Gilles Mendel
speaker
690 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 4 Feb
Gilles Mendel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And, you know, there was an area where
They could live, and if they had special skill of some sort, you know, you would be able to go to Leningrad and eventually, you know, do things like my great-grandfather was doing, you know, for the Tsar.
He could make fur.
He could do, you know, he had this extraordinary talent and artistry.
He brought to there, you know, the knowledge of making, of all the making of the fur, the artisanry.
His technical skills were very high, and I think that's why, because of his skill, he was able to start.
The skill was really, I mean, to make a fur coat, if you think of it, it's a very, very complicated and very artistic effort, because I don't want to be too literal, but there's a lot of cutting involved,
A lot of symmetrical things.
You have to understand an animal doesn't have, you know, the same character from the neck to the bottom of his, you know, the skin has, the hair has a different.
So in order to make a garment very uniform, you have to really understand the leather, on the leather side, how to cut the skins to make it right.
So there is a huge, huge amount of technical knowledge that in those days, you know, was required.
And my great-grandfather, you know,
you know, got this from your, from, from his trade.
I mean, the Jewish people, you know, I think the fur trade was, comes from hundreds and hundreds of years, you know, so it's, uh, I think he was highly skilled.
He was extremely skilled.
And when he came, when my grandfather, you know, left after the revolution, you know, this Russian area and came to France, uh,
He brought with him his knowledge, his technical knowledge, and that's how he started to build something in Paris.
They were, no, they were a little bit, they were middle class, maybe a little bit better than middle class.
I mean, you know, my, but you know, my father would come home at night and continue to do his work, watching television, you know, at home in front of the TV, but still trying to make up a little bit so he could, the next day, have already advanced his work.
He had a atelier.
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