8 September 2025

Discussion between Dr. Kamilio Kijeko and dr. Małgorzatos Litwinowicz. „Young Voices. YIVO autobiography competitions and their multilingual participants“

On 16 September at 6 pm, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania will host a discussion „Young Voices. YIVO autobiography competitions and their multilingual participants“ with researchers from Poland, Dr. Kamil Kijek and Prof. Małgorzata Litwinowicz. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Lara Lempertienė, director of the Judaica Research Center.

Founded in Vilnius in 1925, YIVO was the first secular institute for the study of Eastern European Jews. It had four research sections: philology, history, economics and statistics, and psychology and pedagogy. The latter, seeking to gather information about Jewish youth, organized competitions for autobiographies and diaries written by young people. Jewish youth aged 16–22 were invited to participate in the competitions and were asked to openly describe their daily lives, surroundings, and personal lives. The authors of the best autobiographies were awarded cash prizes and YIVO publications.

In 1932, when inviting participants to the first competition, YIVO director Max Weinreich asked them not only to recount unusual events in their lives, but also to describe all their experiences in detail. In their autobiographies, young people wrote about conflicts with their parents, first loves, their parents' excessive religiosity, participation in various political youth organizations, and anti-Semitic encounters. Thus, YIVO obtained valuable material about the social and cultural processes that took place in Jewish families, society, and Jewish-Polish relations.

Over 600 autobiographies and diaries were collected during the competitions organized in the 1930s, received from 15 countries. Since contestants were encouraged to write in the language they felt most comfortable with, the autobiographies are in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German, English, Russian, French, and even Czech and Serbian.

At events dedicated to the academic forum, we have listened to public lectures. This time, we invite you to a discussion in which Dr. Kamil Kijek will talk about the autobiographies of Jewish youth written in Yiddish, and Dr. Małgorzata Litwinowicz will present the autobiographies submitted to the competition that were written in Polish. The discussion will be moderated by Dr. Lara Lempertienė, director of the Judaica Research Center.

Dr. Kamil Kijek is an Assistant Professor at the Jewish Studies Department, University of Wrocław.  His research interest include Central-East European Jewish History in the end of XIX and in XX century, social and cultural theory. K. Kijek has been a Prins Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York and Sosland Family Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, as well as Gerda Henkel Research Fellow at the Wiener Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Holocaust Studies in Munich. In 2017, K. Kijek published a book in Polish on Jewish youth in interwar Poland (in 2026, this book will be published in English as Modern and Radical. Politics, Culture, and Socialization of Jewish Youth in Interwar Poland).

Dr. Małgorzata Litwinowicz is a professor at Institute of Polish Culture (University of Warsaw). Her primary fields of research include 19th and early 20th century history of Polish and Lithuanian cultures, problems of modernity and modernization, in particular issues related to media transformations and inventiveness. M. Litwinowicz  is a member of scientific team project “Life Written for a Competition. Memoir-writing practices in Poland 1918-1939” (in Institute of Polish Culture). She is currently working on a project devoted to “domestication” of the Baltic Sea in Polish culture in interwar period and cultural history of national parks in Poland in the same period.

The event is supported by the Polish Institute in Vilnius.

The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Briefly about the event

Date

16 September

Time

18:00

Duration

1,5 h

Place

Conference Hall, 5th floor

Attendance

free

Organiser

Judaica Research Centre of the National Library

Important

the event may be photographed and/or filmed.
the discussion will be held in English

More information

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