The Interior and Exterior Dramas of YA Fiction

I imagine there's some deep-seeded reason why I both read and write YA fiction.  Maybe I'm still holding on to unfulfilled hopes and dreams from my high school years. Maybe I wish those years hadn't been so uninspiring, where each day blended into the next and so on. 

It's not that I didn't have friends or that I wasn't involved in a variety of activities.  I was vice president of the student association (only a boy could be president in those days) and my grades were good.  But aside from my female friends, I didn't have much of a romantic life because I hadn't yet come out. Mind you, this was the early 1970s, so not many people in high school were out. So I'm sure I have a bit of FIMO (fear I missed out) and am trying to make up for it by reading about the trials and tribulations of same-sex high school romance.

What I do know is that I am drawn to YA because it has this unique ability to present dramatic events both external to teen characters' lives as well as internal to them. This point was driven home to me when I recently learned about the a unique contest that was sponsored by YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 1930s Poland. YIVO invited Jewish teens to compete for a prize by writing and submitting their autobiographies, describing their everyday lives.  These submissions were encouraged to be anonymous so that the teens could write honestly and openly without compromising their identities.  

A photo of one of the autobiographies written in Yiddish

Hundreds of teens submitted handwritten autobiographies; most written in Yiddish, some in Polish and a smattering of others in various languages. These stories were raw and uncompromising, revealing closely held secrets about love, friendship, sexuality, and dreams for the future. Like teens in most eras, they complained about their parents, longing to separate from what the teens saw as inflexible rules and the strictures of Orthodox Judaism. 

Some were Zionists and longed to go to Palestine.  Others dreamed of a socialist future. Still others wanted to become scientists, writers or artists.

While their social and romantic lives were a primary focus, these teens, writing in late 1930s Poland, were greatly aware of increasing antisemitism in their home country and the threat from Nazi Germany just west of their border. These external threats were part of the larger context of their lives at the same time that they were also focused on so many of the coming of age struggles that high school students experience.

"Awakening Lives" a book about the YIVO contest published in 2002

It's that juxtaposition of the internal and the external that brought home to me the unique quality of young adult fiction--how teenagers must grapple with so much change and so many emotional issues at a relatively young age.  This realization has informed my own YA writing.

YIVO was scheduled to announce the winner of its contest on September 1, 1939, the same day that Hitler invaded Poland. Because of that, the contest was unable to award a winner. Once the Nazis arrived in Vilna, the home city of YIVO, they took over the Institute, forcing some of its scholars to identify the most important books and papers so they could be shipped to Germany. Many other volumes in the collection were destroyed. The books and records that survived did so because brave Jewish scholars found hiding places for them.  

And the teen autobiographies? What became of them? Some were lost forever and others were later recovered.  The fate of their teenage authors remains a mystery, though based on the mass murder of most of Poland's Jews, it is safe to say that most did not survive. 

When I Grow Up is a recently published graphic novel depicting six of the teen autobiographies 

It is only their writings that live on and provide for us, so many years later, an unvarnished picture of Jewish teen life in Poland in the interwar years.

Cindy Rizzo is a NYC-based writer. Her most recent YA novel is The Papercutter, which tells the story of three, queer Jewish teens, members of the first generation to come of age after the US has split into two countries.