***
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.
Prologue II:
Saying Hello
Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history, which is also the unity of life.
Fernand Braudel, On History (1980).
GROWING 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 af
ter 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.
His knowledge was beyond panoramic. Chimen knew things that were not just rare nuggets of information but were literally unknown to other scholars. And he knew just when to reveal his hidden intellectual treasures and when to play coy and let other people take the spotlight. Well into his nineties Chimen retained a photographic memory, a remarkable range of knowledge, and an engagement with the world of ideas that was reminiscent of participants from the great salons of bygone centu
ries. His last published work was a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books in 2007, when he was ninety years old, providing hitherto unknown details of the ill-fated attempt by the literary critic Walter Benjamin to escape over the Pyrenees to elude his Nazi pursuers in 1940; Benjamin did get over the mountains, but was found dead shortly afterwards, the victim either of suicide or of murder. Chimen wrote about how he had discovered, through conversations with the niece of the woman who had tried to smuggle Benjamin to freedom, that Benjamin was carrying with him a black briefcase containing a manuscript ‘more important than his life’. Neither the briefcase nor the manuscript was ever found. It must, wrote Chimen sadly, have been ‘destroyed by whoever found it immediately after Benjamin’s suicide’. Shortly after Chimen wrote this letter, Carl Djerassi (an emeritus professor of chemistry from Stanford University, who had been instrumental in the development of the contraceptive pill and steroids), visited him. In retirement, Djerassi was writing novels and plays, and he was currently researching for a theatre piece – Four Jews on Parnassus – in which four famous Jews, from different walks of life, would get into a conversation. One of his characters was Benjamin, and one of the themes he wanted to explore was the missing briefcase that Chimen had detailed. Chimen and Djerassi spent time together talking at Hillway. Afterwards, the chemist wrote, enthusiastically, that my grandfather had ‘bewitched’ him.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 3