When I Grow Up

In early 2017, almost 180,000 pages of lost Yiddish documents were discovered, mothballed and hidden in a Lithuanian church. Poignantly, these were pieces from a YIVO writing contest for Jewish teens in Europe, written and submitted before the Nazi incursion started. These young people, documenting their lives, had no idea of what was to come. In the summer of 2018, I traveled to Vilnius/Vilna to bring six anonymous pre-WWII teenage autobiographies to life— using their words and my pictures. Here’s a snapshot of one of them, a middle-school Vilna girl I dubbed “The Rule Breaker.” (See the images as a slideshow here)