[URBAN NOTE] On the afterlife of the Yiddish sign of Mandel's in Baldwin Village

[rfmcdonald]

In July 2013, I posted about an interesting sign, apparently in Yiddish, in Toronto's Baldwin Village

I was walking with a friend late last month around Baldwin Street when I saw, in the window of John's Italian Caffe at 27-29 Baldwin Street, this Hebrew script. I didn't recognize what it was. I naturally uploaded the picture to Facebook and asked my friends.

Erin found a February 2013 post by Walking Woman that identified the language as a mixture of Yiddish and Yinglish, Anglicized Yiddish; David translated this as "Puter, kez, krim, eygs, frish jeden tag", i.e. Butter, Cheese, Cream, Eggs, fresh every day." (The "eygs" and "frish" are the Yinglish words.) The window's lettering thus dates back a century to a time when this building was in the middle of Toronto's first Jewish neighbourhood, kept by the current occupants of this building.

blogTO reported that the sign has since been removed to a museum.

[L]uckily, the Ontario Jewish Archives worked with a glass company to save the entire pane, which is currently in storage. The organization is now looking to restore it.

"One option we are exploring is creating a monument/public art sculpture in the Kensington Market neighbourhood that celebrates the language and rich culture of Yiddish," Dara Solomon, the Director of the Ontario Jewish Archives, tells me via email.

But before that happens, you'll be able to get a glimpse of Yinglish on College Street. That's because the Mandel's sign has been recreated at Fentster (which means window in Yiddish), a new storefront window gallery at 402 College St., at Makom (a grassroots Jewish organization) space.

This installation, titled Mandel's Dreamery, aims to harken back to a time when College Street - and Kensington Market - was the bustling centre of Jewish life in Toronto. But unlike the original Mandel's sign, this newfangled version, set in front of an archival photograph of Trachter's Milk Store, says, "butter, cheese, cream, eggs. Only memories."

"This installation is an echo of a memory" says curator Evelyn Tauben, who's putting on the exhibition along with the Ontario Jewish Archives and the Ashkenaz Festival. "You can't get kosher food in this neighbourhood fresh every day. That's a different era."

The Toronto Star's Sarah-Joyce Battersby wrote at length about the meaning of the sign for Toronto's Jewish history.

From the shop’s opening in 1915 until last summer, the sign remained as the neighbourhood changed, lovingly preserved by the Italian restaurant that took over Mandel’s in the ’70s. When a bubble tea shop moved in a year ago, the window was quietly removed, purchased by the Mandel family and donated to the Ontario Jewish Archives.

[. . .]

Called Mandel’s Dreamery, it’s one of the exhibits at the small gallery in the window of Makom, a recently-opened Jewish community space, at 402 College St.

The grassroots organization moved into the building in March when artist Rochelle Rubinstein, who had mounted exhibits in the window for several years, left for a studio on nearby Augusta Ave.

[. . .]

Nestled between a Domino’s Pizza and the former College Street Diner, the hand-painted storefront sign is accompanied by a photograph of Trachter’s Milk Store, a similar shop to Mandel’s, snapped in 1925 at 71 Kensington Ave.

But where Mandel’s promised “fresh every day,” the re-creation reads “Only memories.”

“It’s like a dream,” said Tauben, “The idea that it was this bustling hub with a lot of energy … that Yiddish was spoken in the streets, that Yiddish was on the storefronts.”

The Canadian Jewish News also has more, noting that the sign and its wider exhibit will remain up until the 30th of October.