The House of Twenty Thousand Books (16 page)

Mendelssohn believed the existence of God could be proved through rational argument; the divine revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, however, he was happy to leave as revelation. In Mendelssohn’s world, therefore, the reality of God was akin to a mathematical proof; but God’s
law, his code of conduct for daily living, had to be taken on faith. And whether one chose to take it or not was, he felt, a matter of individual conscience. Like his Enlightenment peers, he believed the state should not attempt to enforce any form of religious orthodoxy. The promulgators of the Haskalah thus embraced the great liberal political vision of a secular state, its umbrella broad enough to encompass people of all faiths or none (though Mendelssohn himself was harshly critical of atheists), which was formulated in Western Europe and America in the decades surrounding the French Revolution, and honed this vision into a sophisticated message aimed specifically at Europe’s Jewish population. The men and women who embraced the Haskalah in the century following Mendelssohn’s zenith welcomed change, and welcomed the prospect of civic emancipation, of full political and economic rights. They did not, however, stop with liberalism. For many of them, as their involvement with European political movements deepened, so too did their radicalism.

By the later part of the nineteenth century, large numbers of young Jews, in reaction to government-supported pogroms in Russia and to violent repression against political activists in countries spread across the continent, were attracted to a more explicitly socialist vision. It had first acquired momentum with the wave of revolutions that briefly swept through Europe in 1848; and that momentum picked up speed in Russia from the 1860s onward. Many sympathised with Alexander Herzen’s idea, itself a modified version of the ‘noble savage’ theory espoused by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Rousseau, that the purest incarnation of mankind was the peasant commune, that the daily life of a peasant was, somehow, more real than that of the urbanite or the landed gentry. Others adopted the varieties of Marxism coming to the fore in Russia during the last decades of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth: some supported the Mensheviks and their more democratic vision of
socialism, while others put their faith in Plekhanov and then in Lenin’s Bolsheviks and in their theory of a small, elite vanguard of urban revolutionaries laying the groundwork for a broader uprising. In the dying years of the century, some joined the General Jewish Labour Bund, a workers’ organisation in Russia, Lithuania and Poland, whose members believed in a socialist transformation of society. Still others threw in their lot with the Folkspartey, founded in 1904 by the historian Simon Dubnow with the idea of promoting Jewish cultural autonomy within a broader liberal political settlement. They wanted Jews to stay in Russia, but to be allowed to nurture their culture without being persecuted. In that regard they stood in opposition to the growing numbers of Zionists who at this time were encouraging Eastern European Jews to leave the pogroms behind and to relocate themselves in Palestine – a land they hoped would one day again be known as Israel.

It was out of this chaotic political world, this kaleidoscope of endless reconfigurations of radical ideological associations among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe that literary figures like the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem emerged. It was in this world, too, that revolutionaries like Lev Bronstein – known to history as Trotsky – came to the fore. But there was also a reaction against these liberal and radical ideas, an Orthodox Jewish equivalent to Joseph de Maistre’s opposition to the French Enlightenment nearly a century earlier. The Yeshiva Movement in Lithuania, from which as a young man Yehezhkel had emerged as a feted religious scholar, destined to be considered amongst the
Gedoylim
– or saint-like religious sages – of the next century, was cast in direct opposition to the liberalising, secularising forces of the Haskalah. Students at these yeshivas mocked Haskalah
followers, according to Chaim Grade; some of the more outspoken among them even trailed after their secular rivals in the street to hurl insults at them. Theirs was the task of restoring the traditional order to communities caught in the crosshairs of history; of re-imposing a timeless vision of the cosmos on a world in flux. Not coincidentally, the Yeshiva Movement’s
scholar-activists
were as thoroughly opposed to the mystical, ecstatic, religious movement of Hasidism, which had swept Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century onward, created new rabbinic dynasties and downplayed the importance of the legal texts of Judaism, as they were to the Haskalah. The Hasids, following the teaching of their founder, the Baal Shem Tov, emphasised the importance of prayer and of love; with these two tools, they argued, even an unschooled Jew could reach the spiritual heights. This was a challenge to the strict hierarchies of Talmudic learning; and, by the time of Shem Tov’s death in 1760 many thousands had cast their lot with his teachings. They, and their descendants, were considered to be dangerously anti-authority, bound up in the emotions and sensations of the religious experience, rather than being preoccupied by the law and by the word-by-word minutiae of Talmudic debate. The Haskalah students were considered to be too freethinking, too critical of age-old authority. Neither vision augured well for the traditionalists.

Of course, there were limits to how far the Yeshiva Movement could roll back the clock. The ideas of the Haskalah, in particular, once let loose in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe set off a whirlwind of change. They paved the way for a generation of shtetl Jews to gain knowledge and political awareness, to move to big cities, to participate in the intellectual ferment of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The lives and culture of the shtetl Jews were so mysterious and unexplored by historians that, according to Nathaniel Deutsch’s book
The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement
, late
Tsarist ethnographers planned to circulate a Yiddish questionnaire of roughly two thousand questions, to study the folk traditions of what the ethnographers saw as this strange people. The Haskalah movement took this ‘dark continent’ (the phrase is Simon Dubnow’s) and rooted it in history. It gave the Jews of Eastern Europe the ability, the right, to pen their own histories.

In Chimen and Mimi’s front room, the debates unleashed within Judaism by the Haskalah played out keenly – both in the conversations and lives of its residents and among the thousands of books housed from its rickety floor to its paint-flaking ceiling: Zionism versus international socialism; assimilation in contradistinction to nationalism; religion against secularism; tradition contrasted with modernity; the authority of the rabbis versus the power of the new revolutionaries.

On the shelves in this room there were also many books on the Holocaust and more generally on anti-Semitism. So too, there were rare, oversized socialist volumes – collections of essays, policy tracts and so on – many of them with stamps suggesting they originally were held by the library in the German city of Leipzig, a library part of the collection of which Chimen must have purchased shortly after the war ended. And there were first editions of the leading Fabian thinkers on those shelves – Harold Laski, Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Dotted among the volumes here, jewels camouflaged in anonymity, were a couple of dozen large tomes, of varying heights, in which were bound together thousands of original colour images from the 1870 Franco–Prussian war and the Paris Commune that followed a year later, including English magazine cartoons of the Commune, and full-page French newspaper pages containing various manifestos and calls to arms. This was a collection that
Chimen treasured as much as any in the House of Books. The volume covers were black morocco leather, the spines knobbly. Each one had a red rectangle on the spine; and in each rectangle in small gold letters were the words:
Distractions des deux sièges de Paris 1870–71
, along with the volume number in roman numerals. Inside those tomes were spectacular images: a militia man, gun slung over his shoulder, dragg‘La 1871 Commune ou la morting a weeping woman through the streets; Prussian soldiers, in spiked metal hats, leaving a burning, looted building, a dead, bloodied woman, spread out on the street before them; an illustration from the barricades, showing the Communards, their bayonets resting against a cannon, a red flag fluttering overhead. On the flag were the words
‘La 1871 Commune ou la mort
’. There were political cartoons showing the impotence of the Emperor Louis Napoleon; conservative commentaries from the English press denouncing the atheism, the disrespect for property, and the bloodthirstiness of the revolutionaries – one, by the famous illustrator George Cruikshank, was titled ‘An Awful Lesson to the World for All Time to Come’; reproductions of a proclamation by Maximilien de Robespierre in 1792 on the ‘Rights of Man and of Citizens’, and of revolutionary manifestos by the socialist Louis Blanqui. Many of the pictures showed skeletons, surrounded by
pastel-coloured
floral arrangements, the skulls, intended to symbolise various moribund political movements and social structures, ghoulishly staring out at observers; they were part of an iconographic tradition that spans from Goya’s sketches of the Napoleonic wars in the Iberian peninsula nearly seventy years earlier to Grateful Dead album covers a century later.

Chimen had bought the collection, already bound, at a Sotheby’s auction decades before I arrived on the scene. One of my favourite images, hidden deep in volume twenty-one, was titled
‘Les Amis de L’Ordre
,’ (the Friends of Order). It showed a brown-cloaked friar, bald and fat, holding the feet of a prostrate
figure of a woman representing the ‘République’, while the deposed emperor, Napoleon III, and the duc d’Aumale, pretender to the throne of France, held the Republic’s chest. Completing the dreadful scene, a well-dressed assassin, Thiers, the head of the anti-Commune government, his midriff bumping against the Republic’s head, prepared to plunge a knife into the Republic’s heart. It was not subtle; but it conveyed a suitable sense of grotesqueness, of the betrayal of the ideals of the Commune.

In the way in which he stored these precious posters, whether consciously or not, Chimen was emulating the Talmudic students of the Volozhin yeshiva in Telz and the other great religious schools that dotted the landscape of his father’s youth; there, banned by the rabbis and the
rosh yeshiva
(the school principals) from any literary connection to the dangerous secular world outside, the more daring students subscribed to newspapers and academic journals. Such intellectual adventurism was, wrote the former student Natan Grinblat later in life, an illicit experience akin in the feeling it generated to ‘sipping heady wine’. After all, unless a rabbi had certified a Hebrew book with a
Haskamah
, which was essentially a stamp of approval testifying that the book contained nothing of a heretical nature, it was out of bounds to the students. The newspapers and journals, picked up at the town post offices, were passed from hand to hand surreptitiously, in much the same way that samizdat copies of banned books such as
Doctor Zhivago
or
The Gulag Archipelago
were distributed years later in the Soviet Union. Finally, the papers were collected together again, and an entire year’s issues from a given magazine were then carefully bound into a single volume and secreted away high up on a bookshelf. As a young man, Yehezkel himself had read forbidden Haskalah texts. In a surprising act of rebellion he had also gone so far as to familiarise himself with great Russian literature by authors such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy; for the rabbis, this was
bittul Torah
, which means, roughly, a royal waste
of time, time that could better be spent studying Talmud. Readers of such books could even be denounced as
epikoyreses
, or heretics. But reading books such as
Crime and Punishment
was about as far as Yehezkel’s rebellion stretched – that, and becoming an expert swimmer, presumably in the many rivers that crisscrossed the Lithuanian landscape in which he had come of age. In a time of grand political upheavals, when Jews were coming to play a huge role in Russia’s political protests – by 1905, one third of political arrestees in the Russian Empire were Jewish – Yehezkhel stayed aloof from temporal concerns.

In fact, as he grew into maturity, Yehezkel was very much at one with the austere Musar movement, the movement of
self-abnegation
and asceticism that had actively rooted out heretics from the yeshivas of his youth. The modern world was desperately tempting; but, precisely for that reason it was, he believed, desperately dangerous. In this, he was a kindred spirit to many of the leading lights of Musar, men of an older generation who in their younger years had dabbled with new ethical and philosophical notions, had been intrigued by new scientific advances, even by great novels and new-fangled theories being developed by people such as Sigmund Freud, but who had subsequently reverted deep into Orthodoxy. Shaul Stampfer writes that these men often ‘used vocabulary borrowed from philosophy and psychology’, but they would also memorise, and repeatedly chant, religious texts such as the
Mesilat Yesharim
, or the ‘path of the upright’, to cast a protective net over the students – both the chanters and also their peers – keeping out corrupting influences from the world beyond. Despite his adherence to the Haskalah, in many ways Chimen remained protected by that net throughout his life. He was a man of modernity who had nonetheless been shaped in myriad ways by the worlds of his father, his maternal grandfather, his great-grandfather; by that long line of fabled rabbis of which he was the progeny.

In the centre of Mimi and Chimen’s living room, a woven, tattered, dark purple woollen rug covered the uneven, unpolished dark wooden planks that had been put down as a makeshift floor during the war years and never replaced. Two or three rather lumpy, unmatched armchairs and an old rocking chair with a stiff wooden back, were crammed into that centre space, arranged so they were all facing inward, angled so that the occupant of any of the seats could hold court. Thomas More, imagining an ideal society, a Utopia, wrote of its inhabitants that ‘of golde and sylver they make commonly chaumber pottes, and other vesselles, that serve for moste vile uses. They marveyle that any men be so folyshe, as to have delite and pleasure in the doubteful glistering of a lytil tryffelynge stone…so much that a lympyse blockehedded churle, and whyche hathe no more wytte than an asse…shall have nevertheless manye wyse and good men in subjection and bondage, only for this, bycause he hath a greate heape of golde’. In his copy, Chimen had underlined this passage in pencil, one presumes more for the value of its anti-materialistic insight than the creativity of More’s spelling.