WHEN I GROW UP

From the prize-winning author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, a deeply resonant, graphic depiction of newly discovered stories of Jewish youthsfrom a world on the cusp of nightmare.

In the 1930s, as war loomed, a group of Jewish scholars in Eastern Europeguided by the humanistic philosophy that "he who holds the future, holds the youth" established an autobiography competition for Jewish youth between the ages of 17 and 22 as part of an ethnographic study to point the way forward. More than 600 hand-written texts were collected. But the prizes for the final competition were never awarded, as on the very day they were scheduled to be given out, the Nazis invaded Poland, and everything changed. These autobiographies disappeared, and became some of the first casualties of World War II.

In an unbelievable turn of events, some eighty years later, a trove of hidden Jewish documents was discovered hidden in an abandoned Lithuanian church cellarincluding scores of the original teen autobiographies. It's as if hundreds of Anne Frank stories had suddenly come to light, illuminating a hidden moment in time through the vibrant, questioning, sometimes sacrilegious voices of these anonymous Yiddish teens. What's more, each of these autobiographies is charged with a wrenching poignancy, as the authors have no idea what horror is soon to come.

Ken Krimstein, with his remarkable talent for combining words and pictures to breathe life into stories, elevates six of these forgotten youths from historical ghosts to real human beings. And surrounding it all is the incredible story of the autobiography competition, the loss of the documents to Nazi invaders, and their eventual, unexpected discovery.

Beautifully illustrated, riveting, heart-wrenching, and timely, Ken Krimstein's newest work opens a time capsule to a forgotten moment and introduces us to six unforgettable teens - inviting us to reimagine their world, and ours.

Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of Kvetch as Kvetch Can and The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, and a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize. He teaches at De Paul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ken lives in Evanston, Illinois.