The House of Twenty Thousand Books (30 page)

He dreamed, perhaps, of ghosts.

The old upright piano, which, in earlier decades my sister Tanya and I had played at the behest of Mimi and her friends, gradually ceased to function as a musical instrument and became, instead, a photographic shrine, upon every horizontal surface of which rested photos of friends and relatives now dead, along with images of the living – photos of children, of grandchildren, and, eventually, of great-grandchildren: my own children, Sofia and
Leo, and Tanya’s daughter Izzy. By the piano, too, in the last years of the salon, hung a watercolour painting by my cousin Maia and two pencil drawings that Tanya had sketched. One was of Chimen, the other of Mimi. Both seemed to be smiling slightly as they looked out on the crowded room below. To the left of the piano, adjacent to a shelf that contained the collection of Jewish encyclopaedias, there hung a matte ten-by-eight black and white photograph of four generations of Abramsky men: Yehezkel, Chimen, Jack, and me. It was taken in 1973 in Yehezkel’s small apartment in Jerusalem. In the background is a window, the white slats of its shutters letting in the sunlight. I was one year old, sitting on my father’s lap, a curly blond-haired toddler, smiling. My father, already balding, had let what hair he still had grow out; his beard was bushy, but in a 1960s rather than a religious sort of way. Chimen stood, hunched slightly, wearing a short-sleeved grey shirt, a yarmulke on his head, his right hand gripping his left wrist, his watch-wearing wrist. Yehezkel sat to the left of the frame, in a starched white shirt, looking stern, his long, white beard the focal point for the camera, the part of the image against which everything else was set. He was eighty-seven years old. It was the last time that my father saw him. It was the only time that I ever saw him.

On the other side of the piano was a wooden cabinet, the bottom of which served as storage for some of Mimi’s papers, the top part housing the few books that she claimed as her own in this mighty House of Books: some cookery books, some detective thrillers, a few popular histories. After she died, Chimen kept her books there, never attempting to empty the shelves, to fill them with his own volumes. There were more photos in front of the books, including one of me. I was thirteen years old, in my black school blazer, black trousers, white shirt, and my red and black striped tie; I was still pre-pubescent, my face cherubic, hairless, barely five feet tall. I was standing next to Denis Healey, one of
the Labour Party’s leading politicians, a cabinet minister in the governments of the 1960s and 1970s, and a man who had fought to keep the party on an even keel as it tacked ever further to the left in the 1980s. He was, in the middle years of that decade, shadow foreign secretary – the opposition Labour Party’s leading spokesperson on foreign affairs. A large, grey-suited man, with extraordinary bushy eyebrows, he towered over me in the picture. We were on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament – an improbable visit arranged by Mimi’s friend Rose Uren, whose dental services the MP used. (Calling in favours from other clients, she also commandeered hard-to-come by tickets to the Royal Opera House, and, to my father’s absolute delight, Centre Court tickets to Wimbledon.) There were better photos of me, but I doubt there were any that made Chimen quite so happy. For, loathed by much of the left, Healey had become something of a political role-model to the ex-Communist as they both grew older; a man of moderate socialist convictions who was not afraid to stand up to the Soviet Union as well as to the ideologues inside his own political party.

Back in the dining room, and apparently at random, piles of books spiralled upwards from the carpeted floor. Sometimes heaps would materialise on the dining room table – a vanguard testing the waters, seeing how long it would take Mimi to swat them away. The table-top itself was entirely her territory. ‘Frankly’, recalled Elliott Medrich, ‘there was no such thing as you were done eating. Food was fuel. There was no question that she recognised this to be her first responsibility. The meals, as you well know, the next course was always in preparation. She always made sure that whoever you were you participated. Always made sure that you were heard from, that there was a real effort made to assure the conversation wouldn’t go on around you, that you became a part of it. The third thing she always did – whenever I would come, all the relatives at one point or another would be in
the house’. It was somewhere between an obligation and a delight: a distant cousin would arrive from overseas, and the entire extended family was commanded to attend them at Hillway.

Chimen held court at the dining table, and, in between trundling in platters of food from the kitchen, Mimi would add in the occasional pithy remark, puncturing academic bubbles as she saw fit. ‘The dinner table’ noted Elliott, ‘was clearly a partnership between the two of them. They obviously honed this over many years – because it never changed. They’d figured out how to do this’. It was a double-act that kept their salon functioning even as the world of Marxist political ideas and the fascination with Marx’s texts, which had first drawn so many to Hillway and into late-night conversations with Chimen, came to seem increasingly irrelevant. At the height of the Cold War, the minutiae of Marxist and socialist literature had mattered in a very profound way. The people of Hillway, in the salon’s earlier incarnation, had not been debating esoterica: they were – or at least they believed they were – discussing the future, coming to an understanding of how the world was changing and of how society would be organised in the future. In such a world, Chimen’s library had totemic, talismanic powers. It was, to Marxists, a socialist Ark of the Covenant representing power, knowledge, the words of secular gods. No wonder scholars and politicians and revolutionaries from the world over flocked to Chimen’s House of Books.

By the 1970s, however, not only was Chimen’s infatuation with Communism a thing of the distant past; more generally, the world’s fascination with the Bolshevik vision was in serious decline. Watching progressives the world over move away from the ideas that he had been so passionate about, Chimen must have had an inkling of how Yehezkel had felt as he published one majestic volume after another of his religious commentaries in a world that, outside of the enclaves of Orthodoxy, had less and less
time for scholarship such as his. ‘Progress is destroying the Jewish religion’, the itinerant Jewish novelist and journalist Joseph Roth wrote, sadly, as far back as 1926, in
The Wandering Jews
. ‘Fewer and fewer believers are holding out, and…the numbers of the faithful are dwindling.’ In his own circles, Yehezkel was a
gaon
, a Talmudic genius. Outside those circles, by the 1970s he was an old man from a vanished world. He had followers – tens of thousands of whom would attend his funeral in Jerusalem in 1976 – but they lived in a self-enclosed universe, sealed off from the broader, secular society around them.

In Volozhin, Yehezkel had studied the Brisker Method with the descendants of the famous Rabbi Hayim ben Yitshak, who himself had studied with the Vilna Gaon, one of the most influential Jewish scholars of the eighteenth century. Under the guidance of Hayim Soloveitchik, students in the late nineteenth century learned to analyse the context in which ideas were developed, as well as the literal meaning of the words themselves. So influential, so coldly logical, was Soloveitchik’s Brisker technique that it had revolutionised Talmudic scholarship. It let in new ideas – it had room for scientific theory, for medicine, for the ideas that were daily altering the lives of men and women around the world. In contrast to this sophisticated methodology, the students scorned what they termed
pilpul
, the parroting of obscure textual detail, the forcing of disparate quotations and phrases into agreement with each other, without a deeper understanding of the issues being discussed. By the 1970s, the debates about Marxist minutiae had taken on something of a
pilpul
quality – an obsessive reading, for hidden meaning, of tomes that no longer had the power to change the world. Chimen’s socialist library was starting to lose its totemic power. It was becoming dusty.

When Chimen’s life ended in 2010, in a post-Marxist world, many of the volumes that he had so prized had been reduced to
curiosity items. The inflated monetary value assigned to them at the height of Soviet power was now as hard to comprehend as the six figure prices accorded tulips in the flower markets of Amsterdam for a brief period in the seventeenth century. But, despite these shifting sands, in the decades prior to his death such was the reputation both of Chimen and of his House of Books that the salon remained a vital part of London’s intellectual scene.

As more of his close friends and relatives started to die – Alec Waterman succumbed to a stroke in 1966; Henry Collins, in 1969, to prostate cancer; Robinson to pancreatic cancer in 1974; his brothers Moshe and Yaakov David in 1975 and 1977; Jacob Talmon in 1980; Piero Sraffa in 1983 – Chimen entered a new phase in life: as a grandfather. He would take breaks from his work and entertain the children who were, after a generation’s gap, again running riot through the rooms of Hillway. Visitors popping in unannounced could find him balancing Yehezkhel’s gnarled old cane, its lineage traceable back into the eighteenth century, on the tips of his fingers, and dancing around the dining room, to the amusement of his five grandchildren and the various other young cousins who were effortlessly absorbed into the house by Mimi and her mothering instincts. Or performing his other circus party trick: balancing stacks of plastic cups on his head and doing the Charlie Chaplin pigeon-toed walk. Given recognition and validation in the academic world, perhaps he felt able to relax just a little bit, to learn not to take himself quite so seriously.

In between meals, he would clear space on either the kitchen or dining room table and take out the little wooden domino box. Unlike regular dominoes, small black rectangles with indented white dots, these were large wooden dominoes, the dots painted in a different colour for each number. For children, the colours made the game of Russian Dominoes easy to learn. There are many variants of dominoes; in this one your aim, as a player, was twofold: most immediately, to try to create a snake of dominoes,
as well as side-arms coming off of the first double-numbered domino to be crossed, the ends of which collectively added up to a multiple of five. If they did, that number was added to your score. As the double-numbers were added into the equation, as the game unfolded, you could end up with numerous domino end-points, and scores that, on occasion, went into the thirties. Your second strategy was to get rid of all the dominoes in your possession. Once you were all out, you added up the numbers left in your opponent’s hand to the nearest five, and added that score to your own. The manipulation of the numbers was endlessly fascinating to Chimen the chess scholar. Usually we played to five hundred points, which could involve ten or twenty rounds. Sometimes we played up to a thousand. The hours would vanish as we played. On occasion, like a particularly long game of cricket, our matches would stretch across an entire weekend. Mimi would, eventually, order us to stop, so that she could use the table upon which we had ventured to trespass. When we were young, I later realised, Chimen would go easy, letting his grandchildren build up big scores, deliberately mis-strategising. As we got older, he tried harder. By the time I was a teenager, my grandfather and I would pit our wills against each other, endlessly playing this game conjured up out of the memory of the far-off decades of his own childhood.

Around the dining room table, at huge family lunches and dinners, Chimen would ask a young child’s advice or comment on a matter of world politics, and would then say, in all earnestness, ‘I agree with every-zing you say’. He’d smile slightly, as if infinitely amused by the interaction; amused, but not in a condescending way – rather he was happy that here was a young person capable of intelligent comment on matters of import. ‘The ways of the world are mysterious, but everything works out in the end’, might have been the sentiment behind that hint of a smile.

As they had done ever since they were first married, Mimi and Chimen continued to host enormous Seders – one on each of the first two nights of Passover. Some of their friends from the Communist days continued to come as guests. There were always a number of overseas visitors, and, of course, the core of the family: my parents and us three children; Jenny and Al and their kids; and a profusion of relatives from Mimi’s side of the family – Peter and Vavi and their children; Eve and her son Tom. Sara would arrive laden down with platters of food. Lily and Martin would appear with their children and grandchildren, as would Phyllis and her husband Max. Minna did not often come for Seders. And neither, by this time, did Raph.

The dining room table with the addition of three or four
fold-up
wooden tables ranged in a long row off of it, would, somehow, seat nearly thirty people. There would be bottles of sickly sweet kosher Manischewitz wine positioned up and down the table – and, sometimes, far better wines conjured up by my
wine-collecting
uncle Al; piles of matzo, dishes stacked full of delicious haroses (a nut, apple and raisin concoction), bowls filled with hard boiled eggs, and dishes containing the ceremonial salt water, bitter herbs and a lamb shank.

Chimen, as he had done for decades, would stand at the head of the table, dressed in his best suit, the unruly white hair that normally protruded wildly off the back of his bald pate tamed for the occasion, and would read through the entire Haggadah. He did so at breakneck speed, alternating between Hebrew and English so often that it became almost impossible to focus on which language he was speaking. Mimi continued to cook extraordinary amounts of food. There would always be appetisers of smoked salmon on crackers and an enormous pot of matzo-ball soup, followed by a massive roast turkey, roast potatoes and other
vegetables: carrots, onions, mushrooms, perhaps some green beans. Into the mid-1990s, no effort was spared. ‘Our Seder was magnificent’, Chimen wrote to me in late April 1995. ‘The culinary side was done by Jenny, your Mum and Dad, under Mimi’s sharp eyes and major planning and designing. The dinner was supreme. The Haggadah part was well orchestrated. We finished after midnight’.