In 1932, 1934, and again in 1938, the Wilno-based Yidisher visnshaftlikher institut (which at the time rendered its name in English, somewhat problematically, as the Yiddish Scientific Institute) issued calls to young Jews, aged sixteen through twenty-two, to compose their autobiographies and enter them in a competition, with cash prizes offered the winners. The contests yielded 627 submissions from twelve different countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the large majority coming from Poland. Three hundred two of the compositions were recovered after the Holocaust; today they are housed at the sponsoring institution's New York heir, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

Intended originally to assist Jewish leaders in formulating social policy in their communities, the autobiographies have attracted the attention of scholars over the past two decades for the unique window they offer onto the lived experience of a generation of Jews that came of age in the independent national states of east central Europe between the two world wars. Initial studies of the works employed the life stories largely as a counterweight to the “lenses tinted by nostalgia or horror, personal or familial loyalty, political or religious commitment” that have often served post-Holocaust representations to flatten “the intense and often fractious vitality of interwar Polish Jewry” or to idealize an imagined world suddenly and violently destroyed forever.Footnote ¹ Accordingly, they tended to highlight the most richly-descriptive autobiographies, ones that added complexity and nuance to stereotypic views of what was often called synechdochically “the shtetl.” It is only of late that scholars have begun to mine the corpus analytically, turning to it less as a fountain of compelling personal stories and more as a database from which to infer answers to historical questions.Footnote ² Kamil Kijek's fine work, Dzieci modernizmu, meticulously researched and elegantly written, is arguably the most extensive and the most ambitious of these latter-day investigations.

Kijek, one of a notable corps of talented young Judaicists trained and teaching in Polish universities who have acquired command of Yiddish and Hebrew, has employed the autobiographies to help him understand a striking feature of the interwar Polish-Jewish landscape: the pervasive influence of ideological youth movements, many of them operated by or affiliated with ethnic or religious Jewish political parties, in the lives of young Jews. As he notes, “toward the end of the interwar period, belonging to one of the many political [Jewish] organizations was often, for the young Polish Jew, something natural, requiring no explanation” (14). What went without saying in that time and place, however, was actually quite unusual compared both synchronically with other diaspora Jewish communities and diachronically with earlier east European Jewish generations. Kijek begins, logically, with the hypothesis that the context of the Second Polish Republic must have helped mold this new mass behavioral pattern. Unlike their parents, who came of age in the Romanov or Habsburg empires, the young Jews of whom Kijek writes were socialized in a Polish ethnocratic state that counted them as citizens and educated them to the national culture while simultaneously pushing them de facto toward the margins of its political and economic life. How, he wishes to know, did the ambivalent messages they received from the Polish state about the key values of Polish culture and about their place as Jews in Polish society affect their political socialization? To what extent can that combination of “symbolic acculturation” (218) and “symbolic exclusion” (250) account for a Jewish youth culture marked by notably high levels of participation in a broad spectrum of specifically Jewish political organizations that competed vigorously (sometimes even violently) with one another for hegemony in the Jewish community and that became a primary focus of identity for their members?

To answer these questions, Kijek notes, “party documents, leaflets, bulletins, the press, and the ideological announcements of party elites” are not sufficient, for they do not show “how the elements of the [various] political ideologies … functioned in the daily life of politically-engaged youth and whether and how they influenced their identity, self-assessment, world outlook, family life, and primary frame of reference” (15). The YIVO autobiographies, by contrast, offer him access to “the political meaning of the symbols, norms, values, and outlooks represented by” their authors (15). They also permit him to examine the influence of a range of additional variables not directly related to the environment of the Second Republic, including family dynamics, residential patterns, social class, occupation, religious orientation, reading habits, and awareness of broader European and world cultural trends. The last of these variables is especially important for Kijek, for its consideration suggests to him a modification of his initial hypothesis. He is aware that the youth culture he explores resembled the sort of “radical modernism”―a situation of “mass engagement, an enormous role for propaganda, polarization of positions, millenarian convictions about the inevitability of great social transformations, and explication of the contemporary world by means of totalizing concepts and complex programs for changing it” (13–14) ―that characterized much of European political life during the 1930s. In the autobiographies he finds such a “radical habitus” ― “the internalization of collective convictions … that reject the social order … and demonstrate affinity for political visions imagining radical change” (390) ― to be a general feature of interwar Polish Jewish youth. This radical countercultural orientation, he claims, “came from the outside;” it “took an example from the modern mass political movements that had arisen in Europe from the second half of the nineteenth century” (420). It was also directed in significant measure toward traditional Jewish institutions as well as toward contemporary Polish realities. Hence ideological commitments and group loyalties appear to have been less important to young Polish Jews than was a vague but intensely burning desire for anything but the status quo. This amorphous vision of the future made switching between movements and ideological camps a frequently-observed feature of the political culture of interwar Polish-Jewish youth.

In the end, then, Kijek's research appears to diminish the importance both of interwar Polish politics and of Jewish ethnoreligious ties in shaping that culture. Young Jews who grew up in the Second Polish Republic may have expressed a strong sense of alienation from the political reality in which they lived, which forced them to favor a Jewish over a Polish identity, but in Kijek's view the most painful aspect of that reality for most was precisely that forced choice. He discovers in the autobiographies evidence that “during the interwar period a ‘cultural Polishness’ was taking shape among Jews, a growing patriotism, a sense of connection to the state in which they lived” (427). Ironically, the new reality his subjects strove to create was not the one officially endorsed by most of the youth movements they joined ― one in which Jewish culture and society remained autonomous units, unassimilated to their surroundings. It was, rather, one in which “Polish politics would begin to move in a somewhat more open direction, accepting of the Jewish community, inclined toward building a true partnership (wspólnota) among all of the citizens of the Second Republic, no matter what their ethnic background” (427).

Kijek believes that the “civic potential” inherent in that vision might well have been realized had the Second World War not intervened. That counterfactual projection necessarily carries him beyond his evidence―a miscue in a volume that otherwise takes the maximum the evidence offers but no more. For some readers, though, that evidence―including the fact that nearly three quarters of the extant autobiographies were written in Yiddish, not Polish―might actually lead to a different conclusion: that interwar Polish Jewish youth saw their situation as untenable and found “cultural Polishness” of no value for them at all. A notable merit of his is work that Kijek's detailed exposition of his subjects’ life stories allows multiple interpretations, demonstrating the complexity of the problems he considers. His thoughtful treatment of his material pushes the analytical envelope well beyond what previous scholars have done with it and demonstrates its potential to deepen understanding of Polish-Jewish history.