A YOUTH IN YIDDISHLAND

In the 1930s, a contest for the “best autobiography by a young Jewish person” was launched across Jewish communities in Central and Western Europe. Hundreds of young people between the ages of 16 and 22 submitted entries.

Hidden during the Second World War by the “paper brigade” – a group of Jewish resistance fighters – these manuscripts emerged from oblivion in 2017 in the city of Vilnius, among 180,000 pages of Yiddish-language documents. They are voices that bring us into the inner world of the last generation of teenagers to grow up in “Yiddishland” – a borderless cultural space at the heart of Europe that was home to 11 million Jews –, with all their anxieties, inner conflicts, and dreams.

A polyphonic narrative weaving their words together with archival documents, excerpts from Yiddish cinema, and amateur films from this time, this documentary offers a rare window into the lives of European Jewish communities in the final years before the Holocaust.