

About the Speaker

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor and Chair of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. Shandler’s books include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture, and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press), an examination of how Jewish life in East European provincial towns has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship, from the early modern era to the present. Among other titles, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press).