The House of Twenty Thousand Books (22 page)

The transformation took years to mature, years during which he was still a largely uncritical supporter of the Soviet Union. It was partly a transformation born of shifting political beliefs; and partly one fuelled by a personal tragedy which struck the family in 1948 when Chimen’s nephew, Jonathan (whom Chimen had last seen as a toddler in what was then still Palestine a decade earlier) was shot dead on the streets of Jerusalem during the
Palestinian revolt that followed the declaration of the state of Israel. Chimen had helped his older brother, Yaakov David, with his wife and their infant son, to find a flat in Jerusalem when they moved to the city from London in April 1937, just months after finally being freed into exile by the Soviet authorities. At the time, Chimen recalled with amusement, Yaakov David spoke a rarified form of classical Hebrew, elegant, highly polished, yet virtually incomprehensible to ordinary people. It was, he said, as if his brother were choosing to speak Chaucer’s English during everyday interactions on the streets of modern London. Perhaps starved of adult conversation as a result, he had monopolised Chimen’s attention, preventing him from playing with the young boy. Chimen did not recall very much detail about his lost nephew.

The author Amos Oz wrote about Jonathan’s murder in his memoir
A Tale of Love and Darkness
. According to Chimen, Yehezkel poured out his feelings to a fellow rabbi living in Switzerland, in a long letter, written in Hebrew, after the killing. Shortly afterwards, Chimen told my cousin, Ron Abramski, in a 2003 interview about his life, Yehezkel apparently suffered a heart attack. For the family as a whole, Jonathan’s death must have been a shattering experience. How did the murder of a child, so intimate both in its execution and its consequences, fit into a
one-size
-fits-all philosophy that preached that, if only everyone recognised the brotherhood of man, a universal, everlasting peace would inevitably follow? How did Comintern slogans, no matter how grandiloquent their phrasing, help with the intense grief unleashed by such a personal catastrophe?

Bit by bit, at first subconsciously, later quite explicitly, the ground was being laid for a new political perspective, for a new, less utopian, understanding of the human condition. Decades later, Chimen attempted to explain this shift. ‘When I was involved in politics and had contacts with leading Arabs in every Arab country in the Middle East I realised, fully, the total hostility
of all the Arabs that I encountered, and their leading representation of the Left in Arabian countries, to the existence of the State of Israel’, Chimen wrote to his friend Walter Zander in June 1976. ‘Without exception, all were for its total destruction, and I became utterly despairing of discussing the Jewish question with them: they showed no compassion or feeling for it’. He ended his letter by warning against ‘idealism in a vacuum’. Many of the guests around the Seder table went through a similar change of heart.

But, while they debated most things political – from Communism to nationalism, from Zionism to colonialism – what Chimen and this circle of first generation Jewish Communist immigrants from Eastern Europe never questioned was their adherence to at least the rudiments of Jewish ritual, to the modes of behaviour that had governed the lives of tens of generations of their ancestors in the little villages and shtetls of Eastern Europe. That, they would leave for future generations. They would leave it to their children and grandchildren, to the younger generations who were reared in democratic, assimilationist cultures, their realities far removed from the deadly violence of the pogrom, the Holocaust and the wars of the Middle East.

In many ways that circle of friends around the dining room table at Hillway were the latest incarnations of a long line of Jewish thinkers, scholars and revolutionaries whom the writer Isaac Deutscher described in his posthumously published 1968 essay ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’. ‘The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition’, Deutscher wrote, in a book to be found in Chimen and Mimi’s dining room, to the left of the little piano. ‘Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxumburg, Trotsky, and Freud. You may, if you wish to, place them with a Jewish tradition.
They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond it, and they represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in modern thought, the sum and substance of the most profound upheavals that have taken place in philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics in the last three centuries’. Initially, Chimen had slammed Deutscher. Writing in a Party publication, C. Allen had penned a long essay accusing the author of being an anti-Soviet Trotskyist. Later, he came to appreciate Deutscher’s writings on the radical Jews of the modern era. For Deutscher, who saw himself within this intellectual lineage, ‘they were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their mind matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations’. In the immediate post-war years, one such nook was the Communist Party and its various committees.

The original mandate of the Historian’s Committee was to update A.L. Morton’s
A People’s History of England
, which had served as the Communist Party’s de facto reference guide for English history since its publication in 1938; and Maurice Dobb’s huge book
Studies in the Development of Capitalism
. Dobb, a colleague of Piero Sraffa’s, at Trinity College, Cambridge, was a leading Marxist economist at the time. To those ends, the members divided up the work, setting up committees on different themes, working to build alliances with historians around the country, and, ultimately, around the globe. Some (including Christopher Hill) specialised in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century
English history and the religious schisms, civil war and economic transformation of that era; others (most notably Eric Hobsbawm) focused on nineteenth-century imperialism; while another group, including E.P.Thompson, John Saville and Raph Samuel concentrated on the history of labour and the working
class in the era of the Industrial Revolution. ‘It was’, Hobsbawm recalled sixty years later, ‘in effect a ten year seminar, in which we talked with each other and talked over historical problems’.

Members of the group, convinced that their work would help establish the tone for the coming revolution in Britain, set up the influential journal
Past and Present
. When the revolution did not unfold as planned, they set out to understand why. And, later on still, in the more critical, anti-USSR years of the late 1950s, as the Party line became increasingly hard to swallow, Chimen’s good friend John Saville, along with E.P. Thompson, established the heretical journal
Reasoner
, to challenge the Party orthodoxy. In the
Reasoner
they tackled the issues laid out in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘Secret Speech’ (a speech that was not, in fact, at all secret), which bluntly acknowledged the horrendous crimes that had occurred, in the name of Communism, under the rule of Stalin; they also used the journal to air grievances after the British Communist Party’s executive committee attempted to stifle the burgeoning dissent that emerged within its ranks in the wake of that speech. Palme Dutt, the Party’s leading theoretician, and Chimen’s friend from the war years, had gone so far as to dismiss Khrushchev’s revelations as ‘spots on the sun’.

Saville and Thompson insisted on their right to dissent from this view. The Party, used to absolute obedience to its diktats, was not amused. In a series of increasingly acrimonious letters, members of the Executive Committee ordered Saville and Thompson to cease and desist publication; to appear before the Political Committee to answer for their sins; and to acknowledge that the Party was ‘the envy of every other working class organization for the level of its activity and the devotion of its membership’. There is an Alice in Wonderland quality to the language. As people around the world were shuddering at the horrors detailed by Khruschev – and as Communists throughout the West were being forced to acknowledge that the critiques of
the Soviet Union that they had so long dismissed as capitalist propaganda were largely true – the Party’s General Secretary blithely asked the two historians, ‘Can you seriously compare our inner party democracy with that of any other organisation? Do you honestly expect to find a better party elsewhere?’ Used to living under siege, the Party could not tolerate any dissent, Pauline Harrison, a molecular biologist and the wife of Royden Harrison, another dissident historian, came to believe. Dare to strike out on your own, to think for yourself, to exercise your critical faculties, and its leaders immediately moved to censor you or, worse, to ostracise you: your erstwhile friends and comrades would simply refuse to talk to you, to acknowledge your existence. ‘I wouldn’t call it a cult exactly’, Pauline noted wryly, in conversation fifty-six years after she left the Party, but ‘it was a tightly knit organisation. There were Party lines, and you were supposed to obey’. Instead of accepting the Party’s convoluted logic, and embittered by the revelations of atrocities, outraged by the Soviet invasion of Hungary which followed quickly on the heels of Khrushchev’s speech, and sickened by the Party’s authoritarian treatment of intellectual dissent in Britain, Thompson and Saville resigned their Party membership. A few months before his final resignation, Thompson wrote that the Executive Committee of the Party would, if it ever achieved power in Britain, instantly destroy liberties carefully nurtured over three hundred years.

During those same months of 1956–57, Mimi, her sisters, Raph, several of her cousins and many close friends, all joined Saville and Thompson in fleeing the Party, although, nearly forty years later, Mimi wrote to me that she did not like the word ‘flee’ in this context. ‘People “flee” when they are pursued by terror’, she explained. ‘The people who “fled” were the people who lived in a modicum of freedom. They “left” the party because they no longer believed it represented what they believed in’. Yet it seems to me that ‘flee’ is not too strong a word here. Forced to view the
true visage of the Soviet Union, they shuddered in horror not only at the nature of the beast but also at their own complicity in its actions. ‘Crimes were perpetrated in the Soviet Union and in the New Democracies which in character (using physical and mental torture of the vilest kinds, terror against relatives and friends of victims, deportations of whole nationalities, etc.), and in results (frame up and murder of hundreds of thousands, and imprisonment of millions of honest communists and people friendly to Socialism, including some of the most outstanding fighters for our cause) – were amongst the worst the world has ever seen’, Mimi’s sister Minna wrote to her Branch Committee, on 22 May 1957, explaining her decision to leave the Party. ‘I know that most Party members, at all levels, are basically not only very good people, but people who have dedicated themselves to work for the betterment of mankind. It has shaken me to the core to find that they can view with comparative equanimity mass murder, torture, and unspeakable crimes committed in their name against their own comrades’.

A year later, the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (who was at that time involved in a long correspondence with the Russian author Boris Pasternak, encouraging him to fight Soviet attempts to ban Russian-language editions of his novel
Doctor Zhivago
, and, who in 1957, had begun selling an Italian edition of the masterpiece) wrote, crestfallen, to Chimen that they were living through ‘a very difficult moment for all sincere socialist [
sic
] and communist [
sic
], for all those who trust fully to apply the great lesson of Marx and Engels’. Intolerance and dogmatism, Feltrinelli continued, were ‘seriously tempering the progress of human society’.

Somehow, inexplicably, for two more years after the invasion of Hungary and after Krushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes, Chimen remained a Party member. He struggled to take off the blinkers that had been so much a part of his daily existence for so many years. He was, I am sure, petrified about what the world would look like once they were removed; as scared as a blind man, who has finally learned to navigate his sightless world – even, like King Lear’s blinded friend Gloucester, to marvel at the interior sight of the eyeless – being told that, with surgery, he might see again. ‘People so much wanted to believe in this idealistic future’, explained Pauline Harrison. ‘It was a search for meaning. A religion that believed in people rather than an external being. A sort of religion, but not totally blind’.

Gradually, though, the pressure became too much. Mimi no longer wanted anything to do with the Party. Good friends like John Saville had been hounded for their refusal to toe the party line. Others, like Pauline’s husband Royden, a historian at Sheffield University, had simply decided that remaining in the Party demanded too many intellectual contortions. ‘You owed it an enormous loyalty’, Pauline remembered. ‘On the other hand, it was an enormous relief – to give up something you were defending even though you no longer believed in it’. In 1958, Chimen left the Party. He had finally come to believe that the liberal world of ideas to which he had already started to temperamentally tie his fortunes was ill-equipped to stand up to the tyrannical impulses of revolutionary leaders.

The events of 1956 had corroded Chimen’s sympathy for the Soviet Union; yet the invasion of Hungary did not trigger his immediate exit from the Party. Rather, the trigger was the discovery that everything he had believed about the Soviet Union as a place where anti-Semitism no longer existed was wrong. And, by extension, it was the psychologically devastating conclusion that, if he was wrong about how the Soviets were treating the Jews,
he was probably also wrong about many of his other assumptions about life in the USSR. It was the work of his good friend, Hyman Levy, and his treatment by the Party, that finally brought Chimen to this realisation.