Mann, Mendel, Plonsk, 1916 - Paris, 1975: "imagined Landscape" Poland, Yiddish, Mahj

MANN, Mendel, Plonsk, 1916 - Paris, 1975: "Imagined Landscape" Poland, watercolor, signed lower right, size: 20 x 26 cm. Yiddish, Museum of Art and History of Judaism in Paris. Born in Warsaw, the Yiddish-speaking novelist Mendel Mann had a village youth. His mother belonged to one of those Jewish families who had settled for generations on Polish soil bought from German owners. One of Mendel Mann's uncles had fallen as a hero during a partisan fight against the Russian occupier. His father, early acquired to socialist ideas and befriended Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, was the son of a Tōrah scribe, who himself numbered poets and men of study. Also attracted by social action, Mendel Mann was an activist from a very young age, while remaining close to nature, which he loved passionately. After his studies, first in Plonsk, then in Warsaw, he learned to paint, like one of his older brothers. After having abandoned it, he returned to it much later, in France, and then exhibited several times watercolors remarkable for the feeling of nature expressed there. Soldier in the Polish army, taken prisoner during the final battle which took place in the streets of Warsaw, Mendel Mann escaped and went to the USSR Already trained as a teacher, he was sent to Tiengouchaï as such , a collective farm village near the Volga and the famous Potma concentration camp, which he will cross again in 1941, no longer alone but with all the able-bodied men of the village, mobilized for the defense of Moscow. He made all the war in the Red Army, until Berlin, where he had the privilege of attending the surrender of Tempelhof. He married a young girl he had met in Russian-occupied Poland, a son was born to them in Tiengouchaï. Demobilized, he returned to Warsaw. His whole family was massacred by the Nazis: his parents in Auschwitz; his younger brother fighting in the ghetto; the elders, one painter and the other professor of botany, in other places, as well as his sister. He goes in search of the surviving Jewish children, most of them orphans, and organizes their passage to Israel.