Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland

YIVO (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut – Jewish Scientific Institute) held three contests in the 1930s for the best autobiography written by a Jewish youth. The original goal of these competitions was to gain a deeper understanding of the social and cultural processes at work in Jewish society, in the Jewish family, and in Jewish-Polish relations at a pivotal moment in time marked by a profound historical crisis.

YIVO’s first contest, held in the summer of 1932, sought participants between the ages of 16 and 22 in Vilna and the Vilna region. Cash prizes and YIVO publications were offered as incentives; 14 out of the 34 submissions were awarded prizes. Subsequent contests in 1934 and 1939 retained the age specification but dispensed with geographic limits and increased the prize offerings to attract more participants, with great success, bringing in 264 and 285 autobiographies respectively. All told, YIVO collected over 625 personal documents from Jewish teenagers and young adults. All three competitions were open to young men and women regardless of educational, religious, political, or socio-economic background or affiliation. As one of its competition stipulations, YIVO agreed to honor the anonymity of the autobiographers. Contestants were encouraged to write in whatever language was most comfortable to them.

The driving force behind the YIVO-sponsored competitions was Max Weinreich, a Yiddish philologist and founding director of YIVO. Weinreich was strongly influenced by the currents in the social sciences of his day. Pioneered by Florian Znaniecki in 1921, autobiography contest was the favored method among interbellum Polish sociologists for gathering source material. Weinreich met Znaniecki (and other social scientists, including W.I. Thomas, Znaniecki’s co-author of The Polish Peasant in Europe and America) at Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, where Weinreich was a participant in a year-long seminar on the impact of culture on personality led by Edward Sapir. There he began developing the theoretical and methodological framework for a study on the psychology Jewish youth. He continued to pursue this line of research in the fall of 1933 in Vienna, where he studied under developmental psychology and befriended Siegfried Bernfeld, a psychoanalyst and activist for Jewish youth. Weinreich returned to Vilna that winter with a significant portion of Bernfeld’s archive and plans for several new initiatives for youth research at YIVO.

In the spring of 1934 YIVO created the Division for Youth Research (yugntforshung), known as Yugfor, and announced a second autobiography contest. The response was so strong that YIVO pushed back the deadline two months to give entrants more time. The combined 298 autobiographies received in the 1932 and 1934 contests were utilized as source material for Weinreich’s 1935 book Der veg tsu undzer yugnt (The Way to Our Youth), a study of the elements, methods, and problems of Jewish youth research. In addition to the announced contest prizes, free copies were distributed to the 75 autobiographers cited in the book. Many participants also submitted diaries or literary compositions. Yugfor encouraged their young correspondents to stay in touch – they continued to send autobiographies after the competition ended, as well as collected correspondences, literary works, and essays. Other sources of material included Chaim Ormian, a scholar of education and psychology in Łódź who executed a parallel collecting effort, and the collection of personal documents in the Siegfried Bernfeld archive.

Yugfor’s activity was not limited to soliciting autobiographies. They also conducted interviews and distributed questionnaires, focusing particularly on school libraries and sports movements. But autobiography contest was their most potent tool, so in December 1938 they announced a third competition. In the intervening years YIVO had established the Aspirantur, a type of graduate program to train new scholars in the social sciences and humanities in Yiddish. One of the students, Chana Piszczacer Mann, an aspirant since the first class in 1935, was tasked with administering the contest. She had experience with collecting personal documents; for her research she had enlisted several mothers to keep detailed day-to-day journals of their child’s development.

The third competition was the most ambitious. YIVO sent letters to Jewish schools and youth organizations around the world, asking them to spread the word. This effort was somewhat successful, attracting autobiographies from 15 countries, though the vast majority of the 285 autobiographies accepted to the competition arrived from within Poland. The deadline for submission was July 1st, extended from May 1st due to public demand, but entries were accepted as late as November 10th, 1939. The outbreak of World War II prevented announcement of the official close of the contest or of the winners. Even so, YIVO received four more autobiographies in early 1940, from refugees recently arrived in Vilna, bringing the number of personal documents inventoried consecutively by Yugfor to 625. The total quantity of items was likely higher, Piszczacer Mann assigned previously overlooked material inventory numbers in the 700 range; there were at least 5 and may have been 20 or more additional texts.

Despite the outbreak of war and the separation of Max Weinreich from Vilna (he was in Copenhagen when Germany invaded Poland and subsequently made his way to New York), the work of youth research continued. Two aspirantn in the 1939-1940 session, Moshe Kligsberg and Emanuel Patt, drew on the new autobiographies for their research projects. Kligsberg would work with some of the autobiographies again much later, in New York. By then he was limited to the items which were salvaged from Germany and Vilnius in the aftermath of the war — only 355 autobiographies.

Bibliography

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Marcus Moseley, and Michael Stanislawski, “Introduction,” in Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust, ed. Jeffrey Shandler, xi-xxvi. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press and YIVO, 2002.

Kijek, Kamil. “Max Weinreich, assimilation and the social politics of Jewish nation-building.” East European Jewish Affairs, 41:1-2 (2011): 25-55.

Kligsberg, Moses. Child and Adolescent Behavior under Stress: An Analytical Guide to a Collection of Autobiographies of Jewish Men and Women in Poland (1932-1939). New York: YIVO, 1965.

Kuznitz, Cecile Esther. YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Zenderland, Leila. "Social Science as a “Weapon of the Weak”: Max Weinreich, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, and the Study of Culture, Personality, and Prejudice." Isis 104, no. 4 (2013): 742-72.