Those pages were some of Chimen’s most treasured possessions, their crinkly texture and age-browned colour conjuring up images of the cultured, tea-drinking revolutionaries who had made up Morris’s coterie. I imagine that, in many ways, Chimen saw himself in their stories. The front page manifesto in The Commonweal’s first issue, sold to readers for one penny in February 1886, and signed by the twenty-three founders of the Socialist League, put the mission simply: ‘We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society – a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities’. On May Day the following year, the date on which Morris chose to issue his paper weekly, he and his friend E. Belfort Bax wrote an editorial: ‘We are but a few, as all those who stand by principles must be until inevitable necessity forces the world to practise those principles. We are few, and have our own work to do, which no one but ourselves can do, and every atom of intelligence and energy that there is amongst us will be needed for that work’.
In his lectures – at Oxford in the early 1960s; at Sussex University, where he delivered an epic series of lectures in 1967 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and at the numerous other universities and clubs which, from the time he reached middle-age, began asking him to speak – Chimen took audiences on panoramic journeys through the landscape of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European upheaval. He ranged from the early and mid-nineteenth century writings of the dramatist Nikolai Gogol and of Alexander Herzen, who wrote a famous pamphlet in 1851 advocating a Russian vision of peasant commune-based socialism, and of the anarchist/terrorist Mikhail Bakunin – denizens of what Isaiah Berlin termed the ‘remarkable decade’ – through to the later nineteenth-century revolutionaries, such as the early Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, and into the twentieth century with the life and times of the Bolshevik leader Lenin.
Marx’s titanic battles during the 1860s and 1870s with Bakunin (whom he had accused, in print, of being a Tsarist agent provocateur as early as 1848 – the year Europe teetered on the brink of wholesale revolution) for the soul of the First International acquired form in Chimen’s lectures. One could imagine the two patriarchs of revolution frothing at the mouth with rage, spittle flecking their copious beards, hands clutching their large brows, as they each made their gambits for the loyalties of Europe’s awakened working classes. So, too, came alive the extraordinary drama of Russia’s changing position in revolutionary thought: it moved from being the lodestar of reaction, the great bear that had crushed Central Europe’s revolutions in 1848, and a country that Europe’s revolutionaries ardently believed had to be brought low before a more general revolution was possible, to becoming the beacon for an international revolutionary movement. ‘To quote Pushkin’, Chimen told the Sussex students at the tail-end of 1967’s summer of love – trying to flatten his Russian accent, and making it sound, in the process, almost Dutch –‘Russia was lying in wait for a spark to light the flame’. His words were precise, clipped; in listening to the recordings, all these decades later, I can visualise him desperately forcing himself to slow down, to enunciate each syllable, each word correctly.
In Chimen’s library the great dramas of generations of revolutionary struggle were tucked away. Enter into this secluded suburban household and a diorama of revolutionary images, from Russian peasant communes and revolutionary committees, through to the more sedate imagery of Victorian English radicals, was there for the viewing. Take, for example, the small purple book, surprisingly heavy for its size, titled The Revolution and Siege of Paris, With the Elections and Entry of the Prussians, in 1870–71, by an anonymous author named simply ‘An Eye Witness’, (but subsequently identified as Percival J. Brine, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge) which my brother picked up for himself after Chimen’s death. Detailing the Prussian occupation of Paris that followed the Franco-Prussian War, Brine noted that, ‘The streets were only too tristes. The fortifications were entirely deserted in those parts of the city allotted to the Prussians. The houses, shops, cafes, hermetically closed all day and night, not a soul at the windows, not a thing to be bought for love or money; in fact, it was like a city of the plague, that the people had deserted’.
Or ponder the little book, with the dull red cover, that occupied shelf-space nearby. Embossed with a gold-lettered title, Paris During the Commune, 1871, it was a blow-by-blow eyewitness account, by a now-forgotten Victorian Methodist minister named William Gibson, of the great revolutionary upheaval that, for a few weeks, delivered Paris to a workers’ revolutionary committee, during the heady spring days of 1871, after the French military defeat in the Franco-Prussian war; and which, quickly and extraordinarily brutally, was obliterated by the army. ‘This day (Saturday)’, he wrote in one of the letters to the Watchman and Wesleyan Advertiser that was collected in this volume, ‘has been a day of great excitement in Paris. Having occasion to go to the Northern Railway Station at six o’clock this morning, I heard the National Guards in all directions being the rappel, and knew something must be brewing’. Gibson matter-of-factly reported on bodies lying dead in the street, of the injured being dragged away. ‘11 p.m.’, the letter concludes, ‘We hear the roll of cannon, but hope, nevertheless, to sleep in peace’.
***
As important, almost, as the words, were the ways the books felt and smelled. In turning the thick pages of old books, in heavy, cracked, cardboard covers or vellum bindings, or the crumbling, flaky pages of other volumes, one could imagine what Marx might have felt as he held a particular tome in his hands while researching his great tracts in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In the cloying smells released when ancient volumes were opened up, one could sniff out hints of lost printing techniques and paper-making methods, of inks manufactured centuries ago. In the vellum-bound author’s manuscript of William Morris’s News From Nowhere, its handcrafted, thick, cream-coloured paper pages made visible by a loosening of the gold ribbon that bound them, one could see the artistry of Morris’s woodblock illustrations. This was a book, set in a utopian, post-revolutionary future, in the year 2102, intended to fire up not just the mental faculties, but the senses as well. It was a detailed description of an imagined society after years of violent upheaval and revolution, following which the state had realised Marx and Engel’s prediction and magically ‘withered away’, a world where ‘people live and act according to the measure of their own faculties’.
In this future, private property and money did not exist. People worked not because they had to but for the intrinsic satisfaction of a job well done – like-minded workers voluntarily joined together not in factories but in ‘banded-workshops’. There were no schools, but learning was universal. Prisons were no more, their echo but a distant memory from barbaric, and thankfully long-gone, days. Formal marriages, and by extension, divorces, were relics from a benighted past. Perhaps most importantly, since everyone lived in harmony there was no need for politics or legislatures, no need for the old charade in which, on the one hand, elected representatives strove ‘to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt’, and on the other they worked ‘to delude the people into supposing that they had some share in the management of their own affairs’. Parliament was, Morris wrote, now a ‘dung market’, a magnificent building housing not politicians but manure for the fields of a newly pastoral London. It was the sort of aside that Chimen would have particularly appreciated.
Reading Morris’s own manuscript of News From Nowhere, holding it, feeling it, was a deeply visual and tactile experience. The house owned by its protagonist, ‘the old house by the Thames’, which was modelled on Morris’s own home at Kelmscott Manor, came alive in these pages. It was a house outside of time, in spirit not too dissimilar to Hillway.
***
Chimen spent his earliest years in Byelorussia, which was a part of the Russian Empire when he was born, became briefly independent after the rev
olution, and was incorporated into the Soviet Union when Chimen was still a young child; today, it is the independent state of Belarus. He was born during the Great War, in September 1916, and had spent his first few years surrounded by the civil wars and famines unleashed in the aftermath of Lenin’s revolution. Infant and childhood mortality soared in these years, in part because of the prevalence of diseases such as typhus – which presumably explains why, in early photographs, the heads of Chimen and his brothers are shorn, to counter the typhus-carrying lice. The great writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was a few years older than Chimen, and, like Chimen, was brought up in a devout household – though in Poland and, in contrast to Chimen’s upbringing, in a home dominated by a Hasidic father – recalled having his sidelocks and head hair shaved off for this reason during the First World War. ‘Mother and I went off with a policeman’, he wrote in his essay ‘The Book’. ‘Mother carrying the few things she had been permitted to pack. In a strange house full of male and female guards another boy and I had our hair cut. I saw my red sidelocks fall and I knew this was the end of them. I had wanted to get rid of them for a long time’.
Family lore had it that the famine accounted for my grandfather’s diminutive stature – his father was 5’8”, his brothers were taller; but Chimen, a toddler at a time when there was almost no food to be had, was barely 5’1”. The Revolution, the Civil War, the famine and the years of chaos, violence and transformation that followed, left their mark on Chimen quite literally. More than three-quarters of a century later, he could still remember the hysteria on the streets of Slutsk when Lenin died in 1924; the family had moved there a year earlier, the latest stopping point in Yehezkel’s itinerant wanderings through the Pale of Settlement, which had begun when he became a teenage wunderkind rabbi. And he could recall the fear his family felt after they moved to Moscow in 1929, to be nearer the government agencies they needed to petition in order to secure Rabbi Abramsky an exit visa for the United States or Palestine; Yehezkel had been offered the rabbinate in the Palestinian town of Petah Tikva, but the Soviet authorities had repeatedly rebuffed his requests to be allowed to leave.
In Moscow, Yehezkel had, at least temporarily, managed to convince the Soviet authorities to let him publish religious commentaries – this was the period when the Soviets were expounding the virtues of secular Yiddish culture. But then, not long after the family had settled in, he was arrested and imprisoned. With each rebuff, with each example of harassment, with each humiliation, Chimen had witnessed the noose tightening on his father. Yet, no longer able to believe in the religion of his ancestors, and heavily influenced by the life of the Soviet Union in which, despite his parents’ best efforts, he felt immersed, the pull of Marxism continued to draw him in. He must have felt he was living a horrendous lie: the son of an imprisoned rabbi, he no longer believed in God; heir to one of the world’s great rabbinic dynasties he was, increasingly, obsessed with secular revolution.
***
Yehezkel Abramsky was a strong man who had built up his reputation during unfathomably difficult times. During the civil war years, the area of White Russia in which the family lived repeatedly changed hands between troops loyal to the old Tsarist regime, Polish nationalists and Bolsheviks. Yehezkel had been widely written about in the European and American Jewish press after he fought back against pogromisti who killed some Jews and attempted to shave off the beards of others. Such an act was widely regarded as a peculiarly vicious insult, a desecration, since several passages in the Talmud specifically prohibited the shaving of beards. Yehezkel had not only managed to preserve his beard, but, according to reports in American Yiddish newspapers, he had even convinced a local Polish commander to sign a proclamation protecting the integrity of Rabbi Abramsky’s facial hair. This was the first time the international media paid attention to my great-grandfather.
Then, in Moscow in 1929 Yehezkel, along with a rabbinic colleague named Shlomo Yosef Zevin, was arrested for co-editing a Hebrew journal of Torah commentary titled Yagdil Torah (bound volumes of which Chimen kept all his life) and for refusing to tell an American human rights mission that life for religious Jews in the Soviet Union was entirely satisfactory. Yehezkel, then in his early forties, was seized on the street one evening by the secret police, while he and Raizl were taking an evening walk. He was interrogated in the notorious Lubyanka prison and then in Butirki, the city’s central jail. During those interrogations, he was beaten, screamed at and threatened with unspeakable torture, in attempts to get him to confess to having conspired to overthrow the Soviet government. He refused. Finally, he was sentenced to five years’ hard labour in Siberia – a sentence the severity of which was mitigated in the family’s mind only by the knowledge that he could easily have been executed. In fact, he had been sentenced to death initially, but the punishment had been commuted, probably because even then Yehezkel was known internationally among religious Jews, and men such as the writer Maxim Gorky and the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (who had been born a little over a decade before Yehezkel, and who had studied in many of the same yeshivas, before becoming the first great modern Hebrew poet) had urged Stalin’s judges to show mercy on their illustrious victim.
In Siberia, Yehezkel recalled later in life, he was forced to run barefoot in minus forty degree temperatures; he was fed near-starvation rations, only occasionally enhanced by care-packages sent to him by Raizl; and he was made to sleep on a bed that was no more than a wooden plank, on which shivering bodies lay huddled next to one another. There his guards made him thread frozen fish onto iron spits in the bitter cold – a torment so painful that he recited prayers for the dying every day before work, assuming there was a better than even chance he would not live to see the morrow. He began his prayers with the Shema, the declaration of faith, muttering in Hebrew ‘Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one’, before setting out into the inhuman cold of the Siberian winter dawn to begin the hours of torment. Wear gloves and it was impossible to thread the fish; take off the gloves, and one’s hands began to freeze.
But, despite the agony of daily life in Siberia, while in the labour camp he continued to compose his commentaries on the Tosefta. The Mishnah, the first part of the Talmud, set down in writing by Judah the Prince (Juda ha-Nasi) about two hundred years into the Christian era, detailed the religious rules that governed Jewish life in the era of the Temple, which the Romans had razed more than a century earlier, and adapted those rules for a people whose central religious institution was, physically, no longer in existence. The Tosefta, by contrast, according to some scholars, possibly emerged out of an earlier, Babylonian, school of oral Jewish religious scholarship. Like the Mishnah it was probably first organised into a coherent body of written work in the later Roman period.
Both the Mishnah and the Tosefta minutely document how Jews should behave: how they should pray, bathe, eat, when they ought to have sexual relations, how they should rest on the Sabbath and so on. Compilations of halakhah, or religious laws, they were worked out over centuries of discourse by the great sages; the rabbis represented in this text are referred to as Tana’im. But the Tosefta is a longer, more involved body of work, filled with explanatory notes and comments, its aphorisms and sayings unedited, its attributions of legal rulings to individual rabbis more complete. It includes material by Tana’im that was not included in the Mishnah. Much of the time, according to religious scholars, its passages agree with those of the Mishnah. Sometimes, however, they contradict them. The Tosefta is an extraordinarily complex work, its origins clouded in uncertainty, its overlap and difference with the Mishnah providing a wealth of material on the development of early Jewish religious law in different population centres and under a variety of political conditions.
As he slaved away in Siberia, Yehezkel worked mentally on his interpretation of this body of law, calling on his prodigious memory of religious texts to conjure up images of the passages that he would critique. Over the months, he memorised thousands of lines of his commentar
y, scribbling them down when he had a chance, late at night or early in the morning, on whatever paper he could find. Usually, it was the translucent cigarette papers that the convict-labourers could occasionally lay their hands on. Once he had written these additions to his growing commentary, he would carefully hide the papers among his personal effects.
After months of international pressure from Jewish organisations in the United States and western Europe, Yehezkel was finally released in 1931, and he arrived back at his Moscow apartment on the eve of Yom Kippur. He greeted his family and then, putting all thoughts of celebration to one side, he immediately began his fast. The family, Chimen recalled three-quarters of a century later, avoided going to synagogue that evening, fearing that if they showed themselves in public his father would once again be arrested. Yehezkel spent the next day teaching his sons the commentaries exploring the significance of the Day of Atonement. Compromise, apparently, was not in his vocabulary.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 6