Presented by Ken Krimstein
Click here to register for this event.
Click here to purchase a copy of When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teens by Ken Krimstein from Afikomen Judaica.
In the 1930s, the Vilna-based institution YIVO sponsored contests soliciting autobiographical submissions from young people between the ages of 13 and 21 to submit. The prizes were scheduled to be announced on September 1, 1939, but this turned out to be the day when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The contest was scrapped, and the entries were presumed to have been destroyed during World War II. Then in 2017, they were among a massive number of documents that were found hidden in the basement of a decommissioned church.
For this book, cartoonist Ken Krimstein chose six stories from the hundreds of pieces that were submitted, rendering them in panels illuminated with a minimalist palette of black and orange. He will discuss the story behind the project and his process as an artist conveying these rediscovered stories from a bygone world.
Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and also of Kvetch as Kvetch Can.
Co-sponsored by Workers Circle/Arbeter Ring of Northern California and co-presented by the Cartoon Art Museum, the Jewish Folk Chorus of San Francisco, and Klezcalifornia.
