In the meantime, though, as Chimen navigated the complicated religious and political terrain of the Jewish East End, Ostwind’s served a surprisingly good fried egg sandwich, with chips and beans; and, while the noise inside mirrored the kaleidoscopic chaos of the East End markets outside, it let Chimen escape the cares of his business for a few minutes each day.
When Chimen turned the lock on the shop door early on Sunday afternoon, the family would decamp to Golders Green, to visit Chimen’s older, Orthodox brother Moshe, who was working at that time as a supervisor in a kosher slaughterhouse, and his wife Chaya Sara and their two young children. Chimen and Moshe, both at the house and over the phone, would natter away in Yiddish, talking for hours about politics, gossiping about mutual friends. Chimen would, perennially, disparage the gossip as ‘rubbish’. Equally perennially, he would file it away in his mind for subsequent retelling, and, quite likely, embellishment. Later on Sunday afternoon, the family would make the short hop across Golders Green for a mid-afternoon tea with Mimi’s sister Sara and her family. Finally, they would return home in time for Mimi to cook Sunday dinner for Chimen’s first cousin Golda Zimmerman, a journalist who had helped Chimen find work at the book shop back in the early days of the war, and who was thus seen as having brought my grandparents together; Mimi felt she owed it to her cousin-in-law, a somewhat isolated spinster, to invite her to Hillway at least weekly.
Despite their break with formal religion, theirs was, in many ways, a world bound by ritual and the densely woven fabric of family ties.
***
All the while, Chimen obsessively hunted for books. Shelf by shelf, he began creating his House of Books.
Walking from the front door at 5 Hillway into the house, you saw the hallway and its contents reflected back at you from an oval mirror hanging next to the staircase. It added a modicum of light, an illusion of scale, to what was otherwise a dark, narrow passage. Here, in this overcrowded hallway, was the evidence of Chimen’s fascination with the arcane disputes and almost Talmudic reasoning of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutionaries. The sprawling political and philosophical battles in which these book-writing men and women had immersed themselves in the years before he was born were not abstract arguments for Chimen; it was by these disputes, by their earnestly footnoted essays and manifestos, that my grandfather measured much of his life. He had done so since he was a teenager.
After arriving in London, Chimen learned English at Pitman Central College and later, while on holiday from his studies in Jerusalem, he worked for the publisher Bela Horovitz, on the East-West Library, a series devoted to Jewish philosophy. For his labour, he was paid in books instead of in cash. He was as determined to imbibe the written word as Yehezkel had been ten years before the First World War, when, as a penniless yeshiva student in Vilna, in Lithuania, he would wander into book shops and spend hours in a corner reading volumes which he could not afford to buy, from cover to cover. And, increasingly, the written words that Chimen cared most about were on socialism. From the family’s first days in London, while his father was at the synagogue on Brick Lane, Chimen had begun surreptitiously attending classes at Marx House, the home of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School in Clerkenwell. When his landlord’s son walked in on him in his attic bedroom one evening, he found Chimen absorbed in Marxist literature. Guiltily, as if he had been caught reading smut, the teenager hid the book and quickly replaced it with a more respectable religious text.
Stuffed into many of the volumes in the hallway were letters that Chimen had written to, and received from, some of the country’s leading left-wing scholars as his fascination with Marxism grew. Of most interest to my grandfather as he grew older was his correspondence with Piero Sraffa. Eighteen years Chimen’s senior, the Italian-born Sraffa had ended up on Mussolini’s wrong side in 1927 and had fled to England, where, a few years later, he was befriended by John Maynard Keynes. By the time the Second World War broke out, he was a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge and had made a reputation as one of the country’s top economists. He was also busily building up a collection of socialist literature that would have been unparalleled had Chimen not also been on the scene. In the post-war decades, Sraffa was the only other collector in England with a similar love of, and knowledge about, the arcane socialist volumes that the rabbi’s son so cherished.
Over the decades, they swapped rare books, and shared with each other the joy of the hunt, the unspeakable pleasure – that only a fellow connoisseur could understand – of finding a particular edition of a particular book or pamphlet, and of getting it for a lower-than-anticipated price. Chimen visited Sraffa at Trinity College numerous times, dining with him in the long hall, at the north end of which was an oil painting of the college founder, King Henry VIII, attributed to either Hans Holbein or one of his disciples. In turn, Sraffa was frequently pressed upon by his friend to come and dine at Hillway. The art was less illustrious; I am fairly certain, however, that the cuisine at my grandparents’ house was somewhat more adventurous. Many of Chimen’s most valuable books were documented in this correspondence with Sraffa, which might well have been why he obsessed over this particular collection as he aged, repeatedly asking my brother or me to show him the letters, as if he were pinching himself, making sure that both he, and the world of books that he had so painstakingly created around him, were still alive.
In these letters, for example, was discussion of an early edition of Karl Marx’s magnum opus on economic theory, Das Kapital, signed by Marx himself, and dedicated to the German Workers’ Association in London. Chimen had bought it in the late 1950s and sold it on to Sraffa for the then-staggering sum of £750 – £600 of which was paid in cash, the remainder in kind: Chimen wanted another Marx volume in Sraffa’s possession. The total amount that the book sold for was roughly the annual salary for a junior level civil servant at the time, according to annual salary estimates produced by the country’s Ministry of Labour in 1960. (The Das Kapital volume was subsequently stolen, turning up only decades later, in Switzerland, whence Trinity College ransomed it back.) Here also were references to letters by Marx; to original Lenin pamphlets and newspaper writings; to a first edition of Malthus on over-population, which Chimen bought and promptly sold to Sraffa for £15. Here were intimations of letters he bought and sold from Russian authors such as Ivan Turgenev (Chimen was scornful of the Soviet government’s decision not to bid a decent amount for the Turgenev manuscripts, which thus allowed him to pick up more than thirty of the author’s handwritten missives); and of negotiations conducted with the Soviet government in Moscow for the purchase of rare Marx documents in Chimen’s possession. He explained, in gleeful detail how he had acquired Marx’s membership card of the First International (which Sraffa had put up for sale) and a signed letter by Marx, as part of a Marx collection sold at Sotheby’s, for what he regarded as the knock-down price of £110 in early April 1960. He would, he acknowledged after the fact – gently teasing his friend that he could have received more money for his treasures – have been quite willing to go as high as £250. And he played Sraffa off against the Soviet government, using the Soviets’ interest in materials that he owned to encourage his friend to make a counter-offer. ‘Moscow has offered me for the two Marx pamphlets on Palmerston [the mid-nineteenth century British statesman] one hundred and fifty pounds in cash’, he wrote, in a note quickly scribbled on cheap lined paper on 20 June 1960 (which was, incidentally, his and Mimi’s twentieth wedding anniversary). ‘If you are willing to give a bit more you can have them. I want one hundred and seventy five pounds.’
To another correspondent, Leo Friedman, in Boston, Massachusetts, to whom he periodically sold books and other documents, he wrote of acquiring a two-page letter that the poet, essayist and journalist Heinrich Heine had written from Paris in 1844 to the editor of the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. ‘This letter has never been published before and is of the utmost historial interest regarding Heine,’ he opined, ‘an
d his attitude to the radicals of the time.’
It was in these letters that Chimen-the-intellectual, rather than Chimen-the-propagandist, came out. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Chimen’s public writing, often written under aliases, was more propaganda than scholarship. He had contact with the Communist Historians’ Group, for a time, and, when he could conjure up the annual dues, was a member; but he was not a regular attender. He wrote the occasional historical paper for them, but most of his Communist writing was either leaflets aimed at the Jews of London’s East End or articles and editorials published in the Party’s Daily Worker, the Jewish Clarion and other journals and newspapers. More often than not, the articles were predictable and filled with jargon. A ten-point leaflet, from the late 1940s, entitled ‘Why Jews Should Vote Communist’ was a typical example. Point Six patiently explained that ‘The Communist Party denies that the standard of the life of the working class must be lowered merely to meet the greed of American dollar financiers’. In 1946, when writing critically about the growing pressure for the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, as ‘C. Chimen’ he wrote that ‘The unhampered defeatist propaganda, which avers that there is no future in Europe for the Jews, has helped considerably to make the displaced Jews a catspaw of imperialism’. Only in Chimen’s private correspondence did he allow the panoramic range of his interests to clear a path through this fog of jargon. He wrote to Harold Laski on the workings of Parliamentary democracy. He penned notes to Isaiah Berlin discussing whether or not Machiavelli had influenced Marx. He wrote letters on Jewish history and pages of musings on the great philosophers. He bounced from current affairs to medieval political dramas.
For Chimen, letters were his great intellectual safety valve, the genre in which he could most freely and fluently express himself. He subscribed to the notion that Alexander Herzen had proclaimed in 1862, when writing to his friend Turgenev: ‘It is for the sake of digression and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters to friends; one can then write without embarrassment whatever comes into one’s head’. Over the decades, Chimen wrote tens of thousands of letters, carbon copying them for posterity; or, when he had no access to carbon paper, simply re-writing his missives before sending off the signed originals, and then filing the duplicates. They ranged in length from one or two line notes setting up meetings, to multi-page treatises on the great political thinkers, philosophers, historians, artists and musicians of the last millennia. Some were about arranging fellowships for needy students; others about the great political events of the day. With friends such as Sraffa and Isaiah Berlin – he had been introduced to the famous philosopher in 1958 by the Oxford Slavonic scholar and librarian John Simmons, and had, the following year, sold him roughly £150 worth of Russian literature by Pushkin and others – he covered an utterly extraordinary intellectual terrain. ‘You are’, wrote Berlin to his friend in June 1979, ‘an exceptionally honest, penetrating and sensitive man and scholar; and the fact that you think me to be some good, fills me with much needed confidence’. Chimen called these missives megile, a Yiddish term roughly translating as ‘a lengthy, detailed explanation or account’. Elsewhere, he described them as megilah, a Hebrew word meaning ‘scroll’. Thousands of these letters still remain in the archives of University College London. In a storage unit that my father rented after Hillway was cleared out, there were several large cardboard boxes, choc-full of correspondence. Elsewhere were kept twenty-four more folio boxes, each containing hundreds of letters written and received by Chimen.
When Chimen died, my aunt and my father found, in a hidden compartment in the back of the huge roll-top desk in his bedroom, a collection of letters, many of them handwritten, addressed to Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. They were from such luminaries as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the editor and owner of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, and the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb – the latter of whom, in a sloppy, at times almost illegible scrawl, exhibited a surprising infatuation with Mussolini’s Fascists in correspondence to Laski from the mid-1920s. In another pile was a fading handwritten letter from Turgenev, written in English interspersed with Russian, and signed in Cyrillic script, in Bougival, France in 1881, to an unknown friend, the only one of the trove of Turgenev letters that Chimen ended up keeping for himself. ‘I am staying here alone with a tremendous grippe, and shall not go back to Paris before the end of next week’, the great author wrote. ‘Believe me. Yours very truly, Iv. Turgenev’. Chimen reported to Sraffa that he had resold almost all of the Turgenev manuscripts, including four pages of an unpublished Turgenev story. There was, however, one other exception: correspondence between Isaiah Berlin and Chimen indicates that he gave one of the letters to Berlin in June 1984, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. Turgenev was, wrote Chimen in explanation of his gift, a man ‘whom we both admire and on whom you wrote so brilliantly’.
A handwritten, signed letter from Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who would one day become Israel’s first president, to the Liverpool-based Rabbi Isaiah Raffalovich, dated 21 June 1917 was also found in the desk. ‘Our enemies will not rest and try and devise means to hurt us mortally’, Weizmann wrote. ‘We must watch things and be on the alert and before all organize and organize an all Jewish congress, which would definitely consolidate our position.’ In a handwritten list of some of his more important possessions, which he wrote late in his life, Chimen referred to an original letter by the French philosopher Voltaire, on the topic of Europe’s Jews. The letter was not found when his house was emptied out. Like the Laski correspondence, he had probably secreted it away somewhere and simply neglected, or forgotten, to tell anyone else where it was. Maybe it was in a hidden drawer, the lock of which could have been opened by one of the dozens of tiny unlabelled keys also found in his great desk. In all likelihood it accidentally ended up in one of the hundreds of rubbish bags which were filled with all the printed matter that Chimen himself could never throw away: old receipt forms from Shapiro, Valentine & Co; utility bills dating back half a century; bank statements from decades past. But maybe it did not. Perhaps, somehow, the letter escaped. Perhaps, one day, generations from now, someone will buy the old desk in a junk shop in some nondescript place or another and discover the Voltaire letter, a time capsule inside a time capsule from the past. Whoever that person might be, I hope they recognise the exquisite beauty of what is resting in their hands.
***
Further down the hallway, in between the doors to the living room and the dining room, opposite a little closet with a toilet and sink, was another set of images: black and white photos, taken by my cousin Rob, as part of a school photography project. The space where they hung had been grudgingly saved from books, probably because the hallway was so narrow that had bookshelves been placed opposite the toilet, there would have been no easy way to use that important room. The images showed Chimen in action, and included, also, one photo of Mimi and of Jenny, ‘the two women of his life’, as Rob put it: there, on that wall, was a zoomed-in photograph of Chimen in a wool hat; another of his hat resting on bookshelves; Chimen hunched over a chessboard, deep in concentration. Sometimes there would be a person on the other side of the chessboard – myself, or one of the other grandchildren; other days, Chimen would simply recreate a grand master’s game that he had read about in that morning’s edition of the Times, carefully poring over the moves, studying them as he would the text of a rare book. ‘Chess was his sport’, Rob noted, as he explained his choice of photographic imagery. ‘Like so much of his life, the muscle he liked to exercise was his mind.’ In 1995, when he was nearly eighty years old, Chimen wrote the foreword to Victor Keats’ book Chess in Jewish History and Hebrew Literature. There was, apparently, almost nothing about Jewish life upon which Chimen could not expound.
It was at the end of the hallway, where the route branched off either to the dining room or the kitchen that I recall frequently standing and watching as my older cousin Raph woul
d enter the house, walking deliberately slowly, hands in light brown suede jacket pockets. I would feel a shiver of excitement at Raph’s entry, fuelled by my half-knowledge that he and Chimen had been feuding for years, with an intensity born of deep love and extraordinary intellectual competition: both were leading historians of their generation; both book collectors of remarkable importance; both were fascinated by socialism and both felt rather proprietary about the movements they chronicled. Some of that I knew, some of it I intuited. But, what was clear to me, even as a young child, was that when Raph came through that doorway, the atmosphere at Hillway would change: Mimi would almost cry for joy that her beloved nephew was visiting her, but then she would glance around at Chimen to see how he was reacting. And, every time, a tension would descend, Chimen’s blood pressure would visibly go up, voices would soon be raised. It was predictable, but it was, nevertheless, often spectacular.
Through it all, Raph would keep up his insouciant expression, his sort of deliberate cool-intellectual appearance; he had wispy hair, falling forward chaotically onto his forehead; round glasses perched atop his thin nose; that wonderful, tattered suede jacket. There was about him the permanent smell of cigarettes; his voice was desperately gentle, slightly nasal, and as full of passion as any voice I had ever encountered; and there was an almost beatific expression in his eyes. And yet, for all the other-worldly qualities that Raph exuded, when he got into arguments with Chimen over Israel, or the activities of left-wing trade union leaders or the validity of direct action protests, there was something steely about those eyes and that voice. Chimen knew it; and it bothered him – at least in part, I came to think, because it reminded him of who he had once been. I loved the anticipation. I loved being a spectator of, and, as I got older, a participant in, these epic verbal jousting contests.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 12