Mendy Cahan

Mendy Cahan ( Hebrew מנדי כהאן, born 1963 in Antwerp ) is an Israeli literary scholar and promoter of Yiddish , especially as a collector of Yiddish books.

Life

Mendy Cahan grew up as a child of Holocaust survivors in Belgium . Yiddish was spoken in his parents' house. In 1980 Cahan went to Israel to study in a yeshiva . He broke off this religious education and studied French literature, German and comparative literature, philosophy and political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem . Since then he has worked as an actor, including at the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv, and as a klezmer singer.

The central bus station in Tel Aviv with an area of 230,000 m², hiding a corner with 60,000 Yiddish books

In 1993 Mendy Cahan began collecting antiquarian Yiddish books; while he was working as a broadcaster at Radio Kol Israel , he publicly asked for book donations. In 2003 he moved with his treasure trove of books into the basement of the Association for Yiddish Journalists and Writers . In 2006, Cahan founded the “Yung Yidish Book Museum” in rented rooms on the fifth floor of Tel Aviv's central bus station, in which by 2016 around 60,000 volumes of Yiddish literature had accumulated. The rooms also serve as an event space for the “Yung Yidish” cultural initiative.

Cahan is one of the founders of the “Vilnius Yiddish Institute” in Lithuania , which offers a summer course in Yiddish at Vilnius University . Cahan also sings klezmer music and in 2008 recorded his own translation of Jacques Brels Ne me quitte pas as Los mich nischt alejn (לאָז מיך נישט אַלײן) .

In 2015 he advised the Hungarian director László Nemes on the preparation of his feature film about the Holocaust in the Auschwitz extermination camp , which was released in 2015 under the Hungarian original title Saul fia . Cahan took on the task of writing the Yiddish dialogues in the script. To do this, he consulted the research of the linguists Israel Kaplan and Nachman Blumental , who shortly after the liberation of the camp had documented the language development of Yiddish as the lingua franca of the concentration camp inmates. Cahan also got a supporting role in the film as a member of the special command of the concentration camp inmates .