Aaron Landsman & Herman Mermelstein
Aaron Landsman makes performances and other events. He grew up in Minneapolis, arriving by plane to New York City in 1987 to attend NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing. He has worked as an actor, dancer, playwright, dramaturg and teacher. He is an Abrons Arts Center PATHS Social Practice Residency artist, where he runs Perfect City, a group of young who to use creative strategies to make the city better. His son Harry goes to school on East 6th Street, where Herman first arrived. Aaron is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a former Princeton Arts Fellow and Gammage Residency Artist at ASU. He is working on a book called No One Is Qualified, to be published by the University of Iowa Press, writing poems, taking walks and keeping it together.
Herman Mermelstein grew up in the hassidic jewish community in Berhove, which is a town that used to be in Czechoslovakia, then was part of Russia, then the Czech Republic, and now Ukraine. He arrived by a slow boat to New York City in 1939, escaping the Nazi holocaust with his two sisters and mother. They docked in the West 40’s discovered it was Saturday, the sabbath, and walked - “schlepped” - all their things down to East Sixth Street on the Lower East Side. He went to Yeshiva on Houston Street, learned to be a diamond cutter, which he did for 50 years, and drove many nice cars, including a Pontiac. He has two sons, one of whom lives in Israel and the other New York City, and 16 grandchildren. He and his wife Muriel live on Grand Street.