The House of Twenty Thousand Books (3 page)

I do not think anyone ever counted the number of books in the house, although Chimen made partial efforts over the years to catalogue his collection, and various book experts, some flown in from New York and others from London, spent weeks studying it after he died. Looking at the shelves, I estimated that there were probably close to twenty thousand volumes in the house at the time of Chimen’s death. My father believed it was more like fifteen thousand. Whatever the exact number of books at Hillway, it was staggering. And what made it more staggering was their quality. Chimen did not simply aim for numbers; he collected books and editions that were extraordinarily hard to find, and, by extension, were worth their weight in gold. More importantly, they were the stuff of rebirth, ways to bring vanished pasts to life.

It was, quite simply, a magnificent intellectual enterprise, both a working library that Chimen could access while researching his essays and books, and also a work of love, of respect for the past, preserving the memories and ideas of men and women now long dead, their worlds as vanished as their voices, their smiles, their bodies. Inside Hillway, one could embark on journeys into that past, to see the fighters of 1848 take to the streets in Vienna or Berlin or London itself; to witness the Paris Communards on the barricades; to visit the Russian revolutionaries in Petrograd in October 1917, or the displaced Yiddish-language journalists and theatre impressarios, who, a century earlier, had printed London East End newspapers with such whimsical names as
Der Poylisher Yidl
and had entertained homesick immigrants.

Chimen himself was not a particularly good storyteller – he frequently gave away the punchline of humorous anecdotes too early; or, with more serious stories, got bogged down in too many details. Yet he knew so much about history, and was so precise with his usage of names, his memory of places and dates, of who knew whom and who feuded with whom, that with a bit of imagination one could create one’s own vivid, three dimensional, plotlines to accompany Chimen’s scholarly historical conversation. He provided the raw materials and empowered his guests or students to create technicolour mental images for themselves.

My grandfather was not parsimonious with his collection, but one had to earn the right to see his bibliographic jewels, one had to have the right introductions. When a stranger wrote to University College, shortly after Chimen had been made a professor, asking to see one of his William Morris letters, Chimen had his secretary type out a sniffy response: ‘I regret very much that my library is strictly private and I only allow very few people to have a look at it. Paul Meier, an old friend of mine, used my library for his article on Morris as well as for his great book on Morris in which he refers to it many times. I regret very much that
the manuscript is not available to anybody else’. Chimen would gauge one’s interest, see how much knowledge one brought to the table, or how much enthusiasm one had for the world of ideas, and then, gradually, he would start to give you entrée into the library. Maybe on one visit he would show you an early edition of one of Lenin’s books; then, on the next encounter, he would let you glimpse a handwritten document by Lenin or something penned by the martyred German revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg. Perhaps, eventually, you would even see the original William Morris illustrated manuscripts kept in the very bible box in which Morris had stored them during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Or you might get to handle a first edition of William Godwin’s 1793 treatise
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
, the earliest published anarchist policy tract. It was a heavy volume, its thick, yellowing pages sandwiched within a majestic black binding; a similar volume to the one the teenage William Hazlitt, later to be counted among England’s leading essayists, would have read in the mid-1790s. ‘No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice’, Hazlitt wrote later in his collection of essays on famous men,
The Spirit of the Age
. ‘Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him, Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of thought’.

All of this was an exercise in trust – not that Chimen was fearful that one of his guests would flee Hillway with the box of Morris under his or her arm, or with Godwin’s tract secreted in a briefcase; but rather, that he believed intellectual favours ought to be reciprocal. He was more than happy to show visitors documents that in some cases they could see nowhere else on earth; but he would only do so in exchange for meaningful questions and thoughtful comments, or at the very least an
expression of admiration and awe, about the ideas and documents at hand. In 2006, to commemorate Chimen’s ninetieth birthday, a documentary film-maker, Christo Hird, and the British New Left activist and scholar, Tariq Ali, made a film about Chimen and his books. As Chimen took Tariq Ali deeper and deeper into the collection, eventually bringing out such treasures as Karl Marx’s membership card of the First International – the organisation set up in London in 1864 with the aim of uniting trade unions and left-wing political parties around the world into a structure capable of promoting a co-ordinated working class revolution – and Communist Manifestos with Marx and Engels’s personal, handwritten annotations, Ali’s eyes got wider and wider. ‘Oh my gosh, oooooh my gosh Chimen’, he kept spluttering, utterly overwhelmed by the historical relics he saw before him, by the proximity to extraordinary historical events that Chimen was allowing him to experience. ‘Oh my gosh!’

In the late 1970s, a family friend of my mother’s came from Los Angeles to visit us in London, and was taken to see Chimen and Mimi’s house. An artist, he immortalised that evening with a black and white ink drawing; titled (for some reason in French)
Maison Livres des Shimin Abramski (sic)
, or
Chimen Abramsky’s House of Books
, it showed a house the walls and – a flurry of artistic exaggeration – even the ceilings of which consisted entirely of books; whose occupants sat around cluttered tables in old chairs drinking endless cups of tea while engaged in animated conversation.

To me, that house, so ordinary from the outside – with its white plastered walls and tiled roof, its TV antenna perched next to the chimney, it looked like one of countless thousands of north London semi-detached houses built in the early decades of the
twentieth century – was my school, my university, my library, my sanctuary when the going got tough at home. It was the place I retreated to when I fought with my parents, or found my younger siblings too annoying. From a very young age, I’d take a train from the station near our house in west London to Gospel Oak, walk along the side of Hampstead Heath, left on Highgate Road, right on Swain’s Lane, and then another left on Hillway. I’d walk down the dull-red brick front garden path, between my grandmother’s rose bushes, and climb the three steps to the door. I’d ring the doorbell, and there Chimen would be: ‘Ah, Meester Sasha’, he’d announce, pretending to be surprised. ‘Miri, it’s Meester Sasha. Come on in’. And he’d kiss me quickly on both cheeks, his breath slightly stale, then pull me into the House of Books and close the door behind me.

G
ROWING UP
, I was always presented with my grandfather’s story in almost mythological terms, a series of inadequate, somewhat simplistic, snapshots of a life too large to chronicle properly. I knew, according to the summaries of his life that I gathered in conversation, that Chimen himself had been born in the autumn of 1916 in Minsk, then a White Russian region, and now in the Republic of Belarus, near the small town of Smalyavichy in which his family lived; that his birth had only been registered several months afterwards, and that he had, therefore, at least two different birthdays. I knew, too, that Chimen had grown into his teenage years in Moscow and, when he was fifteen years old, his father – who had served two years in a hard-labour camp in Siberia for religious proselytising and the ostensibly treasonable
activity of talking to an American human rights fact-finding mission – had been sent into exile in England. Chimen, his younger brother Menachem and his mother, were also allowed to leave. His two older brothers were kept as hostages in the Soviet Union for several more years. In London, despite Rabbi Abramsky’s recent experiences at the hands of the Soviet secret police, Chimen became involved in left-wing politics, and surreptitiously acquired and read copies of Karl Marx’s writings with the glee of discovery and of youthful rebellion.

In the mid-1930s, the young man enrolled at the still-new Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in what was then Palestine. He travelled there by train and boat: boat from England to France, trains south to the Mediterranean, then another ship, on which he had a steerage ticket, across the sea to Palestine. His vessel, like so many others bringing Jews to the Mandate territory in the mid-1930s, docked at the port town of Haifa. On similar voyages it is recorded that many of the passengers, as they readied themselves to disembark, sang the Zionist anthem which later became Israel’s national anthem,
Ha-tikvah
: ‘As long as the Jewish spirit is yearning deep in the heart, With eyes turned toward the East, looking toward Zion, Then our hope – the two-thousand-year-old hope – will not be lost: To be a free people in our land, The land of Zion and Jerusalem’. Chimen might have sung along, although he never mentioned it when reminiscing about these years; more probably, however, he would have stayed silent. His political beliefs, at this point, did not include supporting the creation of a Jewish state. He arrived in a city in the throes of reinvention. In the old quarters of the town, narrow, cobbled streets were lined with buildings hundreds of years old. In the newer parts of Jerusalem, large numbers of modern apartment complexes were being erected at speed to accommodate the influx of new residents.

The university was a strange place, still trying to establish itself. Chaim Weizman, the leading figure behind modern
Zionism, had sunk its foundation stones in the summer of 1918, but the university itself had not opened for classes until 1925; and when Chimen arrived in 1936 it was still not quite sure of its position in the academic firmament. Many of the faculty members were refugees from Nazi Germany; a fair number of them, as described in S.Y. Agnon’s novel
Shira
, spoke almost no Hebrew. When they were short of cash, they sold their German books to dealers for a pittance: some of those books ended up in Chimen’s early collection.

Shortly after he arrived, Chimen joined the
Haganah
, or Jewish Defense Force, in response to the Arab revolt which broke out that year. Rioting throughout the summer months resulted in the deaths of numerous Jews, among them six students and several faculty members. The university’s library was also attacked. ‘There was’, wrote Agnon (one of whose original manuscripts subsequently ended up in Chimen’s collection) ‘a new round of violence known as the riots, in which Jewish blood flowed unrestrained, and there were so many murders and massacres that no self-preserving Jew would venture out at night’. Buses were fitted with iron window bars to deflect the rocks thrown at the vehicles by rioters. Yet, if Chimen’s letters are any guide to his actions, he spent his time in the
Haganah
arguing fine philosophical points rather than learning military drill. He became, during this period, friends with three other intense young men – Shmuel Ettinger, Jacob Fleischer and the Silesian-born Abraham ‘Abby’ Robinson – who would play huge roles in his life over the coming decades. And he dreamed of success in the world of academia.

But the Second World War interrupted his studies. Returning to England for a summer holiday in 1939, he ended up trapped and stateless, unable to return to Palestine to complete his undergraduate degree. And so, instead of claiming what he surely thought was his rightful place in a respected university, over the
next several decades Chimen and my grandmother Mimi (whom he married in 1940) ran Shapiro, Valentine & Co, a respected, albeit rather claustrophobic, Jewish book shop in London’s East End. Thwarted and frustrated in his academic ambitions, he looked for other avenues for his intellectual curiosity. During these early years with Mimi, Chimen embraced two passions: firstly, no longer religious, and searching for an alternative set of certainties, he threw himself into the world of Marxism. And secondly, apprenticing himself to Eisemann, he began to collect and deal in rare books.

Like so many of his peers, and like my grandmother and both of her sisters, Chimen had been drawn ever-closer to Communism during the early years of the Great Depression, and most particularly with the onset of the Spanish Civil War, years in which progressives in Europe dreamed of a ‘popular front’, while the great Western democracies stood by and watched the demise of the Spanish Republic. Mimi formally joined the Communist Party in the mid-1930s. Chimen took slightly longer to so do. Growing up, I believed this delay was perhaps out of deference to Rabbi Abramsky. It was, however, merely conjecture; my grandfather never really explained to me either why he had joined the Party after his father’s experiences, or why it had taken him longer to join than it did many of his peers – although, I found out subsequently, he did tell researchers late in his life that in the 1930s, before he became a British citizen, the Communist Party did not admit foreigners as members. He did, however, acknowledge that he had become an intellectual Marxist as a teenager while he was still living in the Soviet Union. Whatever the reasons for the delays, he formally became a member only after the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941.

Chimen never told me, either, how he rationalised joining a political organisation that had defended the Nazi–Soviet Pact only two years earlier; how he justified to himself his defence, even hero-worship, of Joseph Stalin; or how he could continue to glorify the Soviet Union (albeit with less enthusiasm in the years after ‘Uncle Joe’s’ death) until the late 1950s, two years after Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khruschev, had acknowledged the scale of Stalin’s horrific crimes. Perhaps he felt that others had already explained it for him. There was, wrote the English politician Richard Crossman in the introduction to his famous collection of essays
The God That Failed
, a ‘terrible loneliness’ that progressive intellectuals felt during the 1930s. ‘They had a premonition of catastrophe, they looked for a philosophy with which they could analyze it and overcome it – and many of them found what they needed in Marxism.’

Once Chimen joined the Party, he rapidly became a committed activist. During the war years and the decade that followed, he was one of the leading figures in the party’s National Jewish Committee, as active – perhaps, I fear, even as fanatical – as any other Party leader. In his contribution to
The God That Failed
, Arthur Koestler compared his [Koestler’s] original commitment to Marxism to a religious conversion. ‘From the psychologist’s point of view’, he noted, ‘there is little difference between a revolutionary and a traditionalist faith. All true faith is uncompromising, radical, purist… All Utopias are fed from the sources of mythology; the social engineer’s blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text’. So it was with Chimen. He embraced Marxist orthodoxy with a messianic passion. In January 1947 he wrote a critical review of Koestler’s book
Thieves in the Night
, on Jewish terror groups such as the Stern Gang, which had embarked on a violent campaign in Palestine, and he prefaced his clever critique of the author’s support for the violent organisations with a jargon-filled denunciation of his politics. Koestler, he
opined, under the ludicrously flimsy nom de plume ‘A. Chimen’, was a ‘former revisionist, once a fellow-traveller in the Communist Party, [who] has now returned to the revisionist fold’.

Yet, as for so many others of his generation, the adherence to the all-or-nothing political vision ultimately could not last. The word ‘utopia’, coined by Thomas More, comes from the Greek word
ou-topos
, meaning ‘nowhere’. In the early 1950s, in the face of Stalin’s purges of Jewish intellectuals and a rash of anti-Semitic show trials and campaigns throughout the Warsaw Pact countries – most famously the Doctors’ Plot in Moscow, in which nine prominent doctors, most of them Jewish, were accused of poisoning, or planning to poison, top Communist Party officials; and the trial of prominent Jewish Communists in Prague who had been accused of the catch-all crime of ‘Trotsky–Titoism’ – Chimen gradually came to feel that he was indeed stuck in a nowhere-land. When the Jewish doctors were freed after Stalin’s death, and their confessions voided – they had been tortured into admitting to non-existent crimes – it became all but impossible for Communists in the west to continue to deny that anti-Semitism had flourished in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Chimen’s unease grew. And yet, somehow, still he remained a Party member.

In 1956, when, in quick succession, the post-Stalin leadership in the USSR made public a long list of Stalin’s atrocities and then committed their own outrage, by sending troops into Hungary to suppress the anti-Soviet revolution, Mimi and her sisters left the Party. Chimen, inexplicably, stuck it out for two more years. For the rest of his life, my grandfather was dismayed at his lack of judgement in supporting an abysmal, bloodthirsty system for so long.

Why Chimen stayed in the Party so long is beyond my powers of explanation – and possibly his own. But, a man who did nothing by half-measures, once he left, he left with a vengeance, and, in the decades following, both he and Mimi grew increasingly
critical of left-wing politics. Chimen, long a member of the influential historians’ unit within the British Communist Party, feuded with friends like Eric Hobsbawm for their continued embrace of Communism. Over time, he reinvented himself as a serious liberal thinker. Politically, he came to align himself with Cold War liberals such as his close friend from his Hebrew University years, Jacob Fleischer (who had subsequently changed his surname to Talmon), whose world-view Chimen had, at the height of his Stalinism, scorned.

Across the decades, however, whether a Communist or an anti-Communist, the world of books sustained him.

The book-selling business that kept the family solvent for more than twenty-five years was not the path that Chimen as a young man had hoped to follow, but, as he would often explain, world events had intervened to change his plans. He had been studying history in Jerusalem in 1939, and had come to London to visit his parents, leaving from the port city of Haifa and transiting through Marseilles on 11 July, carrying a Certificate of Naturalization from the government of Palestine, written in both English and Hebrew, and also a brown Palestinian Government passport, number 103907, issued the previous June. Chimen entered the United Kingdom on a four-month tourist visa, fully intending to return to Jerusalem after the summer; instead, he was left stranded and stateless by the outbreak of war. He remained stateless until late in 1947, when he received a short, typewritten notice that his application to become a British citizen had been approved. He swore the oath of allegiance to the United Kingdom six days into the new year. As for his undergraduate university studies, he never returned to them. Henceforth, he would be an autodidact.

My grandmother Miriam (Mimi to us kids; Miri to Chimen), despite being extremely intelligent, was not by calling an intellectual. But she
was
an extraordinary hostess and a successful professional in her own right. After Chimen took over the day-
to-day
running of their book shop, Mimi studied to become a social worker; and by the 1970s she was head of the psychiatric social work department at the Royal Free Hospital. She would come home from work – long days spent counselling extremely disturbed, sometimes suicidal, individuals – to cook fabulous, heavy, old-world meals with which to feed the endless array of guests who made their way to the house. One could not refuse her food; she simply would not accept an unwillingness to eat. Generations of scholars and rabbis, politicians, refugees, artists and students traipsed to 5 Hillway. When, during the last years of his life, I brought my own children to visit an aging and ailing Chimen, he was still welcoming visiting academics and old comrades – those few whom he had not outlived – for brief cups of coffee, bread and herring, and snippets of conversation. The house had become like Route 66, America’s fabled cross-country thoroughfare so unceremoniously replaced by modern freeways but still signposted on old Main Streets as a reminder of glory days long gone. The physical structure was dilapidated, the nonagenarian occupant something of a living ghost, but both were still iconic.

From middle age onward, Chimen became, temperamentally, ever more of an intellectual, an interpreter of events rather than a participant in them. In his little pocket diaries, in place of Communist Party meetings, were the minutiae of everyday family life: £26 and change spent on buying food, drink, and clothing for Yasha’s (his and Mimi’s nickname for my father) bar mitzvah;
notes to pay insurance bills; dates on which school terms began. Yet, unlike so many others in full flight from Communism, Chimen did not ever really withdraw from public life. Instead, he pivoted, embracing academia where once he had embraced slogan-filled pamphleteering; declaring his fealty to liberal values and promoting the rights of individuals where once he had placed his hopes in the class struggle.