The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  To the left of the door, across from the start of the shelves, there was a small cupboard, in which hung Mimi and Chimen’s coats and a couple of large umbrellas. But it was so dusty, and so crowded with miscellaneous papers, rolled up posters and piles of books that, as a cupboard it was all but unusable. Usually, therefore, visitors simply draped their coats and scarves over the newel post at the foot of the stairs. Between the cupboard and the bottom of the staircase was a little table, on which sat, well into the 1990s, a red rotary telephone, the dial of which seemed to be weighted so as to only go around agonisingly slowly. Perched next to the phone was my grandmother’s oversized address book, her large scrawl covering page after page with names, phone numbers and addresses, its scale a study in contrasts to Chimen’s miniscule address books and the almost microscopic entries that he penned in them.

  In a tiny corner of the wall just to the right of the front door, was a space where the bookshelves ended and the dull, cracked, red paintwork was exposed. There hung a rather austere-looking oil painting of Mimi’s father, Jacob Nirenstein. He had a heavy, drooping moustache, the kind favoured by civil servants or other functionaries in Edwardian England, and was wearing a jacket and formal tie, his hair neatly parted; he looked as if he meted out his smiles sparingly. Yet, behind this dolorous exterior I knew a passionate heart was beating. In an era of arranged marriages and carefully choreographed matches, Jacob had married his childhood sweetheart, Fanny Nirenstein, later known to everyone as Bellafeigel, or ‘beautiful bird’. What made the story rather discomfiting in the retelling – my mother, in particular, loved to recount this family lore – was that Jacob and Bellafeigel were uncle and niece, an arrangement legal under Jewish law (although an aunt marrying her nephew is not), but not in England. He was the youngest of several children, born in 1882; she the oldest, born in 1885, the generational difference obliterated by the size of their families. Growing up together as children in the small shtetl of Multch, near the Pripet Marshes, a vast wetland that encompassed swathes of Byelorussia and Ukraine, they had fallen in love, secretly promised each other they would marry when they came of age, and, true to their word, had migrated to London where they married in Whitechapel in 1908, and started their family in the East End.

  They bought a musty old Victorian Jewish book shop in Spitalfields, at 81 Wentworth Street, named Shapiro, Valentine & Co. They had lived above the shop with the Widow Shapiro before buying her out and starting off in business on their own. Through this enterprise, they made a meagre living buying and selling Jewish books, prayer-books and religious holiday paraphernalia. It was a well-respected shop, quite possibly the best Jewish book shop in London; and it allowed Jacob to keep his growing family housed and clad. Jacob and Bellafeigel lived just around the corner from the shop, at 9 Commercial Street, the pavements of which bustled with fruit and vegetable stalls; nearby, penny doss houses provided bedbug-riddled beds for the homeless. In Toynbee Hall, well-meaning social workers helped immigrant children assimilate to the broader English culture. Fishmongers crowded Petticoat Lane. Merchants sold live chickens, which could then be taken to be ritually slaughtered in a kosher manner nearby. There were bakers such as Goide’s, selling bagels and challah. There were kosher butchers such as Barnett’s. On May Day, the Communist Party organiser Hymie Fagan (who also ended up living near Hillway) wrote decades later in an unpublished memoir, the local children of radical Russian Jewish émigré families would parade through the streets ‘dressed in their poor best, but washed, groomed, combed and beribboned’, dancing around maypoles pulled on carts, and singing songs of revolution.

  When I was a child, as the story of Jacob and Bellafeigel’s slightly awkward romance was revealed, laughingly, to yet another friend, I would feel a nervous rush of adrenalin, and, at least figuratively, would start squirming in my seat. But to my great-grandparents, it was not really a cause for anxiety. Admittedly, on official documents – passports, their children’s birth certificates and their own marriage certificate – to avoid aspersions on the legality of their marriage, they used a false name for Bellafeigel; she became Fanny (or Fenny) Sherashevsky, taking her mother’s maiden name for her own surname. In fact, and legalities aside, theirs was not such an unusual situation. Cousins routinely married each other in the shtetl, and young uncles marrying their oldest nieces, whatever the official laws of the land might say about it, really was not considered unacceptable. To Jacob and Bellafeigel’s parents, innkeepers and fisherfolk in the marshes around Multch, whose own ancesters had migrated to the marshes from the Russian village of Olshevi in the early decades of the nineteenth century, what would have been far more unacceptable than their kinship was the fact that it was a love-match. That, in many ways, was a revolutionary rejection of parental authority, almost as far-reaching in its implications as a denial of the revelatory truth of the religion itself. In the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the milkman wrestles with just such a dilemma when his oldest daughter announces that she is in love with the tailor Motel Kamsol. It is, he says, ‘unheard of’. But then he reflects. ‘Love, it’s a new style’, he finally says, as he reconciles himself to the inconvenient state of affairs. Perhaps not coincidentally, Fiddler was one of my grandmother Mimi’s favourite films, the Technicolor scenes of unfolding family drama as guaranteed to produce tears as were the onions that she would cut up in her kitchen to burn, deliberately, for flavour, and spread over her lamb chops.

  But however much Jacob and Bellafeigel’s affair of the heart hurt their parents, they followed through, got married, and ensured that that part of the family tree would become a bemusing tangle for future genealogists to pore over. Two generations later, that tangle became almost impossible to unknot: Bellafeigel and Jacob’s grandson, Jack Abramsky married Lenore Levine, the granddaughter of Bellafeigel’s sister Sophie. Sophie had migrated to the United States when her sister left for England; her daughter Miriam, known as Mim, moved to Los Angeles in the late 1930s; and Mim’s daughter Lenore had come on a visit to London in 1966, where she met her cousin Jack, fell in love and decided she would stay in London. My grandmothers, both Miriams, both, presumably, named after the same ancestor, were first cousins; my parents, Jack and Lenore, are second cousins; I am my own third cousin. That also made me third cousin to my own brother and sister. Maybe, at some level, it was the bizarreness of these kinship relationships created by her marriage that led my mum to choose genetic counselling as a career when she went back to work in 1981, two years after my sister Tanya was born.

  In 1926, when Mimi was a young girl of nine years old, Jacob dropped dead from a heart attack in his early forties, not long after the family had gone on their one foreign trip together: they had travelled east across Europe, back to the Pale of Settlement communities out of which they had emerged a generation earlier. Jacob’s funeral was held, with little fanfare, in a small Jewish cemetery in north London. His death shattered the upwardly mobile aspirations of his wife and children, leaving Bellafeigel struggling to raise their three daughters and keep the book shop going. For the oldest Nirenstein daughter, Minna, the upheaval was particularly hard to bear. A talented musician and composer, she was enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music at the time of her father’s death, but as the family’s finances imploded the expense of her studies became harder to justify. In 1929, at the age of twenty, she had to give up her dreams and return to the East End to work in the book shop. It must have been a desperately claustrophobic transformation for her. Only decades later – years into her second marriage and now known as Minna Keal – in her seventies, was she able to return to composition, eventually composing, in the garage at the back of her house, a powerful, often angry, symphony. It was premiered in the Albert Hall as a part of the 1989 London Proms series to considerable acclaim. She followed it up with several chamber pieces, and eventually a documentary was made about her, tellingly titled A Life in Reverse. For the two much younger Nirenstein sisters, Jacob’s premature death meant a childhood of at tim
es desperate poverty in the impoverished neighbourhood of Stepney. Mimi later remembered that she had only one small rag doll in her entire childhood, and that even the acquisition of such a small gift was something she truly treasured, given how little spare money her mother had.

  But while Jacob’s passing fractured his daughters’ world, it was also the catalyst for a political shift. Without the religious strictures of their father, as Europe navigated the cataclysmic aftermath of world war, revolution, and economic collapse, in the decade following Jacob’s death all three Nirenstein sisters shed their religious beliefs and veered instead towards a new political faith, Communism. In the early 1930s, with the Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald presiding over cuts to unemployment benefits and public sector salaries, it was the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920 to promote a Bolshevik-style revolution, which organised the unemployed to demonstrate; co-ordinated a series of hunger marches through London; and put together the Workers’ Charter Movement, modelled on the Chartists of nearly a century before, to demand a seven-hour working day, increases in unemployment benefits, and political rights for members of the armed forces. Its leader, Harry Pollitt, toured the country, giving speeches in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and London touting the benefits of the Charter Movement’s platform. A popular Communist song from the era urged:

  If you want to fight wage cuts,

  Fight for the Workers’ Charter.

  Stand and show you’ve got some guts,

  You won’t be beaten down forever.

  Now’s the time to make a move

  Forward with the Charter.

  And together we will prove

  That the workers’ fight will win the day.

  Of course, it was this same Communist Party that engaged in bitter purges of purported Trotskyists amongst its own members, and resolutely refused to countenance the stories emanating out of Russia, which told of wholesale imprisonment and the execution of dissidents, some of these tales recounted by westerners who had journeyed to the Soviet Union to witness the creation of a Promised Land and returned deeply cynical about the project.

  In the early 1930s, however, Mimi did not want to see the downside. Instead, she and her sisters, like so many other young, idealistic people during these years, saw the Communists in action on the streets of her beloved East End, and they were seduced. During the years of Appeasement, when one German and Italian outrage after another was tolerated by the British and French political leaderships, it was the Communists who fought back most forcefully against Fascism. It was the Communists who intervened in an ill-starred attempt to save the Spanish Republic. And it was the Communists who took the lead in many labour conflicts, during years of mass unemployment and plummeting wages. With hindsight, Mimi and many others came to resent the Party deeply for the way in which it had manipulated grand causes for its own narrow aims: it used noble human aspirations and dreams as currency; with this currency it purchased the support of a generation of idealists. And that support helped to maintain a nightmare in the Soviet Union. At the time, however, it felt deeply liberating.

  Mimi’s first boyfriend was a card-carrying member of the Party, and, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, he quickly volunteered for the International Brigade. The Communists were not just active overseas, however. Seeking to counter the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and its appeal to working-class Londoners, they mobilised their members in an all-out effort to win the hearts and minds of London’s East Enders and ultimately to secure political control of the neighbourhoods in which those East Enders lived. Mosley planned a provocative march of his Blackshirts through the Jewish enclaves of the East End on 4 March 1936. In response, the Party organised a huge protest, which Mimi and her sisters joined, along with tens of thousands of men and women shouting out the Spanish partisans’ mantra ‘They shall not pass’. They stood firm at barricades co-ordinated by local Communist organiser and future Member of Parliament, Phil Piratin, as roughly six thousand police officers attempted to clear a path down Cable Street along which Mosley’s marchers could parade. The confrontation was rapidly converted into folklore as the Battle of Cable Street, and those barricades, a journalist for the New Statesman wrote later that month, were ‘the best thing that has happened for some time’. Writing of the local populace deciding to bar Mosley’s marchers, he noted that ‘the common people banned it by so filling the streets that even police charges could not clear the way for Sir Oswald’s army’.

  A few years later, when a young man named Chimen Abramsky was hired to work at Shapiro, Valentine & Co a couple of months after the outbreak of the Second World War, it was the common bond of Marxism, the shared utopian language of an eagerly anticipated revolution, which initially drew the new employee and the boss’s daughter together. Miriam Nirenstein was, Chimen wrote more than sixty years later, ‘strikingly good looking, with a delicate chiselled face, beautiful warm brown eyes, sparkling, with a wonderful sense of humour. Her face captivated me instantly’. On walks through a London darkened by the blackout, from the shop to the underground station, she filled him in on the details of her life. ‘I learned from her that she was originally a Zionist, but through the civil war in Spain…joined the Communist Party. The rise and spread of fascism strengthened her determination and beliefs. During the day she ran the family business, and in the evenings she delivered party leaflets’. My grandparents fell head over heels in love.

  And yet, despite the fact that Mimi and her sisters had joined the Communist Party largely as a way to fight the rise of Fascism, largely because they realised the savage danger that Nazism posed to the world, when Hitler and Stalin signed an opportunistic non-aggression pact on 23 August 1939 – after years of appeasement of the Fascist powers by Britain and France, years in which the possibility of a Soviet-British-French alliance was frittered away – somehow they convinced themselves to follow the Party line in opposing a war which the Party deemed ‘imperialist’. Of course, Mimi, Sara, Minna and Chimen (who was not yet a Party member or a presence in my grandmother’s life) knew the extent of Fascism’s horrors. They knew – but at the same time they also now convinced themselves that the Nazi–Soviet Pact was a necessary tactical manoeuvre intended to buy Russia time while Britain and France dithered and Germany expanded into Austria, Czechoslovakia and, then, who knew where else?

  What it meant, in practice, was that after Britain finally declared war on 3 September 1939, British Communists stood back and parroted Party platitudes, while Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia carved up Poland, the Baltics and Finland between them. Some Communist agitators in the United Kingdom, in the early months of the war, plastered posters on walls decrying the war as an imperialist charade; in the aftermath of this, many Communist publications were banned, and some Communists were even interned. It was, to say the least, a deeply disingenuous political position, born of a context in which ideological rigidity and undeviating adherence to the Party line was seen as the primary measure of a comrade’s worth.

  The sloganising extended beyond politics and, to one degree or another, made its way into the personal realm too. As Miri and Chimen’s relationship blossomed in early 1940, they worried, in their quickly penned love letters, how their parents would take the news that they wanted to get married. Neither was convinced that the other’s family would approve. Chimen was particularly afraid of what his ‘reactionary’ father would say; and both were concerned that Barnett Samuel, Minna’s husband at the time and, as such, the male head of the Nirenstein clan, would object to the match since, being a very religious man, he had already made it known, sniffily, to Mrs Nirenstein, that he was not sure Chimen was frum (pious) enough to work in the book shop. However, when Chimen screwed up his courage in the spring of 1940 to tell his mother that he intended to marry Miri, he reported, with evident relief, that Raizl was overjoyed. Now, the challenge was to convince ‘such a reactionary as my father’ that the match was good. ‘My dear little Chimen’, my
twenty-three-year-old future grandmother wrote back, on hearing the news, ‘I’m glad to hear that you’ve told my mother-in-law and made her happy. I hope my reactionary father-in-law will react with similar joy’. As it turns out, Yehezkel was equally enthusiastic and, on 20 June 1940, in an East End nervously waiting for the Luftwaffe to turn its attention to England after Germany had overrun Belgium, Holland and France, the wedding went ahead unhindered.

  After the wedding, my grandparents quickly returned to their political activism. Of course, in June 1941, when the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa against their erstwhile Soviet allies – somehow surprising Stalin, despite urgent memos from Churchill and Roosevelt detailing the intelligence that led them to believe the attack was imminent – Communist cadres in the West performed a quick volte-face and became enthusiastic backers of what they now saw as a vital conflict. The instincts that had led people like Mimi to barricade Cable Street against the Fascists were let loose once more. Now they urged the necessity of a ‘second front’ to siphon Nazi military energies away from the Soviet Union; they urged total war; they praised the heroism of the Soviet Union and its foot soldiers. When Churchill’s government decided to release the Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, from Holloway prison in late 1943, judging that he was no longer a threat to social order, Chimen helped the Communist Party formulate its response. Angered that the Jewish Board of Deputies, with which Chimen’s father closely worked, was insufficiently vocal in its criticism of the decision, Chimen penned an angry letter to the Jewish Chronicle. ‘This cowardice’, he wrote, ‘shames all Jews fighting heroically against Fascism. This backwardness, this lagging behind the democratic forces, is a blot on our names’.