The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Given a month to leave the Soviet Union, but with his passport confiscated by the Soviet authorities, Yehezkel travelled to the west, to Riga, Vilna and Berlin, and arrived in London at the end of 1931. He became a refugee. Raizl and their two youngest sons, Chimen and Menachem, were allowed to follow him out of the country shortly afterwards; but his two oldest sons, Moshe and Yaakov David were kept behind in the Soviet Union as hostages against the possibility of the rabbi speaking out too vocally against his erstwhile country. In London, Yehezkel and Raizl fasted twice weekly as an offering for their children’s freedom, and rallied an international movement to secure their sons’ release. With Europe sliding ever closer to war, Britain’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, who had taken an interest in Yehezkel Abramsky’s fate since the international campaign to save the great rabbi’s life after his arrest, found time to craft a personal appeal to the Soviets to release the Abramsky boys – Yaakov David, at the time, was in internal exile in Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, where he had married and had a son; Moshe was in Moscow. The appeal worked, and in late 1936 Moshe was allowed to leave to join the rest of his family in London. Yaakov David and his family followed a month later, spending a few months in London, where Yaakov apparently quarrelled with Yehezkel and Raizl about his lack of religious belief, before moving on to Palestine. Twelve years later, his son Jonathan, Yehezkel and Raizl’s eldest grandson, was shot dead on a Jerusalem street by a Palestinian sniper during the Arab uprising that followed Israel’s declaration of independence.

  ***

  Yehezkel’s imprisonment and subsequent exile did not, however, make Chimen embrace his religion. To the contrary; in rebellion against his father and the unquestioning, ultra-Orthodox religious world that Rabbi Abramsky represented, Chimen started imbibing Bolshevik ideas in Russia while working as an apprentice to an artisanal suitcase-maker to support his mother and his brothers during these dark years. He had, at the age of fourteen, begun attending Communist clubs frequented by well-known figures in Moscow’s Yiddish cultural scene. By the time he was sixteen – a lonely exile living in London’s Jewish East End, in a flat at 1a St Mark Street, Aldgate, which was owned by an immigrant boot maker named Nathan Mitzelmacher; and with two older brothers stuck in the Soviet Union still – to whom Yehezkel sent money each week so that they would not starve – he was writing in Hebrew to his cousin Shimon Berlin, whose family lived in Palestine, declaring that he was a Marxist. ‘I live here alone, lonely, unable to associate with such people’, he reported to his cousin in describing his surroundings. ‘I read “a lot” in these three languages: Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and a little English’, he wrote, his words precisely penned, each word identically spaced one from the next. ‘I read especially historical and political-economy books, written from a Marxist point of view, because I consider myself a Marxist.’

  As a young man, Chimen wanted, desperately, to stand up and be counted in his own right. Myopic, stunted in height, flat-footed, averse to physical exercise and sports, he knew that he was never destined to be a hero on the battlefield. But he wanted to make up for it in the arena of ideas. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, while he still kept kosher and, for the sake of family peace, observed the daily rituals of an Orthodox existence, inside his own mind he had rejected the religious strictures that governed every aspect of his parents’ lives. Instead he found intellectual stimulation in the great political and philosophical tracts of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras: he had started befriending secular, left-wing intellectuals; and, increasingly, despite the horror stories that his father had told him about the prisons and labour camps of the Soviet Union, he had come to see that country as representing a new, beneficent force in human history.

  Like so many of Europe’s young intellectuals during the 1930s, he looked to Communism as a counterpoint to Fascism and also to the values and political systems that had led the continent’s great nations to throw themselves into the slaughter of the Great War. ‘Being people of quite unusual sensitivity’, Crossman wrote of these young intellectuals in his hugely perceptive study The God That Failed, ‘they made most abnormal communists, just as the literary Catholic is a most abnormal Catholic. They had a heightened perception of the spirit of the age, and felt more acutely than others both its frustrations and its hopes. Their conversion therefore expressed, in an acute and sometimes in a hysterical form, feelings which were dimly shared by the inarticulate millions who felt that Russia was on the side of the workers’. This was, for millions of young men and women, growing up amid the wreckage of an old world shattered by world war, a quest for absolute meaning. It was an existential search for moral purpose in a post-God world, a hunt for new ways of organising human society in the wake of a Great War in which millions had died; and, increasingly in the 1920s, in the face of the oncoming onslaught of Fascism. It was a search that brought in its wake one of the twentieth century’s greatest paradoxes: how could so many people, believing so passionately in the language of universalism, so quick to latch onto the language of justice in their arguments, make such appalling political choices regarding whom they trusted and what political institutions they supported? How could so many utopians end up supporting Stalin’s intolerant and bloodthirsty project?

  At least in part, the answer must remain somewhat metaphysical. It was the zeitgeist, the atmosphere of the times, the immediacy of history – a time when history was seen as a living, breathing, pulsating entity, a thing that was pressing in on individuals caught within its vice from all sides. It was part of a search for certainty, unfathomable with hindsight, but, at the time, all too easy to fall into. In America, many filmmakers and artists joined the ranks of the Communist Party. In Britain, the Party struck deep roots in London, Glasgow and other urban centres. For the novelist Arthur Koestler, embracing Marxism allowed him to think that, ‘the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke… Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse’.

  Did Chimen sympathise with the tormentors of his father? Highly doubtful. But did he come to think that his father was misguided, that his father’s trial represented an aberration rather than the norm, or that the urgency of opposing a rising Fascist wave by aligning oneself with revolutionary workers’ politics outweighed all other arguments? Certainly by the late 1930s it seemed that way. Stalin had notoriously argued that one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs – that a new world could not be created without some remnants of the old being hurt, even killed – and the young Chimen, to his later bitter shame, entirely accepted the violent implications of this logic. Where Yehezkel, according to his biographer Aaron Sorsky, wrote of a Soviet Union that was ‘a land of blood that eats its inhabitants’, Chimen wrote that it was a place where anti-Semitism had been ended and where the workers were freer than anywhere else on earth.

  ***

  It was a world view that, by the late 1930s, Miriam Nirenstein well understood. Educated in the primary schools that catered to the children of immigrants in the crowded, poor neighbourhoods of London’s East End, and then at Clapton County High School for Girls in Laura Place in Hackney, my grandmother and her sisters Minna and Sara had grown up kosher, traditional, yet clearly separated from the ways of their ancestors. They spoke an English influenced by the cockney of the East End, interspersed with Yiddish phrases, went out with boys of their own choosing, and, while they attended synagogue, their hearts were no longer in the age-old rites.

  Unconvinced by the religious enthusiasms of their parents, who were shtetl immigrants from an old, vanished Tsarist Russian Empire, first Minna, then Sara and Miriam turned to Marxism for their rituals, their catechisms. Those who remained religious in the face of the challenges and traumas of the modern world were, they felt, ‘reactionary’. By 1937, all three sisters were card-carrying members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Like so many of their friends,
their reasoning was simple. They were young Jewish East Enders, horrified by Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts marching through their community in imitation of the thuggish brownshirts of early Nazi Germany, appalled by the dithering responses to fascism engaged in by the mediocre English and French leaders of the interwar years, tormented by the images that they saw in cinema newsreels of the Civil War in Spain. They believed that the Communists offered an alternative vision and so, as did many of their contemporaries, they threw themselves into Communist organising.

  ***

  Given the way Yehezkel had been treated in Soviet Russia, his third son’s conversion to the religion of Bolshevism must have been a bitter blow. Certainly in biographical notes and essays on Yehezkel published in religious journals and encyclopaedias, Chimen is described as one straying, having chosen to walk away from the light. Chimen and – after they had met during the early months of the Second World War – Mimi, by contrast, cocksure in their assumption that the future lay with a Soviet-style Communism must, I think, have reasoned somewhat as follows: ‘Yes, Rabbi Abramsky is a good man, but he’s entirely wrong about religion. And if he’s wrong about religion, in all likelihood he’s politically compromised, too. Yes, he’s a good man, a loving father, a caring father-in-law, but maybe the Soviet system had its reasons for arresting him; maybe, without even realising it, he was endangering the workers’ state. The human progress that Marxist revolution represents is too important to be derailed by sentimental stories and personal sympathies’. When he came to write his biography for the Communist Party, on 28 March 1950, Chimen, at the time a fervent Soviet apologist, explained that ‘my parents are very reactionary. For a short time my father was imprisoned in Russia’. The way it was structured, the first sentence seemed intended to justify the content of the second: ‘he was imprisoned because he was reactionary’. Later in that same paragraph, he continued that he had been educated at home ‘owing to my father’s reactionary views’. Chimen had, he wrote, begun to ‘rebel’ against his parents’ conservatism in 1934, when he had started to attend the Marx House Library and had begun to spend time with Communist students at the London School of Economics. In other internal Communist Party documents, Chimen went further; his conversion to Marxism, he averred in one handwritten testimonial, had begun in Moscow, during his father’s Siberian imprisonment, when, seeking relief from the claustrophobic environs of the family’s apartment, he ‘became a regular visitor to the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest, and the Jewish Communist Club’. There, he recalled, the ‘famous Communist Yiddish writer’, Beryl Dishansky, had befriended him. ‘Unfortunately’, the text continues, ‘I left the Soviet Union soon after, but both these places made a great impression on me and were my steps on the road to Marxism. The seeds sown in Moscow began to bear fruit in England. I began to read Marxist literature in earnest… In 1933–34, I became a member at Marx House… By then, I was completely “left” in my outlook’.

  Not for the first time in my research, as I read this letter I am stunned. There is nothing in it of the gentleness that I knew in the older, grandfatherly Chimen. Nothing in it of the grief that he later felt when thinking back on Yehezkel’s experiences in Siberia. I understand why Chimen, later in his life, tried to destroy all traces of this most dogmatic individual, why he attempted to destroy all copies of these documents, why he refused to discuss how, at the time, he had viewed his father’s imprisonment. When I read it again, I realise that this six-page missive is written in someone else’s hand, with Chimen’s signature formulaically added at the bottom. It is twice as long as the biography that Chimen did, indeed, write for the Party archives, and contains little that was not in the original – but is that much more jargonistic, that much more in the tone of a Party apparatchnik. I am sure that Chimen believed in its content; but, it is, at least, mildly comforting to know the words might not have all been his. Of course, when I look at the handwriting more carefully, I realise, to my shock, that it is my grandmother’s.

  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’.