“When I Grow Up” - A Graphic Novel Exploring Interwar Teenage Jewish Life
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Book Talk
Admission: Free |
When I Grow Up is a new graphic nonfiction book, based on six of the hundreds of autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teens collected by YIVO on the brink of WWII, including those discovered in 2017 which had been hidden in a Lithuanian church cellar. Created by New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, When I Grow Up shows readers the stories of six young men and women in illustrated narratives showcasing the humor, yearning, ambition, and angst of their teenage years. Join YIVO for a discussion with Krimstein led by scholar Jeffrey Shandler celebrating this new book.
About the Participants
Ken Krimstein’s cartoons have been published in the New Yorker, Barron's, The Harvard Business Review, Prospect Magazine, Punch, The National Lampoon, the Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, and three of S. Gross’s cartoon anthologies. His humor writing has been in The New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and humor websites, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. Ken is also an advertising creative director who has taught writing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently a professor at De Paul University.
Jeffrey Shandler is Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His publications include Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005) and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (2014); among other titles, he is editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002) and translator of Emil and Karl, a Holocaust novel for young readers by Yankev Glatshteyn (2006). Shandler has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.