Jeffrey Shandler

For three years during the 1930s, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research asked Jewish youth between 16 and 22 to write their biographies and send them in for research purposes. They offered a substantial cash prize to the author of the best one. Mostly it was Polish Jews who responded. Fifteen of these autobiographies are included in this book. The writers were anonymous, using pseudonyms and disguising details like their hometowns so they could write frankly without worrying what others would think.

What made the biggest impression on me was the sheer difficulty of life in Poland during that time. Most of the biographers in this book were poor, some abjectly so, experiencing hunger and outright starvation. It was difficult to get an education -- elementary school was free but textbooks were not; high schools charged tuition and were only in large cities, so students from villages had to leave home to go. Workers were paid low wages and often mistreated. I could understand why Communism held such great attraction for people in the thirties.

Of course, it is hard to read these accounts and not think of these young people's eventual fate. The epilogue says they were able to identify a few of the authors and most did not survive the war.

They will probably not interest the ordinary reader, but they are invaluable for people who want to know what Jewish life was like in Poland between the wars. Those few Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust and wrote their memoirs tended to wax nostalgic about their prior lives and their murdered families; the young people who wrote their autobiographies for YIVO had more reason to be honest. This is a very important historical document.… (altro)

This is the most fun book on Yiddish culture that I have read so far. I'm only halfway through because I can't read it late at night when I do most of my reading - it keeps me up and the ideas are exciting.

Basically, Shandler is the first person to look at postvernacular Yiddish culture as its own entity - not as a nostaglic look backwards, but as (at least two) forks of modern Yiddish culture that is thriving: Hasidic and haredi communities that have always used Yiddish and still do, now primarily based in North America and Israel; and the modern Yiddishists - people who have chosen to look to Yiddish culture and Yiddish language as something that is part of their cultural mapping.… (altro)