Growing up the hard way

You don’t have to be Jewish to find this book rewarding, but you do need to be interested in humanity: every page seethes with it. There are no gruesome Holocaust testimonies: the youthful authors of these autobiographies, written in Poland in the years leading up to the second world war, had no premonition of the horrors to come. Standing on the threshold of life, they could not know how few of their generation would live to cross it.

These writings emerged from three literary contests held in Poland during the 1930s. The organisers invited Jews between the ages of 16 and 22 to write about their everyday lives, their memories and thoughts; minimum length ’25 standard notebook pages’. Of the 627 entries submitted, nearly half have survived. Fifteen, translated from Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew, make up this poignant volume. An exemplary introduction provides the historical context.