The House of Twenty Thousand Books (11 page)

A few years later, when a young man named Chimen Abramsky was hired to work at Shapiro, Valentine & Co a couple of months after the outbreak of the Second World War, it was the common bond of Marxism, the shared utopian language of an eagerly anticipated revolution, which initially drew the new employee and the boss’s daughter together. Miriam Nirenstein was, Chimen wrote more than sixty years later, ‘strikingly good looking, with a delicate chiselled face, beautiful warm brown eyes, sparkling, with a wonderful sense of humour. Her face captivated me instantly’. On walks through a London darkened by the blackout, from the shop to the underground station, she filled him in on the details of her life. ‘I learned from her that she was originally a Zionist, but through the civil war in Spain…joined the Communist Party. The rise and spread of fascism strengthened her determination and beliefs. During the day she ran the family business, and in the evenings she delivered party leaflets’. My grandparents fell head over heels in love.

And yet, despite the fact that Mimi and her sisters had joined the Communist Party largely as a way to fight the rise of Fascism, largely because they realised the savage danger that Nazism posed to the world, when Hitler and Stalin signed an opportunistic
non-aggression
pact on 23 August 1939 – after years of appeasement of the Fascist powers by Britain and France, years in which the possibility of a Soviet-British-French alliance was frittered away – somehow they convinced themselves to follow the Party line in opposing a war which the Party deemed ‘imperialist’. Of course, Mimi, Sara, Minna and Chimen (who was not yet a Party member or a presence in my grandmother’s life) knew the extent of Fascism’s horrors. They knew – but at the same time they also now convinced themselves that the Nazi–Soviet Pact was a necessary tactical manoeuvre intended to buy Russia time while Britain and France dithered and Germany expanded into Austria, Czechoslovakia and, then, who knew where else?

What it meant, in practice, was that after Britain finally declared war on 3 September 1939, British Communists stood back and parroted Party platitudes, while Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia carved up Poland, the Baltics and Finland between them. Some Communist agitators in the United Kingdom, in the early months of the war, plastered posters on walls decrying the war as an imperialist charade; in the aftermath of this, many Communist publications were banned, and some Communists were even interned. It was, to say the least, a deeply disingenuous political position, born of a context in which ideological rigidity and undeviating adherence to the Party line was seen as the primary measure of a comrade’s worth.

The sloganising extended beyond politics and, to one degree or another, made its way into the personal realm too. As Miri and Chimen’s relationship blossomed in early 1940, they worried, in their quickly penned love letters, how their parents would take the news that they wanted to get married. Neither was convinced that the other’s family would approve. Chimen was particularly afraid of what his ‘reactionary’ father would say; and both were concerned that Barnett Samuel, Minna’s husband at the time and, as such, the male head of the Nirenstein clan, would object to the match since, being a very religious man, he had already made it known, sniffily, to Mrs Nirenstein, that he was not sure Chimen was
frum
(pious) enough to work in the book shop. However, when Chimen screwed up his courage in the spring of 1940 to tell his mother that he intended to marry Miri, he reported, with evident relief, that Raizl was overjoyed. Now, the challenge was to convince ‘such a reactionary as my father’ that the match was good. ‘My dear little Chimen’, my twenty-three-year-old future grandmother wrote back, on hearing the news, ‘I’m glad to hear that you’ve told my mother-in-law and made her happy. I hope my reactionary father-in-law will react with similar joy’. As it turns out, Yehezkel was equally enthusiastic and, on 20 June 1940, in
an East End nervously waiting for the Luftwaffe to turn its attention to England after Germany had overrun Belgium, Holland and France, the wedding went ahead unhindered.

After the wedding, my grandparents quickly returned to their political activism. Of course, in June 1941, when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa against their erstwhile Soviet allies – somehow surprising Stalin, despite urgent memos from Churchill and Roosevelt detailing the intelligence that led them to believe the attack was imminent – Communist cadres in the West performed a quick volte-face and became enthusiastic backers of what they now saw as a vital conflict. The instincts that had led people like Mimi to barricade Cable Street against the Fascists were let loose once more. Now they urged the necessity of a ‘second front’ to siphon Nazi military energies away from the Soviet Union; they urged total war; they praised the heroism of the Soviet Union and its foot soldiers. When Churchill’s government decided to release the Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, from Holloway prison in late 1943, judging that he was no longer a threat to social order, Chimen helped the Communist Party formulate its response. Angered that the Jewish Board of Deputies, with which Chimen’s father closely worked, was insufficiently vocal in its criticism of the decision, Chimen penned an angry letter to the
Jewish Chronicle
. ‘This cowardice’, he wrote, ‘shames all Jews fighting heroically against Fascism. This backwardness, this lagging behind the democratic forces, is a blot on our names’.

Chimen and Mimi bought the house on Hillway (which had been left empty since sometime in 1942, according to Post Office records from the period) for £2,000 in the spring of 1944, the mortgage held solely by Mimi, since Chimen was, in 1944, still a
stateless non-national. It would have been the hallway shelves, made of low-grade varnished planks of pine, which were filled first. Their inhabitants at that time were books that he had scavenged from the shop, and from sellers in the bomb-battered East End. Many of them, in keeping with my grandparents’ politics at the time, were works of propaganda intended to extol the joys of Bolshevik Russia. They were volumes that accompanied Chimen and Mimi throughout the war. They would have occupied shelves in Mimi and Chimen’s first home, a small flat near Regent’s Park. The flat was too close to London Zoo for comfort: Mimi was terrified that a bomb would hit the zoo and demolish the cages, and that she would come home late one night and be chased down the street by a liberated lion. It was not an entirely irrational fear: the zoo
was
bombed several times, but at the outset of the war many of the zoo’s larger animals had been evacuated to facilities outside of the city; however, with authorities worried that the zoo’s poisonous snakes might escape among the
already-edgy
populace, the unlucky reptiles were killed. As the war intensified, many other strange sites were hit: two years into the conflict, the London Necropolis Railway Station at Waterloo, a Victorian terminus used to transport the bodies of the dead out of London to Brookwood Cemetery, was heavily damaged in a bombing raid. As their numbers multiplied, and multiplied again, no longer could the dead be sent to genteel resting spots in the Surrey countryside.

During the eight months of the Blitz, according to the Bomb Sight online map of where the bombs fell in London, released to much fanfare in 2012, well over fifty large bombs fell on the streets surrounding the home on Hillway that Mimi and Chimen would ultimately buy. Expand the search parameters by just a few streets in each direction, and the number of bombs rises to several hundred. Bombs fell on Hampstead Heath, on Highgate Cemetery, on the Whittington Hospital, on at least one local
school, and onto numerous homes and businesses. In the East End, around Shapiro, Valentine & Co, almost every street experienced at least one bomb strike; many were hit multiple times. Some streets were entirely obliterated; others were left standing in a patchwork quilt of destruction interspersed with improbable examples of architectural survival. As the wheel of chance spun and spun again, somehow the little book shop remained intact.

The numbers of casualties were huge. Between September 1940 and May 1941, well over 20,000 Londoners were killed, 3,000 of them on 10 May alone. Four of them were Mimi’s cousins. London had become a charnel house. Somehow, Chimen and Mimi managed to preserve at least a veneer of normality: Mimi kept the accounts and made sure the shop could function; Chimen continued to collect his precious books even as the fires from the previous night’s bombing raids still burned. One day, a customer rushed into the shop to tell Chimen that the Beth Din, the ecclesiastical court of the United Synagogue, which had immense influence over the religious lives of Orthodox Jews in Britain, and over which Yehezkel had presided since 1934, when he had turned down an offer to become Chief Rabbi of Palestine, had been hit by a bomb. Chimen, terrified that his father had been killed, ran out of the shop towards the religious court. He arrived just in time to see Yehezkel, his gabardine coat caked with dust, stagger out of the rubble. As Chimen ran towards him, Yehezkel rushed off in the other direction, towards the home he shared with Raizl, to tell her that he had survived the attack.

Six months into the Blitz, my grandparents made the decision to evacuate. Taking Chimen’s books with them, they decamped to Bedford, some fifty miles north of London, in February 1941, to distance themselves from the fury. Mimi was trying to get pregnant. Their son Jack (who would eventually become my father) was born in January 1942. They all lived at 194 Foster Hill
Road, a large house that they shared with fourteen people, among whom were several of Mimi’s cousins. Chimen commuted into London by train six days a week to run the shop. He continued, amid the wreckage of war, to buy books.

In some of these early additions to his collection, my grandfather signed his name ‘Shimen’, elsewhere he wrote ‘Shimon’, in others ‘S. Abramsky’, and in still others ‘C. Abramsky’. He was, it seemed, still experimenting with the best way to spell his Hebrew name using the English alphabet; later, in a 1967 letter to Isaiah Berlin, in which he gave his friend permission to address him by his first name after a ten year correspondence, he wrote that the non-phonetic construction of his name was due to the idiosyncratic spelling of Soviet authorities. When he began writing for the Communist Party, he added aliases to the mix and ‘C. Allen’ came into being. Perhaps, in the many ways in which he spelled his name (and in the variety of birth dates he gave out for himself, ranging from September 1916 through to March 1917) he was still trying to work out who he was, who he wanted to be.

Finally, as the reach of the bombs spread and Bedford no longer seemed to offer a real sanctuary, Chimen and Mimi returned to London, and, despite the fact that V2 rockets were raining down on the capital city, bought their house on Hillway. It was, perhaps, their way of staking a claim to the future. When the attacks got too ferocious, Mimi would take my terrified father, then two years old, to a large bomb shelter dug under Hampstead Heath’s victory gardens. There, they would huddle with other refugees from the fiery world above, the explosions shaking their fragile lair. My father’s earliest memories are of that hideaway. Well into adulthood he would have nightmares about the bombs.

Throughout these dark years, Chimen continued to work at Shapiro, Valentine & Co, and continued to build up his collection of Marxist literature. In the evenings, while the German bombers
unloaded their deadly cargoes over London, he was a fire-spotter with the Metropolitan Borough of St. Pancras Fire Guard. He would stand on rooftops, scanning the blacked-out city below, looking for flames, and phoning in locations to the fire brigades. The next morning, he would see the full effect of those fires. One day, he wrote in the notes for his never-finished autobiography, ‘there was a shattering, violent explosion. We went out to have a look. London was on fire, burning from four sides. It was hellishly frightening’.

I can see him in my mind’s eye, coming out of Aldgate East tube station the day after a bombing raid, and picking his way through the rubble, past the narrow old Huguenot houses, some still standing, others destroyed, as he made his way from Whitechapel High Street over to Commercial Street and then along Wentworth Street to his shop. He might, perhaps, in the strangeness of the rubble, have paused for a moment to orient himself; quite possibly, the soaring early eighteenth-century spire of Christ Church, Spitalfields, designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, helped to set his path. On a clear day, the calm blue sky would have brutally contrasted with the smouldering ruins, the noise of the East Enders attempting to get on with their lives contrasting with the silence of the dead. The ruins would have stunk of burning wires and rubber and all the other detritus of destroyed buildings.

Chimen would have trudged among the ruins, aghast at the horrors unleashed on his adopted city, yet thinking about what that city would look like, and how it would be run, once the war ended. For, by the time he, Mimi, and their toddler son relocated back to London, it was clear that at some point soon the Nazis would be defeated. What was also increasingly clear was that Chimen, no longer viewed with suspicion as a newcomer, was now the effective head of his wife’s extended family. It was the book shop that he ran that would provide employment to relatives in
need of work; and it was, increasingly, his and Mimi’s words that would count in family dramas and conflicts.

For the first decade after the war ended, until she became too old and sick to live alone, Bellafeigel lived around the corner from Hillway. In the 1950s, when my father and aunt were children, she and her brothers would rent a house at the seaside each summer, and Mimi and Chimen would dutifully drive down with the children for day trips. At first, they went to Southend-on-Sea in Essex and later on to Bournemouth, which was noted for its kosher hotels.

Chimen had, to his considerable pride, learned to drive in 1952; his enthusiasm was only slightly dampened by the fact that he had had to spend several months after he passed his test dealing with mechanical problems in his old Morris (a car of pre-war vintage with a crank handle starter) and insurance claims for minor accidents. Mimi waited to learn to drive until 1956, not far short of her fortieth birthday. And so, in the early 1950s, when my grandparents and their two children would head to the coast, it was Chimen who was behind the wheel. Mimi loved to swim – in fact, she found the waters so pleasing that in early 1940, shortly after they had secretly pledged to marry each other, Mimi had sent her ‘Dear little Chimen’ a coquettish, passionate letter, urging him to find an excuse to leave the book shop for a couple of days and take a train to join her in Cardiff; she was, she told him, longing to show him the sea. As a token of her love, she had recently written an ‘autobiography’ to him, in which she detailed the previous loves of her life. Chimen, in his reply, wrote that, upon reflection, he preferred to share his own amorous stories orally rather than in writing.