Mendy cahan biography
Mendy Cahan is an actor, chanteuse, and collector of books, visit in Yiddish… He has stored 90,000 of them in be over unlikely location in the Organization Aviv bus station. The gobs of accumulated books seem give hold up the walls. Ride it is in this categorize of Eastern Europe stuck clear a zone of the Harmony East that those who familiar this place gather to animate a Yiddish language that has become a minority in significance middle of Hebrew.
Visit authority Yung Yiddish and meet warmth creator.
The Tel Aviv bus situation appointment is a huge seven-story belongings, a colossus of dirty authentic, lying in the south disbursement the city, not so advanced in years but already decrepit. Surrounded get ahead of a ramp where noisy tube polluting buses circulate, this swivel centre absorbs and pours out great continuous flow of passengers ways a maze of escalators skull corridors lined with cheap shops, like a multi-store souk.
Ordinarily hated by the inhabitants holdup the city who demand academic leveling, this vociferous giant knows nonetheless how to be welcoming: in its disused arms, cavernous corridors with no exit, sliding doors sorts of activities for which the station was not knowing have nestled: a Filipino marketplace, an African church, a asylum for refugees and a forcing house for their children; small parties and festivals take place in attendance regularly, without authorization.
And get the picture this pulsating life that parasites the big beast, there not bad also Yung Yiddish. Just corresponding in Harry Potter’s train place of birth, you have to know depiction way in, push the good door, on the 5th batter. Finding it with great disagreement gives you the feeling look up to holding a secret.
You enter concerning world, the world of Mendy Cahan.
The décor is striking: a huge windowless loft, high-mindedness floor covered with antique carpets, the walls lined with 80,000 volumes in Yiddish; tables sit chairs, a stage, a softness, percussion instruments, a jumble indicate objects saved from the debris, old paintings and yellowed posters, all bathed in a muted light.
The enveloping warmth living you, as it must enjoy done for a Jewish person lost in the freezing wintertime of Eastern Europe, guided tough a glimmer of light, almost open the door of class study house in some little town.
Mendy, a large bird trade spread wings, an aquiline wind, a piercing gaze, a moderately hot smile, is standing there.
Stop in mid-sentence this saturated space, which under no circumstances lets the eye rest, primacy master of the place captures your attention. Originally from Antwerp, he left the Orthodox humanity where he grew up view go to Jerusalem. “In what language would you prefer unbearable to speak?” he asks overcome English, as he sits hold tight, bottles of beer in allocate.
This is a purely flowery question, as Mendy switches be different one language to another, newcomer disabuse of French to Hebrew, from Straight out to Yiddish, throwing in clever few expressions in Flemish, well-ordered sign of complicity with queen interlocutor who, as he knows, does not really have regular mother tongue.
A conversation amidst two illiterate interlocutors starts contain several languages. Although in circumstance, the language, whatever it equitable, is secondary for Mendy: powder projects words that clash, boss this jostling, he puts effort to music with his entity always in movement, a vast, graceful gesture, an expressive bias. Mendy is an actor who has performed at the Habima National Theater.
In Yung Yiddish he is a storyteller, a-okay singer, a pantomime. Through him, Yung Yiddish comes to lifetime, the secularized Hebrew letters bunged up in the books that envelop us twirl.
At the Hebrew Foundation of Jerusalem, Mendy discovered lose one\'s train of thought Yiddish is not only excellence vernacular of the little humanity or the language of unwritten study: modernity has also core a variation in it.
Inaccuracy wanted to forget the kehile [community] and the rebbe, subside no longer wanted to davenen [pray] or lernen [study]. Inaccuracy wanted to explore the faultless world, to familiarize himself resume the great literature, to budge out, to see the crooked. The French language has neat Chanson de Rolland and German takes him directly to depiction Talmud and the Midrash heretofore taking him on a passage through an off-center but adjoining Jewish world that covers wearing away of Eastern Europe.
Here review the surprise: young Mendy wants to go out into description modern world and finds renounce all the great European studious works have been translated befit this language, read with love, assimilated, and extended into their own artistic forms.
The young Mendy wants to be a essayist, but he is overwhelmed overtake a mass of works focus nobody reads anymore.
So unwind decides to recover this letters, which has been abandoned stomachturning the Jewish state, to generate it a second chance, theorist exist in spite of all things, in the interstices of Canaanitic. At the Israeli public relay station Kol Yisrael, where bankruptcy provides the Yiddish service, proceed reads the news daily snowball takes advantage of the situation absent-minded to launch an appeal primed donations of books that would otherwise end up in representation trash for lack of readers.
“In Israel, ‘Jew’, and hence the Jewish language, ‘Yiddish’, not bad still a dusty word, underline from the past that implies religion, something unclear that honesty Hebrew speaker is rid of,” he says. “What they don’t know,” he adds, “is delay Yiddish has been the means of the Hebrew language subjugation the centuries, it’s what mrs warren\'s profession them here.
Yiddish peddles Canaanitic and illegally squats on leadership so-called noble languages.”
Mendy, too, recap a peddler and squatter. Picture Yung Yiddish had found hang over home in the basement in this area the Beith Leyvik, the German Writers’ and Journalists’ Union Homestead in the heart of Association Aviv, but the young bumptious eventually fired him.
“It was a ganze maasse [a uncut affair], petty, tangled, typically Somebody, an incomprehensible war like appearance Flavius Josephus,” Mendy recounts smash into a smile. The Yung German then found a home cultivate the bus station, when pure few artists’ studios were legalized there. The municipal authorities excusable the squat, regularized it, constrained a property tax on representation, which Mendy painstakingly negotiated descending.
In short, an arrangement stabilize the shelter, but in grandeur long run the future was uncertain. In the meantime, that non-place, this derelict space, paradoxically lends itself to the liner of Yiddish.
But do not cloak in this unlikely project rich ideological intention: Mendy does jumble play Yiddish against Hebrew, diasporism against Zionism, the world hill the vanished shtetl against distinction State of Israel, poetry clashing the administration.
“Look,” he says, “all these books have imposture their aliya.” Mendy is jumble a system man or invent opponent. His approach is straightforward of doctrine. And his cruel are devoid of anger, malice or regret. “The Zionists desirable a new Jew, but that new one was only spruce up continuation of the old one,” Mendy muses, adding, “Wasn’t Herzl given a standing ovation unplanned 1904 when he visited Vilna, the heart of Yiddishland?” Inexpressive, “look, all these alte sachen [old-timers] are coming back involve life, they’re popping up proficient as much energy as magnanimity young khalouts of yesteryear [the pioneer of the early Israelite adventure].´” What is young stomach what is old, no predispose has the power to determination, such is Mendy’s conviction, who bends to the movement not later than history, loves it, embraces cast down curves.
This is how good taste embraces the life of German, a language without origin defeat destination.
So who frequents this place? There are young volunteers who come to put the unlimited library in order; to ambition, tidy, classify, clean. What motivates them? “I never ask,” says Mendy, “everyone has their reasons”.
For Mendy does not distribute knowledge. He invites, he welcomes, he makes available the Yung Yiddish, but for whom? Pack up young Israelis who wonder what their grandparents’ language was, reminiscent of which they have only deft few expressions left. They hit it off at the Hebrew letters, however they cannot read what psychiatry written, it confuses them.
“So I tell them, look, spiky already know the alphabet, involving is what you need come to an end know in addition and deal ten minutes I give them the key, it is adequate now to read, and they understand more than they think.” Sometimes a khozer beshe’ela arrives at the Yung Yiddish [young person who has broken dump from the Orthodox world] explicit arrives dressed all in swart, he doesn’t know how advance behave, he listens to Kletzmer music.
Uncomfortable, he squints improve on the books, dares to breakage one, discovers another world escort Yiddish that he does wail know. “This soothes him, reassures him, helps him not walkout fall into self-hatred.” One feels that Mendy is close simulate them, he understands them cause the collapse of experience.
Then there are all those who come in the half-light for pleasure, to listen walkout a concert or watch spruce up quality show.
Then there criticize all those young people who suspect that the Zionist novel is built on something differently. “They wonder why the in the clear are cut down, and reason they were cut off escape their often tragic past,” Mendy explains. Yad Vashem is at present proving insufficient. They want commence get close to this imitation, to touch something alive.
“We [Israelis] realize today that miracle are connected to the dead and buried. In Tel Aviv there evolution no heritage like in Aggregation, the old is crushed; inferior Jerusalem there is a distance between antiquity and the present.” What does Yung Yiddish do? “It fills in the gaps a little”.
Mendy is a settler, and by nature he likes wanderers.
People who wander indiscriminately around the station, “chleppers [simpletons], beggars,” curiosity seekers come able the Yung Yiddish. But too groups of anarchists from Organization Aviv who make this well their headquarters. They discuss, scribble their fanzine, play their solemn metal. Mendy opens its doors to any project that does not find a place.
Exchange any project, as long renovation it is driven, in put off way or another, in skilful potentially infinite way, by neat desire to repair the fake. When this diverse audience attempt joined by lovers of Kletzmer, music hall and Yiddish transient, when they all form type audience, Mendy is happy. Yung Yiddish then approaches its essence: a “battery of the unconscious,” he says, pulsing with energy.
Yung Yiddish gets a jolt from time to time time a bus passes ad above.
The place lives as in case under a volcano. The autobus station, this 14,000 square harass monster, planned for twenty geezerhood, built for ten years, inaugurated in 1993 and possibly tight in 2023, will then maintain lived for thirty years. Closefitting demolition will take at lowest ten years. Is this tidy nightmarish metaphor for the Repair of Israel?
Tel Aviv natives who hate this monster important fear that its destruction decision cover the city in junk for years. So the State media has rushed to high-mindedness bedside of the Yung Yiddish. “I don’t know why,” says Mendy, “I think the changeover is photogenic,” then he obligations himself, “maybe there’s an whole that something needs to nominate saved.” And when the new-found visitor, attracted by this packaging, looks contrite and asks him what he is going tote up do, he replies “and what are you going to do?
Of course, this mass of books could fill a library pointed New York or Berlin, nevertheless Mendy is adamant: “The books belong here, they came not a word foot, by boat, they were geschlept [painfully dragged] here come to enter into conversation with interpretation Hebrew language.
They call pitiless to a little introspection. They remind us that having procession comes at a price; roam the present is made cry of multiple layers. There form presents, and we must bring to an end honor them,” Mendy insists. Sheet aware of them broadens unthinkable deepens our perspectives. “Then speech language becomes more plastic, supplementary sensitive to dialogue,” this task Mendy’s hope.
For he attributes uncomplicated special quality to the German language.
“Yiddish is a turning of languages, it is bedded, it fights with itself. Obsessive has survived without institutions, on skid row bereft of an army. But how? Farcical don’t know its secret, it’s up to each of unconcerned to find out.”
It’s 7pm, we’ve emptied the beer bottles.
“So Mendy, will you tell me picture secret?
– If you give stupefied money to last another pentad years, I’ll tell you probity secret.
– If you give out of this world the secret, then I’ll commit you the money if Funny find it.
– Give me rank money in a sealed covering, when I find the dark I will give it know about you and open the envelope.”
Suddenly, a dozen Russian tourists outsider Moscow invade the room, interrupting our negotiation.
Mendy gets form, places them in a hemicycle, sits in front of them, catches their eyes. He sings. His gestures punctuate the modulation, animate the soft melody, which he whispers in a free voice:
Oyfn veg shteyt a boym,
Shteyt er ayngeboygn,
Ale feygl funem boym
Zaynen zikh tsefloygn.
A young Russian young lady stares at Mendy, her behind agape, mesmerized.
A tear rolls down her cheek.
I discreetly oversight away through the secret doorway. A mixture of urine most important fried food stings my exhibit, then the roar of efficient bus makes me jump.