The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Yehezkel was thus no stranger to deprivation and loss. Yet even with such a training and a history, such an ability to put his own story into the context of the larger story of human, and in particular Jewish, history, human tragedy and the quest for an understanding of God, losing the bulk of his library in 1920 must have been a bitter blow. Of course, in rabbinic lore the words from burned holy books and scrolls found their way up to Heaven – but, even so, in his heart of hearts Yehezkel must have deeply mourned their loss. Perhaps it was the story of the fire, repeated in subsequent years around the family dinner table, which triggered in Chimen (who was a toddler at the time) his life-long obsession with collecting books. Two things, however, mitigated the loss: all-importantly, Yehezkel’s family had survived the fire; and, secondly, his manuscript, painstakingly handwritten in elegant Hebrew lettering – the early volumes of a sprawling set of commentaries on a body of teachings called the Tosefta, which he would write over six decades, titled Chazon Yehezkel – had been with him in Minsk and had thus avoided the conflagration.

  ***

  Chimen spent a lifetime insulating himself from the flames, surrounding himself with so many books and so much knowledge, that something could be guaranteed to survive out of the ashes, out of the chaos of history. ‘When it came to books’, his friend Dovid Katz, a Yiddish scholar whom Chimen had first met when Katz enrolled to study with him in 1976, believed, ‘there could be no left or right, no good or bad, for Chimen: they were part of a magical sphere of life that he had command of like no other. How he loved to show the works of a rabbi and a radical philosopher on the same shelf, showing how the bookshelf is the true territory of human harmony’.

  Even after Chimen left the Communist Party, he retained his fascination with the history of European socialism, with the appeals to dreams contained within the complex theories of Marx and the dramatic writings of revolutionaries such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Psychologically exiled from the activism of revolutionary politics, he became in many ways its intellectual curator. ‘Marx’, he told Tariq Ali, half a lifetime later, ‘is much more important in his political comments than as an economist of lasting value. This is what keeps me interested in Marx. His interpretation of history is brilliant. He realised before the word globalisation came into being that the capitalist system is becoming bigger and bigger, and not attached to individuals. This point he noticed already in the Communist Manifesto’. Marx remained his lifelong intellectual icon. ‘He opened my eyes to understanding history’, Chimen told Ali during the shooting of the documentary on his collection, the old spark momentarily reignited in his tired, watery, antique eyes, as he lovingly got out book after book from his collection to show his awed interviewer. For those minutes, time fell away and Chimen was no longer crippled by Parkinson’s disease. Instead, he was the still-vibrant man who would take me on walks up the hill to visit Highgate Cemetery where Marx lies buried. For those minutes the emergency medical assistance button hanging from his neck was simply a vanitas, a delicate reminder of mortality, rather than an urgent part of his daily wardrobe. ‘His sharpness of style, writing in English, German, French, absolutely brilliant in all three languages. It captured my imagination’. Chimen smiled a crooked, chipped-toothed smile as he said this, shuffled over to a shelf, pulled an 1886 anarchist edition of the Communist Manifesto from his shelf, and laughed as he showed Ali how the anarchists, the self-proclaimed desperado freedom fighters, had censored passages they disagreed with.

  ***

  The House of Books that my grandparents lived in, as well as the lives they had lived and the people who made up their vast social circle, drew me across the generational lines and into their world. As a result of the gatherings I took part in at Hillway, for all of my life the shadows and ghosts of history have peered over my shoulder.

  From my early childhood days, Chimen taught me how to interpret the world around me, how to use ideas carefully to create patterns out of chaos. He made me realise that we are, in large part, defined by our pasts – both our individual pasts and our collective histories. We are the aggregate of generations of experiences lived by our ancestors; but we are also, inevitably, products of our times, influenced by wars and revolutions, by social upheavals, by economic turmoil, by scientific advances and so on and so forth. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach famously noted that ‘Man is what man eats’. True; but man is also what man’s ancestors ate and what man’s surrounding community eats. However much we try, we cannot entirely escape the past. What I consumed at the House of Books was not just Mimi’s food, but also the grand feast of ideas that accompanied every meal.

  And so, we come back to Chimen’s death. When my books arrived – my Plato, my Thomas More, my Aristotle, my Marx, my de Tocqueville – I put them on the top shelf in my study. There they sat, just within reach if I stood on a chair and stretched my arms up high. Close enough to take down when I needed them. Just far enough away that I did not feel compelled to plough through them all instantly. They were, I reminded myself, still really my grandfather’s books, not mine. In addition to those volumes, I reclaimed a huge photo album that I had made for Chimen on his seventieth birthday, a collection of family images going back to the mid-nineteenth century. I was fourteen when I made that album; with hindsight I realise it was the first serious history project that I ever embarked upon, scavenging up family contacts around the globe, writing to them, asking them to rummage through old boxes for photos of people now long dead, and then coaxing them to conjure up biographical information on those individuals.

  The books and the album, together, represent to me a vision of stewardship. Of understanding how history is both deeply personal and also collective. They help me see how it is made up of memories, but also of documents. They force me to appreciate the role in history both of great doers and thinkers, but also of anonymous individuals. I look at them, and my past comes alive.

  Master Bedroom:

  The Citadel

  We do recognise our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer – the Revolution.

  Karl Marx, speech at anniversary of The People’s Paper (1856).

  MY EARLIEST MEMORY of Hillway is not one of entry, of coming up the garden path and through the red front door, but rather of the citadel: Chimen and Miriam’s bedroom.

  I was three years old, old enough to call my grandfather ‘Nye’ and my grandmother ‘Mimi’, and old enough to be taken to a party at University College London, where Chimen was chair of the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department. If memory serves, it was, ironically enough, a Christmas party. I have a vague recollection of a small room with what seemed to be a hobbits’ door, through which one entered to get a present from a bearded Santa Claus; it had to have been made for hobbits, since even Chimen, at barely five feet tall, had to stoop to enter. And I have another half-memory – maybe from the same day, maybe from another – of Chimen taking me to see a palaeontologist friend who plied me with trilobites and spiralling anemones, and then sent me merrily on my way. I was the oldest grandchild, and my grandfather loved showing me off to all his colleagues. As soon as I learned to walk, he started taking me to the university, parading me through its marbled hallways and past the glass case in which resided the embalmed body of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, on the way to eat in the faculty cafeteria.

  After that party, Nye brought me back to Hillway, for Mimi to cook us dinner. At some point that evening, thick fog rolled in – a pale imitation of the foul and deadly Dickensian pea-soupers that blanketed London into the 1950s, but nevertheless dense enough to bring traffic to a standstill. Chimen tried to get me home to my parents’ house, twelve miles away in west London, and failed. An appalling driver at the best of times, the fog simply overwhelmed him. He turned around and, at a snail’s pace, brought me back to Hillway.

  I screamed bloody murder that night. Lying between Mimi and Chimen, in their musty old bedroom, surrounded by so
many books they were impossible to count, I sobbed for hours. Long before dawn broke, Chimen had had enough. As soon as the fog lifted, he bundled me into my coat, put on his own bulky sheepskin jacket, dumped me into the back seat of his rickety old white Ford Cortina, and headed toward the Westway overpass and then on to Chiswick. By five o’clock, my bleary-eyed parents had reclaimed me.

  ***

  Books cast strange shadows in a bedroom. Crammed next to each other, the varied heights and colours and textures of the spines reflect and absorb light in different ways.

  Chimen and Mimi’s bedroom had one little window, grimy with soot. If you pushed it hard, it opened outward, onto a view of the back garden and, behind that, the tall spire of a north London church. The holes of a painted white latch placed over white pegs in the frame determined how much fresh air would be let in, but it was seldom opened. To the right of the window were piles of books and papers and a series of metal filing cabinets. To the left was a tiny wardrobe, where Chimen’s clothes hung, as well as a small chest of drawers for my grandparents’ underwear and shirts. Next to that, on the wall facing the bed, was a huge old wooden roll-top desk, every inch covered with ancient books, hand-written correspondence, and a vast array of crumbling, antiquated documents. Above the desk were wooden bookshelves bracketed into the wall and sagging with the weight of photograph albums, books dating back to the eighteenth century, and old newspapers. Up on those shelves, and in waterproof plastic bags atop more shelves in the upstairs hallway, was a collection of William Morris books and manuscripts, including the original woodcut for Morris’s book News from Nowhere, and a complete set of Commonweal newspapers that Morris had both published and, in this case, owned. It was, in sum, Chimen asserted proudly and perhaps a touch bombastically, more important than the Morris collection owned by the British Library. On the other side of the desk was the bedroom door. Down the far wall were more bookshelves, these inside sturdy cabinets with glass doors. Behind those doors, which were not in my memory locked, were hundreds of the rarest socialist books and manuscripts in the world. Books with Marx’s hand-written notes, volumes annotated by Lenin, treatises by Trotsky and by Rosa Luxemburg (including the typed manuscript of her doctoral thesis), original documents from the revolutionary Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, whose members had marched, and ultimately fought, for the right to vote, for economic dignity, for the ability to organise into trade unions, and for Parliaments that represented the people instead of corrupt, moneyed interests. ‘For three-and-twenty years’, the original Chartists wrote in their petition to Parliament in July 1838, nearly a quarter of a century after the Napoleonic wars had ended, ‘we have enjoyed a profound peace. Yet with all these elements of national prosperity, and with every disposition and capacity to take advantage of them, we find ourselves overwhelmed with public and private misery’.

  In homage to working-class martyrs from earlier revolutionary epochs, Chimen had, at some point in time, bought at auction a sword made to commemorate the cutting down of protestors at St. Peter’s Field, in Manchester, in 1819, a generation before the Chartists. The ‘Peterloo’ massacre, as it was known, had resulted when cavalry rode into a huge crowd, gathered to demand Parliamentary reform, to forcibly disperse them; eighteen people were killed and hundreds more were injured. It was a long, slightly curved sabre, decorated with a set of floral motifs painted onto the metal near its hilt. Its handle was striped. The point, even after nearly a century and a half, was still murderously sharp. Chimen had kept the totemic weapon just long enough to realise that, as Jack later recalled, should his young children – Jack was a teenager, Jenny still in primary school – stumble upon it while exploring the nooks and crannies of Hillway, they might accidentally shed blood once again with its blade; and then he had resold it.

  The shelves of Chimen and Mimi’s bedroom were double-stacked, hidden jewels invisible to the naked eye, like old da Vinci canvasses with layers of paintings one atop the other. Like genies, waiting to be released when their bottles are uncorked, so the revolutionary ghosts of hundreds of years of human struggle lay in Chimen’s tomes, waiting, waiting, for someone to open the volumes; waiting, waiting, for the chance to leap into the light once more. Every so often, a reader would indeed release these genies, and then hidden worlds would be revealed. Open those books and the Rights of Man would come alive; the cruelties inflicted on nineteenth-century workers would be laid bare; the aspirations of generations of revolutionaries would be explained. Contradictory and contentious programmes for the improvement of humanity jostled each other on Chimen’s shelves, as in life their authors had sparred at political meetings, in cafes and taverns throughout Europe. Volumes calling for universal suffrage could be found alongside detailed justifications for the dictatorship of the proletariat; celebrations of liberal individualism were shelved next to texts that referred to those same individuals, in the mass, by slogans – the glorious proletariat, the filthy bourgeoisie.

  By the late 1950s, Chimen’s greatest intellectual joy lay in his ability to find, and to purchase, rare books. Part of that joy lay in what he knew he would read in those books; he had the passions of a true historian, he was a connoisseur of little details. When he read a book, he read it not simply for the main text, but for the footnotes, the name of the publisher, and the location of the printers. All were clues; all helped him to understand the milieu in which the book was crafted. The differences between editions gave him a glimpse of the author’s evolving thoughts on a topic. The bibliographies enabled him to chart an intellectual odyssey.

  But another part of the joy lay simply in the hunt. He would scour the annual Book Auction Records, exploring what had been sold at which auctions and to whom over the past year. He would examine the prices carefully – and thus be able to calculate how much he would be likely to have to pay for books and manuscripts that he wanted to add to his collection. On Mondays and Tuesdays, he would attend Sotheby’s sales. On Wednesdays, Christies held their auctions. He would turn up on Chancery Lane when Hodgsons was selling books that he was interested in purchasing. In those post-war years, explained the rare books dealer Christopher Edwards, who knew Chimen decades later, ‘There were so many books coming onto the market. It was a more liquid market. There was a greater supply’. And, because of that, prices were suppressed. Chimen could, in the 1950s, indulge his passion for book-buying in a way that he never could have done had he started out on his collecting a generation later. And, like London’s other knowledgeable dealers, he could take advantage of the auction-houses’ ignorance to buy books cheaply and then to resell them to private purchasers for a handsome profit. ‘It was’, noted Edwards, ‘a bit like the diamond business. It was a group to which a relatively small number of people had access. There was a well-established, not very well-known market to which only the dealers were admitted’.

  Chimen approached books with the tenderness of an artisan, cognizant of every little detail, every flaw, every unique blemish. ‘You can recognise the edition by the little woodcut on page 31 and also on the title page’, he wrote to his friend and fellow rare books collector, the economist Piero Sraffa, on 23 November 1959, of a particularly rare 1888 edition of the Communist Manifesto. ‘In some copies there is also a misprint; after Fleet a comma follows and then the word St. There are many reprints but they have slightly different woodcuts. I could easily recognise it if I could see it.’ To a layperson, the misprint would have been unnoticeable; to Chimen it was as important as is a misprinted old stamp to a philatelist. He boasted in his letters that he had acquired ‘the rarest pamphlet of Marx in English’. He mourned being outbid, by £20, for a Marx letter that he had sought to buy at auction. He competed with Sraffa for the privilege of purchasing Marx esoterica. ‘I ordered heavily from Douglas, in Edinborough [sic], but missed all the items’, he wrote in a hurried note to his friend in early April, 1966. ‘Probably you succeeded in getting them.’

  Much later in his life, Chimen turned his eye to cataloguing
his own library. It was a task he stubbornly refused to finish, despite having catalogued many of the world’s most important Judaica libraries for Sotheby’s, despite having even compiled a catalogue of catalogues that he would occasionally show to fellow bibliographers. ‘It takes the magic out of it. It becomes a thing to sell, not a real collection. Once you catalogue the book, it becomes a dead object almost’, was how Christopher Edwards interpreted this reluctance. Chimen loved being courted by would-be buyers; adored being taken out to restaurants and clubs, such as the Garrick, in central London, where dealers could flatter him by talking about the importance of his collection. But, when push came to shove, he did not want to admit that, apart from a few missing pieces (he bemoaned the fact that he did not have any original issues of Karl Marx’s newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, published in Cologne during the revolutionary year of 1848 and into 1849) his collection – his life’s project – was complete. Even when his insurance agent, Will Burns, repeatedly wrote him letters requesting that he provide a catalogue of his library, Chimen managed to find one excuse after another. He was too busy; he was travelling; he was ill; he would do it next month. ‘I had hoped to do it during the summer vacation’, he informed Burns in late October 1981, ‘but unfortunately, as Miriam had an accident in Israel, I was unable to do so. I hope to complete it towards the end of January’. He did not, and Burns wrote him several more letters on the matter before, eventually, simply giving up. The collection remained insured only as general contents; had disaster struck and the House of Books burned to the ground, Chimen would have found, to his horror, that his inability to provide a catalogue was a costly oversight.

  What Chimen did do, though, was pen a series of memoranda about how he had acquired some of his most rare prizes. He wrote, for example, about how, in the early 1950s, he had managed to buy William Morris’s complete collection of the Socialist League’s journal, The Commonweal, along with the wooden Bible-box, with a rexine (artificial leather) cover dyed blue and lined with a white felt-like material, that Morris himself had constructed to house a 1539 Bible, and in which, ultimately, he kept his copies of the revolutionary newspaper. The pages of the publication – its words printed in double columns originally on a monthly basis, then later weekly, from 1886 until 1895, and filled with the revolutionary musings of Morris, Marx’s daughter Eleanor, and other radical luminaries of the late Victorian years – had passed from Morris to his close friend, the typographer Emery Walker; from Walker to his daughter; and from her to a poet named Norman Hidden. Chimen eventually bought it from Hidden for £50. And there they stayed, in their Bible-box, high up on a wooden shelf in the upstairs hallway at 5 Hillway, for more than half a century.