The House of Twenty Thousand Books (8 page)

Later in life, Chimen lectured on the Byelorussian-born Hebrew novelist and journalist Perets Smolenskin, who believed strongly in a Jewish national identity, yet, in the mid-nineteenth century, after migrating to Vienna and modifying his first name to Peter, argued equally fervently against the role of the rabbinate in Jewish life. Smolenskin, Chimen explained to his students, believed that ‘yes, we have to campaign against the rabbis in Russia and Poland, who are against education, who are against enlightenment, against teaching Jews skills. They are remnants of an obscurantist age. We have to combat them’. In his musings on Smolenskin, I hear echoes of my grandfather’s own complicated feelings.

The young, rebellious Chimen’s views of his father were contagious. In a letter that Mimi wrote to Chimen before their marriage, she, too, casually referred to her future father-in-law as a ‘reactionary’. Again, the gentle, sweet, completely non-dogmatic grandma, who made her home so welcoming to so many people over the decades, is in this short note, this missive from a young woman in love with a self-proclaimed revolutionary, nowhere to be seen.

As the middle ground fell out of European politics, politically
engaged young people increasingly felt they had to take sides. Disillusioned with religion, appalled by the Western democracies’ inaction as fascism spread its roots and Spain became a testing ground for the new Nazi arsenal, surrounded by the misery unleashed by economic collapse, my grandparents had set their course toward what they saw as an inevitable communist future.

In 1937, while still studying at the Hebrew University, Chimen had been elected General Secretary of the Students Federation of Palestine, where he organised a strike against increased tuition fees at the university, and agitated on behalf of the International Brigade in Spain. Over the next two years, he defied the British authorities in Palestine by organising May Day parades, despite a ban on such left-wing demonstrations, during the last of which his marchers shouted what he described as ‘anti-Chamberlain, anti-Munich’ slogans at the façade of the German embassy. And he led a series of classes on Marxism for left-wing students at the university. He also spoke at a meeting organised by the outlawed Communist Party of Palestine, justifying the show trials that were underway in the Soviet Union at the time. ‘The meeting caused a great deal of discussion’, he wrote in one of the 1950 biographies, ‘and we were the subject of an attack by the official Labour leadership’. As I read these lines, in Chimen’s familiar handwriting, I feel as if I have caught my grandfather in a filthy act; I wish my eyes had been averted. I wish I had not opened the manila envelope containing photocopies of the documents.

But despite his enthusiasm, once Chimen returned to England and was marooned in London by the outbreak of war, he did not immediately join the Party. It was not, apparently, for want of trying. Rather, he ran up against a paradox. Until 1941, the Communist Party of Great Britain, while espousing the necessity of internationalism, did not accept foreign nationals as members. As soon as the Party’s policy changed, Chimen joined his local branch. For the next seventeen years, he was a committed
member, taking part in organising drives and pamphleteering; and he became a central figure in the National Jewish Committee. To be in the Party was to be a fully-fledged devotee; one could not join by half measures. For both Chimen and Mimi, shorn of the religion of their childhoods, it served as much as an expression of faith as of political intent.

On the National Jewish Committee, Chimen quickly acquired a reputation as a top theorist. ‘Abramsky and Zaidman’, wrote the historian Felix Srebrnik, explaining Chimen’s little place in a revolution that never happened, ‘who had lived in the Soviet Union and Romania, respectively, and were fluent in a number of languages, seem to have been its [the National Jewish Committee’s] chief theoreticians’. Behind the scenes, he worked to convert Stepney and the surrounding East End neighbourhoods to Communism – work that would pay off in 1945, when the area elected a Communist, Phil Piratin, as its Member of Parliament. The committee members became experts on the status of Palestine, and on the challenges presented by the competing claims of Arabs and Jews to the country. Increasingly, as the Communist Party looked to stamp its mark on the post-war landscape, at the urging of Palme Dutt – an Oxford-educated loner and author of the book
Fascism and Social Revolution
, who served for decades as the Party’s leading theoretician – they expanded their analysis to include the whole Middle East, and what would happen to British colonies in the region after the war ended. ‘Enemy number one was British imperialism’, Chimen told an audience decades later, as he talked about the early post-war years and the Party’s policies during this time. ‘The task of communists was to fight against the British Empire and for the liberation of the colonies’. As such, they made contact with left-wing organisers in Persia, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and even Sudan. A woman from Iraq smuggled in communist literature from her homeland, sewn into the hem of her coat; British
customs found other literature in her suitcase, though, and she was swiftly deported. Later, she would become a senior political figure, before disappearing, and, Chimen believed, being executed, following the Ba’athist coup that brought Saddam Hussein to power.

The Party’s Middle East team, and, in the background, the startlingly intense figure of Palme Dutt, became acknowledged experts on the region, looked to for policy advice by left-wing groups throughout Europe; ultimately, Chimen subsequently said, with a mixture of pride and contrition, Soviet Russia even gave a nod to the expertise of the English Communists when shaping its Middle Eastern policy. Taking this knowledge of what was still Palestine, and of the countries surrounding it, Chimen and his team set about evangelising the Jews of East London, convincing them that their future, as well as that of the Jews of the Middle East, lay with Marxism. ‘These theoreticians’, wrote Srebrnik, ‘some of them unassimilated immigrants, did not themselves run for public office, but acted as mentors to the formally non-Jewish Stepney Communist Party’.

There is something clandestine in this description. Something slightly furtive. In my head, I see Chimen, racing off to a Party meeting, socialist pamphlets crammed under his arm, weighty Marxist tomes filling his battered leather briefcase. When he wrote articles for Communist Party publications, more often than not he used a pseudonym: C. Allen, or sometime simply A. Chimen. He must have suspected that the intelligence services were monitoring him (although, in fact, MI5 does not appear to have a Chimen Abramsky file in its archives); his friend Hymie Fagan, in his unpublished memoirs, recollected that from the time of the 1926 General Strike on, each senior Party figure would be tailed by a special forces officer, many of whom they came to recognise on the streets after a while. And, like all good Communists during these years, Chimen probably took steps to
avoid compromising himself and his friends. I see him in a rumpled, untailored, dark suit and a dark tie with an overly large knot, adorning his small body, hat pulled down on his head. I see him taking the London underground, the stations and abandoned tunnels of which sheltered thousands of men and women when the blitzkrieg was at its height, and emerging in the bombed-out East End, picking his way through the rubble, making his way in the primordial dark of the blackout to the all-important Party meeting. It is not too much of a leap from this scene to another of my favourite images of Chimen: in the mid-1950s, he somehow acquired parts of the library of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor. It included six draft pages from Marx’s
Theories of Surplus Value
; a long handwritten letter, in English, which Marx wrote to one Dr Kauffmann in 1875; and two pages of notes for an article on Poland that Marx had penned in 1860. It was, in all likelihood, from that same Marx family collection that Chimen somehow acquired a stash of intimate Marx family letters: these included one that the political philosopher had written to his daughter and signed, mischievously, as ‘Dr Crankey’; and another that Marx had written about his wife’s declining health, which he had signed ‘Old Nick’. Having scouted around for a buyer for the papers, Chimen discovered that Mao’s government in China was interested. The story passed down in family lore is impossibly vague, but it involves Chimen waiting at the base of the Eifel Tower, in Paris, with bags of precious Marx documents. There, he exchanged them for a briefcase full of cash. Somehow, the image reeks of the Cold War, of upturned collars and shadows falling over cobblestoned streets.

All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were
socialist and communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked crumbling them simply by touching them. In this one set of shelves in this one corner of the bedroom were all the intellectual components of hundreds of years of socialist thought. One could learn, in these few cubic feet, the difference between anarchism and communism, between social democracy and Bolshevism, between advocates of a peasant-based revolution and believers in the historic destiny of the urban working class. One could access some of England’s finest radical pamphlets and some of Russia’s most vital revolutionary texts. One could learn about 1848, Europe’s year of revolt, about revolutions and counter-revolutions, about martyred trade unionists and utopian socialist dreamers.

When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated on a number of articles about Marx from the early 1950s on – they had met through the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party – decided to write their book
Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International
, the books and documents in Chimen and Mimi’s bedroom provided the nucleus for their research. It was, as Chimen had always intended it to be, a working library.

The book took Chimen and Henry nearly a decade to research. Chimen found it hard to know when to stop researching and when to start writing. One or other of them would write whole sections and then Chimen would read it again and send a note to his collaborator telling him that it needed to be entirely rewritten. It could, occasionally, be frustrating for Henry. ‘Chim, you old lobus!’ one letter from Henry, dated 6 March 1963, began. ‘What about your promised draft…? I think we should celebrate the final completion of the work.’ The book was, eventually, published by Macmillan in 1965, and, perhaps surprisingly given the topic, was widely, and favourably reviewed, not just in the
left-wing 
press, such as the
Daily Worker
, but also in a number of mainstream and even conservative journals in Britain and America. The
Economist
printed an essay on the book, in which Marx was referred to as undoubtedly the greatest intellectual figure of his age. The
Times
reviewed it. In America, the
New
York
Times
praised it. A year after it came out, my grandfather wrote a note to his publishers letting them know that the ‘leading Soviet historical journal,
Voprosy
Istorii
K.P.S.S
. has devoted a 6 ½ page article to our book, and though it is critical on quite a number of points it also admits that it is a very scholarly work’. Chimen, who had left the Communist Party eight years earlier, and who believed himself to be on a Soviet blacklist, was gratified by the attention. He ended on what I hope was an ironic note. ‘It is quite unprecedented, to my knowledge, that a Soviet historical journal has devoted so much space to a book that is not for sale in the Soviet Union’.

Chimen had always wanted to write the definitive
English-language
biography of Karl Marx. As early as 1964, Henry and he had approached publishers with their idea. In September of that year, they had signed a contract to start work on the volume. Now, with the first book out of the way, slowly they began accumulating the materials they would need for this vast project. Chimen’s library was their starting point again; so too they used the British Library, the archives at London’s Marx House, the Social History Institute in Amsterdam, and an array of other libraries. But the biography did not happen. A few years into the project, Henry fell ill with cancer; and not long afterwards, in 1969, he died. Chimen was devastated. Throughout the funeral, he sobbed uncontrollably.

Despite occasionally talking about continuing with the project alone, the biography gradually faded away. A large part of the book-writer in Chimen died with Henry. To their friends it seemed that Henry had been the stabilising influence in the partnership,
the Engels to Chimen’s Marx, the man who could marshal a vast amount of information into something resembling a coherent narrative. Take Henry out of the equation, and there was nobody left to shape Chimen’s thoughts on Marx’s life into a readable story. An extraordinary compiler of facts, a historian-detective of the first rank, Chimen struggled, both in conversation and on the printed page, to humanise his subjects. While he understood every detail of Marx’s life, he could not write the biography of The Moor (as Marx was known to his friends) without Henry to help him; decades later, he would find it equally impossible to craft his own autobiography. Chimen continued to peruse his tomes on Marx, searching for someone else to share his passion for the life of this extraordinary character. He never quite found a replacement for Henry.

In a corner of my grandparents’ bedroom, between the fabulous treasure trove of Marx volumes and another wall crammed from floor to ceiling with myriad other rare books, as well as a couple of hardback copies of his and Henry’s volume on Marx, and a set of Isaiah Berlin’s books generously dedicated to my grandfather, was a little cupboard. My grandmother stored her few dresses there. In it, too, was a shelf stocked with bottles of spirits, to be taken downstairs for special occasions, and a ceremonial gown that had been given to Chimen long ago by an Iraqi Communist friend. I believe that little cupboard is also where Chimen kept a heavy, gnarled, dark wooden walking stick, with a silver handle and tip, a family heirloom passed down from father to son from the eighteenth century. It had belonged to his father, and Chimen had inherited it on the Rabbi’s death in 1976. When he wanted to entertain one of the grandchildren, he would disappear upstairs and return a few moments later with the heavy cane. Then, his
eyes filled with mirth, he would balance it carefully on the tip of the forefinger of his right hand, and carefully walk around the dining room, his legs slightly bowed, feet turned out, a sudden Charlie Chaplin vulnerability to his appearance.