"Perhaps this autobiography will change the course of my life. This is something new for me. I have never before examined my life seriously."

From the autobiography of "Esther," nineteen years old, written in 1939

The candid and passionate writings in these autobiographies not only reveal the personal struggles, ambitions, and dreams of fifteen young Polish Jews in the 1930s, they also offer remarkable insight into the nature of ordinary Jewish life in Poland during the years between the world wars. Later authors often view this moment through lenses tinted by nostalgia or horror. But these young writers, unaware of the catastrophic future, tell their life stories with the urgency and fervor of adolescents, coming of age during a period of manifold new opportunities and challenges.

The autobiographies presented in the volume are selected from hundreds that were written for contests in the 1930s conducted by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, then based in Vilna. The words of the selected nine male and six female authors now speak across the chasm of history, providing unique testimony on Jewish life in the final years before the Holocaust.

Jeffrey Shandler is assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.