Mendy—The Student

“ ... It is something he told me once when he was still debating about going over. He said (and these are almost his exact words) 'When I think of all the books I haven't read, I can't think of dying.'"

It was that which everyone remembers about Mendy, which no one forgets—his diligence as a student. Mendy without a book or a pamphlet was not Mendy. He'd push bolts of cloth on a wheel barrow through New York streets, and tucked in his pocket waiting for a red light to flash was a pamphlet to be read, to be marked and re-read. Perhaps it was a quiet street and blocks away, then why wait for a red light, ten minutes wouldn't hurt the boss or the textile industry.

Mendy loved to study. You will get his feel for it by reading the letter he wrote from Spain to his sister Jeanette on July 15.

Once Mendy thought it would be a very good idea to take notes on the morning newspapers. He had a very deep appreciation of history in the making. A book that influenced many of us in the fall of 1934 was R. P. Dutt's "Fascism and Social Revolution." This volume Mendy ate alive. When others were just beginning to appreciate the value of the monthly magazine The Communist, Mendy was doing more, he was drinking of that English Marxist periodical, The Labour Monthly.

A fellow camp worker writes that:

" ... Mendy was a terrific reader of theoretical material. No sooner was a political book published than Mendy had it in his bunk. Ile was perhaps one of the best read YCLers we had."

The usual return trip from camp was one in which underwear and a sweater was forgotten behind but the valise and the arms carried a "few" books he bought with summer pay.

In the back of a notebook he has left us we find a listing of books he intended to buy:

Jackson: Dialectics
Mathiez: The French Revolution
Kautsky: Origins of Christianity
Capital: Vols. II and III
Kautsky: Marx's Economic Theories Vol. IV
Rochester: Rulers of America
Hecker: Russian Sociology Parrington: I, II, III

In this same notebook which bears the cover inscription "Marxist Notebook of Important Readings—Nov. I, 1936" we have listed extensive notes from: R. P. Dutt's World Politics, Resolution of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies, Allen's The Negro Question in the United States, Hardy's The First American Revolution, Claude G. Bowers: Jefferson in Power, V. I. Lenin: Two Tactics, April Theses, War Communism; Stalin and others: History of the Civil War in the USSR. Parents and friends all make the point that "burning the midnight oil" really was that with Mendy. Sleep was for later.

We found a very simple and clear essay entitled "What Is Spain Fighting For?" in the pages of this same notebook. We include it in this memento.

There is a listing of books on the subject of Trotskyism, which was a special study point of his. Extensive typewritten pages of notes on this subject are tucked within the notebook. For the sessions he taught at the Second A.D. Training School of the Communist Party on The Negro Question he lists a whole series of questions such as: what are the theories opposing the concept of the Negroes as a nation? What's wrong with the idea that all we need is education to wipe out prejudices?

Still in the same notebook: note for a YCL student outline; notes in great length on neutrality, clippings, bulletins, New York Times editorials, a column of Heywod Broun's full of satire against some reactionary Congressmen; then long pages of notes on the capitulation of Social-Democracy to Hitlerism in Germany.

Next we found a hosiery box with hundreds of looseleaf pages all covered with his small fairly clear handwriting on both sides of the pages: government notes, notes for a course on Imperialism, page after page, land after land, figures after figures. Once Mendy remarked to a friend that it would be wonderful if someone republished Lenin's Imperialism with new and more recent statistics than the 1916 ones that Lenin has. He never lived to see the book but such a one was put out in the Soviet Union and translated for English reading people: New Data for Lenin's Imperialism, by Varga and another man named Mendelsohn!

Further in the notebook we see long quotations from the speeches of the Haymarket martyrs. Now three pages on Soviet writers and literature. Those are part of the things we found neatly put aside. All of the work shows intense effort and care. His books at home are well read and underlined. He read Capital Vol. I in a planned systematic way—every day so many and so many pages. He bought books in a planned way. One of his real prides was his library and a file of the Communist. He competed with another comrade as to who could have a more complete file. It was a game which did not exclude borrowing a very old issue if you saw it in someone's house.

Mendy's greatest joy next to study was writing. His style was pretty free, flexible and pungently forceful. For some months he worked on The Young Worker. He was editor of its student page besides doing general work around the paper such as editing the quips column. This journalistic assignment gave him great pride. One can still feel his pride in a very careful inscription he made on a Foreign Policy Association Report. Up in its left-hand corner he has so neatly written "W. Mendelson, Young Worker Staff Member." It is half printed with a curlicue here and there to embroider it.

It was this intenseness as a student of theory that led him to be a person of intense action; and from this flowed a still greater urge to study.