The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  The hallway, I knew, was somewhere special. Not just a narrow stretch of carpeted terrain from portal to kitchen, but a carefully constructed gateway to debate and conversation, to a magic realm. ‘This world is like a hallway before the world to come’, the Mishnaic-era Rabbi Yaakov was quoted as saying, in the Talmudic commentary Pirkei Avot, nearly two thousand years ago: ‘Prepare yourself in the hallway so you may enter the banquet hall.’

  The Kitchen:

  Salt, Sugar, and a Dash of Love

  Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

  Attributed to Madame de Staël

  HILLWAY WAS A unique salon because the two obsessions of two obsessive people gelled there in a most unusual way: Chimen’s passion for his books and the ideas they contained, Mimi’s for nurturing and nourishing an endless stream of people. Left to his own devices, Chimen would quite probably have collected books and ideas in his house, and done his socialising in more public places – in the cafes around Shapiro, Valentine & Co, in university dining rooms, and at academic conferences. As a child, he would sometimes recall, he had been desperately lonely. He, along with his elder brothers, was educated at home because his father was anxious to avoid his sons coming into contact with the world around them: Yehezkel had repeatedly sought an exit visa from the Soviet Union, in large part because he was so nervous about his sons becoming contaminated by Bolshevism. As a result of this enforced isolation, Chimen had been unable to develop any friendships with other children. It was, my grandfather said sadly, the single biggest regret of his youth. He claimed that once, with little else to do, over a period of several weeks he had counted aloud to one million, breaking into his task only to sleep and eat. Had anyone else told me that, I would have dismissed it as exaggeration; Chimen, however, I was inclined to believe.

  To be sure, the apartment in Moscow to which Yehezkel had moved his family so that he could daily petition government bureaucrats to grant them an exit visa from the country, had housed many guests, mainly Torah scholars seeking illicit intellectual solace in a Soviet Union that Yehezkel had taken to calling a ‘house of bondage’. At times, guests, who were fed the few potatoes which could be bought in the shops by Raizl, had slept on, and even under, the table. There is a sense of a gathering of the doomed in the descriptions of the apartment that eventually made their way into Yehezkel’s biography, of individuals waiting to be arrested, to be sent to labour camps in Siberia or executed. In that tableau, there were no children in whom Chimen could confide or with whom he could make friends. The experience left him craving human interaction; but at the same time it also left him strangely unable to communicate on a mundane level about the little things, the nuances, that cumulatively make up the fabric of most people’s lives.

  Uncomfortable with small talk, Chimen could, I think, had his life taken some different turns – had he not found Mimi, had he not been given an opportunity to let his gregarious nature run free at home – have evolved into one of those lonely, eccentric, somewhat contrary antiquarians who inhabit so many of Dickens’s pages. Taken to an extreme, had that gregariousness not been allowed to take root and flourish, as he aged he might eventually have become the character in Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé who literally walled himself up in a house of books, able only to relate to the printed page. But Chimen was not left to his own devices. For Mimi, collecting people was as important as were Chimen’s books to him. She simply always had to be a hostess, and, by extension, once she had invited you into her Yiddish hoyz, she had to feed you. ‘She is the one who tends, cares for and above all feeds the family’, Zborowski and Herzog wrote of Jewish wives in Eastern Europe, in Life Is With People. ‘When she offers food, she is offering her love, and she offers it constantly. When her food is refused it is as if her love were rejected’. At the end of week dinner which celebrates the Sabbath, a Jewish table is filled with good food, ritual wine is drunk, prayers are said and, of course, strangers are welcomed and hosted. Around that table, community is renewed. At 5 Hillway, almost every day was a Sabbath.

  For Mimi, food was a vicarious pleasure. From childhood onwards, her health had been fragile. When she was in primary school, in the East End of London, she had almost died of an infection; for the rest of her life, she bore a long, curving scar on the side of her neck, as a reminder of the emergency surgery that she had had to undergo to drain the site of pus. A diabetic who failed dismally to adhere to her no-sugar, low-salt diet, from middle age onwards she was beset by health problems. Increasingly overweight, she accumulated pills that she had to take daily to keep her blood pressure in check, her heart in order, her kidneys functioning. After she had a few awful falls, one of them down a flight of concrete steps while travelling in Israel, her legs became increasingly unreliable, criss-crossed like a street map with varicose veins, her thighs prone to unsightly bruising at the slightest knock. However, when people asked her about her health, she would pooh-pooh their concerns, tell them that ‘we don’t need to talk about such things’ and quickly change the subject. While feeding thick, creamy sauces and heavy, rich, delicious desserts to her myriad guests – roulades, trifles, cakes she had decided her grandchildren liked and therefore had to be served repeatedly and in copious quantities – Mimi could snack illicitly without feeling that she was utterly ignoring her doctors. They were her improbable masterpieces; I might even say they were her culinary versions of the deaf Beethoven’s symphonies. And so, whenever you entered the house, you were greeted by a rush of competing aromas: the smell of ducks roasting, the fat bubbling off them as the oven heated up; the gorgeous aroma of chicken soup, so saturated in salt, in my cousin Maia’s recollection, that ‘it was just like the Dead Sea’; or chocolate cakes baking; of thick rye bread cut into slices; and the tart odour of herrings sitting in brine in their glass jars. My grandmother’s guests would eat a lot; she would eat a little – and everybody would feel sated.

  Over the decades, Mimi acquired layer upon layer of friends, one generation atop the next, of people who regarded 5 Hillway as their second home, who regarded Mimi as an extra mother, a supplement to their biological family. During the final year of the war, a number of refugees found safe haven at Hillway. Later, a succession of lodgers became honorary members of the family. Minna’s son, Raphael, spent more time at Hillway than in the home of his recently divorced mother, coming to view its occupants as his surrogate parents. He brought future academic and journalistic luminaries such as Gareth Stedman-Jones, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, and Peter Sedgwick to the house. Henry Collins, Chimen’s urbane literary collaborator, practically lived in the downstairs front room at times. One night, when he was exhausted and could not convince the other guests to vacate his quarters and let him sleep, he simply took off his clothes and climbed into bed in front of the surprised guests. Whether that did the trick, or whether they continued debating Marxist theory over Henry’s snoring, was not recorded.

  Several young French cousins, whose families had been partially destroyed in the Nazi death camps, spent months at a time living there. My father’s best school friends all camped out at the house. There they engaged in furious chess competitions and equally frenetic games of table tennis on a table my dad had jerry-rigged in his bedroom. My aunt, five years younger than her brother, and less enamoured of the chaos, was more reluctant to bring her friends around. Later on, a young girl named Elisabetta Bianconi, whose parents, Margaret (a colleague and close friend of Mimi’s) and Roberto, had both died in a car accident, became a part of the inner circle. Chimen’s best friend, Shmuel Ettinger and his wife Rina visited several times a year from Israel. Left-wing English historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, James Joll and E.P. Thompson, came through the house and were drawn, irresistibly, towards Mimi’s table. So too were economists, including (of course) Piero Sraffa; Communist world-travellers such as Freda Cook, a correspondent for the Morning Star who had moved to Hanoi to express her political solidari
ty with Ho Chi Minh; some leading character actors; a businessman named Danny Nahum, who corresponded with Chimen on expensive, embossed letterhead paper, and who, during the good times, would arrive at Hillway in a Rolls Royce and during bad ones would arrive bedraggled and looking for one of Mimi’s meals to tide him over; and innumerable others. Artists and musicians made their way to the house, as did rabbis and philosophers. For a time, an American butterfly scientist was a staple of the salon. A Canadian government official and his wife also flew in on a semi-regular basis to visit. Claudia Roden, the renowned cookery writer and author of well-received books on Jewish and Middle Eastern food, came to the kitchen, there to discuss food with Mimi and history with Chimen. Each visitor was what was called in Yiddish an oyrekh, a guest, to be hosted, fed and cared for as etiquette and tradition dictated.

  I doubt that anyone ever attempted to calculate how many visitors tramped through Hillway over the years, though it would have made for an entertaining school maths project. Certainly, it was in the thousands, quite possibly in the tens of thousands. It is entirely possible that the number of people for whom Mimi cooked meals over the decades rivalled the number of books that Chimen accumulated. It was through her hospitality and the energy and wisdom that she put into making Hillway a gathering place that Mimi sought to manifest the ideal virtues of Jewish women described in the Book of Proverbs. She had much in common with Rahel Levin, Henriette Herz, or Fanny von Arnstein, Jewish women who held salons in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Berlin and Vienna. These salonnières, wrote Emily Bilski and Emily Braun in Jewish Women and their Salons, ‘presented an ideal of social interaction free of considerations of social rank’. Levin, in particular, they wrote, was renowned for ‘her intelligence, wit, depth of understanding and gift for friendship’.

  ***

  It was in the kitchen, at the end of the hallway, that the true melting pot nature of Hillway unfolded. Sleepy-eyed guests who had bedded down on sofas, spare beds, even chairs when the house was particularly busy, would wander into the kitchen in the morning, only to find other temporary residents or passers-by who had not been there the night before. My cousin Elliott recalled, when he was over from America for a short stay at Hillway, once meeting the playwright Harold Pinter in the kitchen over breakfast. My father and aunt did not think that was likely – to their knowledge Mimi and Chimen did not know Pinter. Yet nor was it entirely implausible. 5 Hillway was, after all, one of London’s crossroads. Frequently it seemed more like a traveller’s hostel than a mid-sized suburban home, replete with the stale air that accompanies too many people confined in too small a space, and the babble of many different tongues.

  It was, at times, overwhelming. You could come into the house, tell Mimi that you had just had a five-course meal at a restaurant, and within minutes she would be placing bowls of soup and plates of steaming chicken or duck or lamb in front of you. Often, she would get all her ‘children’ confused: ‘Have some more chicken, Raph’, she would urge me. Then, realising her mistake, she would try to make amends. ‘Kolya, Rob, I mean Sasha!’ and she would laugh. ‘Oye yoy yoy!’ Chimen would exclaim in mock horror, ‘Mir-ri, it’s our oldest grandson. It’s Meester Sasha’. When I was younger, it frustrated me. As I grew up, however, I realised that the confusion grew not out of carelessness but an excess of love. She knew who we all were; but she cared so much for each of us that we occasionally blended in her mind into one great mass of people for whom she bore responsibility for feeding.

  Whenever I stayed the night at Hillway, I could be sure that in the morning I would be greeted by the sight and the aromas of Mimi cooking potato pancakes for me or quickly putting together a heaping plate of her regular pancakes, always covered with lemon juice and sugar, and rolled tight into a cigar-shape. It was from the kitchen – extended into the back garden by a few feet when I was a young child, so as to provide more room for Mimi’s cooking – that the grandchildren would go into the still-spacious grassy expanse on Guy Fawkes night, when our fathers would set off all the fireworks that we had bought with money raised by the old custom of asking for a ‘penny for the Guy’; Mimi would venture through the glass sliding doors to the garden, plates of kosher mini-hot dogs in her hands, to feed her guests as the explosions rocked the night sky.

  It was while my brother and I were eating plates of Mimi’s pancakes in the kitchen one morning in the early 1990s, when she was already very old and very ill, that Chimen got a call from Sotheby’s suggesting he come in to see a copy of Stalin’s death mask that had mysteriously been deposited at the auction house the night before. In high excitement, Chimen told us to hurry up and finish our pancakes; and then the three of us dashed off to Sotheby’s. There was the mask, a ghastly portrait of the dictator in his final pose before eternity. There was something hideous about it, something vastly awful about touching the mask that had lain on the inert face of a man responsible for the deaths of millions. For Chimen, now in endless flight from the politics of his younger and middle years, it must have been particularly macabre.

  ***

  Mimi’s urge to hospitality seemed, occasionally, to border on the pathological. She simply could not endure the thought of an empty, quiet house. Nor, as someone who had grown up as a sickly child in the impoverished, war-torn East End, and who had reared her own children during the grim years of another world war and food rationing that continued long after hostilities had ceased, could she countenance her guests not eating: after all, it was not until 1954, when my father was twelve years old, that the rationing of meat and other foodstuffs finally ended. The consumption of sweets and chocolate had also been severely restricted for many years (the ration was as low as two ounces per person per week in 1942) as had the usage of butter, sugar, eggs and most other staple foods. For a couple of years after the war, with wheat crops hit by appalling weather, even bread, that most basic part of the British diet, had been rationed. So it was not surprising that, when Chimen left Britain for the first time in nine years, in 1948, on a mission to buy and sell books in an America untroubled by rationing and food shortages, Mimi’s daily letters to him were full of descriptions of the food parcels he should send home.

  Chimen, travelling on his newly issued British passport (for his official photograph he chose to wear a pinstripe suit, a dark tie and a white striped shirt) sailed for New York on the Cunard liner, the Mauretania, on 6 November 1948. His passage in a shared berth on the over-booked vessel was secured by the intervention of his father, Yehezkel, with the head of the shipping company. Mimi worried that Chimen – who, as documented on the form from the British tax office stapled into the back of his passport, had journeyed to America with £510 sterling, as well as rare texts to sell by the French revolutionary, Marat, and the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl – would develop a paunch when he was let loose on American restaurants. (Decades later, one of his New York cousins remembered how the little man from England had wolfed down enormous Reuben sandwiches, one after the other, in the city’s delis). My father, then six years old, ran around the kitchen when he received his father’s first letter, shouting, ‘Hurrah, hurrah, Daddy is in New York’. He was, Mimi reported, beside himself with excitement at the prospect of chewing gum finally arriving at Hillway. Meanwhile, Mimi’s sister Minna teased Chimen about the beautiful women he was likely to meet overseas. The sisters would, she wrote, have to start jitterbugging for him once he returned from his extended trip. But for Mimi more prosaic concerns predominated. On 28 December, ten days before Chimen was due to set sail home, my grandmother wrote, ‘as far as food goes – eggs, tinned fruit, wurst, salmon, tinned chicken etc’. Presumably, the wurst, or sausage, she was referring to was of the non-pork variety, because, despite their lack of religious sentiment, my grandparents, throughout the more than half a century of their marriage, kept a strictly kosher kitchen.

  In the delicate balancing act that made the salon work, Mimi owned the kitchen. But Chimen staked out a presence at the Formica-topped table; he f
requently played games of chess or Russian dominoes with his grandchildren there, and often he brought back to the house people with whom he had been speaking and with whom he hoped to continue in conversation over a mug of tea or a small, delicate cup of coffee in the kitchen, its contents carefully measured out by Chimen. So, too, he controlled the portable radio, increasingly ancient-looking as the years progressed, its telescopic antenna extended as high as it could go, which was always either tuned to classical music on Radio 3, or to the news on Radio 4. Most days, he would hush his visitors and ceremoniously turn on The World at One, or the Today programme: both were programmes which his daughter, Jenny, would edit as she rose up the ranks of the BBC. While the headlines were being read, he enforced strict silence on his guests.

  When I think about the kitchen now, it strikes me that it was a place of initiation. A guest would first come for a cup of tea, perhaps to grill Chimen on his knowledge about an historical topic and ask him for references for which, inevitably, he could conjure up the exact page (and go on to locate the book on his shelves to prove his point); and then, inexorably, and assuming Chimen did not find fault with the visitor’s approach to the world of ideas, the guest would be invited to dinner. Tea in the kitchen was a testing ground for the salon. To the intellectually agile, witty and cultured, the doors were thrown open in succession: first to the kitchen, then the dining room, then the front sitting room – where it was entirely likely that the conversation, begun over a cup of tea in the kitchen early that afternoon, would continue until well into the small hours of the night. That was how Chimen’s Oxford friend, the historian Harry Shukman, was initiated; introduced to Chimen by Shmuel Ettinger in the late 1950s on the steps of the British Museum, Shukman wandered the streets of Bloomsbury with his new acquaintance for two hours, discussing early twentieth-century Russian socialist movements. Soon thereafter, he received an invitation back to the house for tea. And after that, Mimi started feeding him.