With his new book, “When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers,” the New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein has brought to daylight the writings of young Jews in prewar Eastern Europe in a remarkably fresh manner.

The genesis of this project was a series of contests in the 1930s held by YIVO, an institution founded in 1925 in Berlin, Germany, and Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), and focused on the study of East European Jewish culture. Young people between the ages of 13 and 21 were asked to submit, in Yiddish, autobiographical pieces. Hoping to free the authors to write with maximum candor, the organizers developed a coding system that would enable the submissions to remain anonymous. The prizes were scheduled to be announced on Sept. 1, 1939, but this never happened, as that turned out to be the day when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

For this book, Krimstein chose six stories from the hundreds of autobiographical pieces that were submitted, rendering them in panels illuminated with a minimalist palette of black and orange. The graphic presentation is inventive and effective, with the authors’ narrative voices given heft and immediacy by the illustrations.

Importantly, these are not the writings of children under Nazi occupation, but rather denizens of a pronouncedly modern Jewish world which was entirely unaware of its impending obliteration.

The young authors record the angst and longing that come with the territory of adolescence, as well as frank descriptions of complicated dynamics within families. For example, one writer reveals how she still longs for her father despite the fact that he abandoned their family and even stole from them.

While the stories of romantic pursuits and family-life travails may strike a familiar chord with today’s readers, one contrast with the lives of American teens is the politicized landscape for young Jews in Eastern Europe. The pursuit of religion, leftist activism, the Zionist cause, or a combination thereof, was often a decisive choice for teens developing their identity and finding their social footing. In the final story, “The Skater,” the narrator records her coming of age in a Polish town against the backdrop of political fractionalization and class stratification.

While the reader roots for the narrators in their particular struggles — be it a girl’s wish to stand and recite Kaddish for her father in an Orthodox synagogue or a boy’s effort to emigrate from Poland by writing letters to foreign politicians — it is hard to shake one’s awareness that they are all on the cusp of being sucked into a much larger conflagration. Knowing the disasters that were about to befall these young people’s lives, I found it just as painful to read expressions of optimism as to hear accounts of despondency.

I would say that Krimstein, who produced a memorable graphic biography of the philosopher Hannah Arendt several years ago, has saved these stories from oblivion, but it is more accurate to say that his effort is part of a chain of rescue.

The first act of salvation occurred after Vilna had fallen under Nazi control and the Third Reich was carting off materials from YIVO’s collection to assist its propaganda ministry in a study of “the Jewish question,” with the intention of destroying the remainder. A group of Jews known as the Paper Brigade, consisting partly of former YIVO workers, daringly smuggled portions of the collection out of the premises. The submissions to this contest were among those rescued documents.

While many of those salvaged materials were subsequently smuggled out of Soviet-annexed Lithuania after the war, there was much that was unaccounted for and presumed to have been destroyed. And then in 2017, a massive number of documents, including these contest entries, were found hidden in the basement of a decommissioned church. It turns out that a heroic non-Jewish Lithuanian librarian, Antanas Ulpis, had hidden the documents to keep them out of the hands of the Soviet authorities, even concealing some of the  papers in the pipes of an old organ.

And this perhaps merits a spoiler alert, but it is noted in the book’s moving afterword that one of the young writers had herself later served as a member of the Paper Brigade and survived the Holocaust. Contrary to YIVO rules, she had entered the writing contest at age 11 and revealed her name in her submission (thus Krimstein dubs her “the Rule Breaker”). Learning that at least one of these writers had not only lived through the Shoah and the war but also played a role in the rescue and transmission of a priceless legacy moved me to tears.

“When I Grow Up: The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers” by Ken Krimstein (Bloomsbury, 240 pages)