***
My mother was an American, and, as such, was tolerated despite the circumstances of her birth when she first moved into the Hillway orbit. For in the 1960s, Hillway was gripped by a cultural suspicion of all things Yankee – of jazz and baseball as much as of McCarthyism and racial segregation. It was a hangover from the days of Communism, but it was also redolent of the zeitgeist: in the post-war period, many of the British, struggling to accustom themselves to the United Kingdom’s diminished status in the world, were deeply hostile to America, whatever their political persuasion. Americans were, as the sardonic wartime jingle had it, ‘over-fed, over-sexed and over here’, the new imperialists, brash in their assumptions of power, culturally crass, not quite sophisticated enough for the world stage. Or perhaps that was just sour grapes: America’s global aspirations were neither more obnoxious than those of Britain during the recently-faded glory days of Empire nor more all-encompassing. Be that as it may, whether out of political conviction or simple snobbery, Hillway in the immediate post-war decades was as anti-American in sentiment as, say, the conservative Carlton Club, or Jimmy Porter, the nasty, alcoholic protagonist in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, who bitterly noted that ‘it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age – unless you’re an American of course’. (Or, for that matter, Chimen’s own great-grandfather, the Ridbaz, who had lived in New York for a few years in the late nineteenth century, before returning to Byelorussia in disgust. America, he told anyone who was interested, was treyfene medine, an impure land of secularism and assimilation.) In post-war England, anti-Americanism was the acceptable bigotry of the times.
Several years after Chimen had left the Communist Party, he wrote to an old Party friend, the journalist and film-maker (and, it later transpired, Soviet spy) Ivor Montagu, regarding a rare books deal he was trying to close. ‘My dear Ivor’, he began, ‘I wonder whether you can help me. Some months ago I offered Jack, for our mutual friends, some very important unpublished letters of Marx, and four pages of his draft for Das Kapital. In addition also some exceedingly rare first editions of Lenin and Marx. To the present day I have not heard anything from them. There is an American collector who wishes to purchase them, but I am most unwilling to sell these things to an American capitalist’. Montagu replied that he had not been able to get a response from his Party contacts about purchasing the documents. Chimen’s response, penned a few days later, practically exploded with misery. ‘Many thanks for your note’, he wrote. ‘It is a great pity that the Marx letters and manuscript will go to an American capitalist where they will lie hidden and unknown’.
Ironically, Mimi, along with her sisters and mother, had travelled to America in 1933 to visit relatives in Connecticut and she had had a wonderful trip. Likewise, Chimen had thoroughly enjoyed his time in the United States in 1948. But, while the endless sandwiches suited his ration-shrunken stomach, and while the many cousins whom he met in New York, Detroit, Connecticut and elsewhere hosted him like visiting royalty, he remained unconvinced by the culture. He felt far more at home in Western Europe, travelling numerous times to France, Belgium and Holland over the following years, the pages of visas stamped into his passport testifying to an urge to travel, to see the world, that had been stifled over the preceding decade. Only much later in his life would his passport bear an almost equal number of entry stamps from the other side of the Atlantic.
***
As the occupants of Hillway aged, the kitchen seemed to get inexorably greasier. One year, as my mum, Jenny and Vavi were preparing the Seder dinner, my cousin Rob came in to help. The saucepans were covered in grease, the plates were a disaster. ‘How can I help?’ Rob asked. He was told to wash the dishes. Rob looked around in amazement. ‘I thought you did that after the meal’, he said, and set to work.
In his last years, long after Mimi had died, the kitchen was the room in which Chimen sat, passively, staring out at the plants and at the squirrels. It was where his carers fed him, sometimes it was where the social workers and nurses came to examine him. And yet, for all the sadness of that room as Chimen began to fade away, because the kitchen was where he sat for most of his waking hours it was also the room where, in the last five years of his life, I had better conversations with him than anywhere else in the house.
The Front Room:
The Haskalah
And so, covering himself with his shield, and couching his lance, he rushed with Rozinante’s utmost speed upon the first windmill he could come at, and, running his lance into the sail, the wind whirled about with such swiftness, that the rapidity of the motion presently broke the lance into shivers, and hurled down both knight and horse along with it, till down he fell, rolling a good way off in the field.
Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605).
AS MIMI STIRRED her pots of soup and dressed her ducks in the kitchen, gradually the dinner crowd would gather. They would start coming in at around six, chat for a while around the kitchen table, and then, when a critical mass for a conversation had arrived, they would migrate into the front room with their cups of tea, or, if the hour was late enough, their glasses of wine.
The front room looked out onto Hillway, its round bay windows jutting outward slightly into the front garden. Under the window was a built-in, angular, wooden ledge, its white paint greying with age and flaking with disrepair. The top of this ledge lifted up to reveal a chaotic storage area filled with yarmulkes, Haggadot and other Seder accoutrements. Sitting on that ledge, in between some heavy potted plants, you had a slight vantage point, to look out over the rest of the crowd. Peering into the room from that window seat, the small fireplace edged with dark green tiles was off to the right. Back when English houses still used coal, it had been a functional fireplace, vital to heating the house during London’s cold, dank winters. By the time I came on the scene, however, it had long been abandoned in favour of central heating, and rendered largely inaccessible by an old record player, radio and tape recorder hi-fi system resting on a table in front of it, and by two more large potted plants with deep green velvet-like leaves which stood sentinel on each flank.
Chimen and Mimi both liked music, but they did not know much about it. When they did listen to a record, their tastes mainly veered toward high culture: Beethoven symphonies, Mozart chamber music, the occasional opera; but, at the same time, they also enjoyed the Yiddish folk music of their own and an earlier age. Chimen had in his collection many of the original manuscripts of Velvl Zbarzher, a nineteenth-century Galician Jew described in the Jewish Encyclopedia as ‘a real folk-poet’, as well as a complete collection of all his published works – it was a trove of Zbarzher material unrivalled by that owned by any other individual or institution in the world, including the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Zbarzher’s real name was Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz, but, like Robert Zimmerman a century later, he decided his folk music needed a snappier nom de plume. And so a Galician Bob Dylan was born. Zbarzher wrote Yiddish poems, often recited to music, about love and loss, social injustice and religious intolerance. A follower of the Jewish Enlightenment, known as the Haskalah, he loved poking fun at his Hasidic neighbours, writing mocking lyrics about how they believed they had all the hidden knowledge and that therefore the achievements of science, in an age of technological transformations, were for naught.
Eventually, the Galician troubadour fell in love with a woman known as Malkele the Beautiful and moved to Istanbul, where he died in 1883, the same year as did Karl Marx. Zbarzher’s story ended only six years after Thomas Edison had invented the phonograph and, to posterity’s loss, he did not leave any recordings behind. Had he done so, I am sure they would have found their way into my grandparents’ small collection of LPs. After all, Yiddish was the language in which Chimen wept; it was in the mamaloshen, the mother tongue, that he read poems of love and loss. It might very well have been the language in which he dreamed.
What was in that collection, were the recorded songs of Itzik Manger, a larger-than-life twent
ieth-century Yiddish poet, playwright and self-proclaimed ‘folk bard’ who had hero-worshipped Zbarzher. Chimen had befriended him shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, and for a brief time they had co-edited the left-wing Yiddish literary journal Eyropë. During the war, Manger was the central figure in a group of Yiddish essayists, poets and playwrights with whom Chimen drank cups of tea and talked at a little café on a side street near the British Library. It was there that they met the journalist and art critic Leo Koenig; quite likely that was also the spot where Chimen would have met another close friend from the period, the Yiddish novelist, playwright and book collector Scholem Asch. There too he may have befriended the German Yiddish poet A.N. Stencl, an eccentric figure who published the journal Loshn un Lebn (Language and Life) and who was rumoured to have smuggled himself out of Nazi Germany and into England in a coffin. Stencl ran a salon in Whitechapel, known as the Friends of Yiddish, which survived for nearly thirty years after his death in 1983. Itzik Manger was, however, the focal point of this group. He spent eleven years living in London, first as an unhappy refugee during the war – by a convoluted path, he had gone from Poland to France to North Africa to Gibraltar, then to Portugal, and finally to London, in the early months of hostilities – and subsequently as an unhappy, stateless resident after the war. In 1951 he moved to Israel, where he died in 1969.
Chimen admired Manger and loved speaking Yiddish with him, but he came to resent his friend’s inability to control his tongue. Manger was a notoriously difficult man, a breathtakingly good poet who, when he got drunk – which he did all too often – was capable of saying the most appalling things to those close to him. Many decades later Chimen told his friend the Yiddish scholar Efrat Gal-ed (who taught at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldörf), that Manger had burned his bridges with him when, sometime after the war ended, Chimen had spoken at a London gathering to commemorate the lives of two Bundist leaders killed by the Soviet secret police. Manger had taken offence at Chimen’s words, and had accused Chimen of ‘murdering’ the two men all over again. Quite possibly, Chimen, then in the full bloom of his Stalinism, had indeed said something offensive – Chimen also feuded so angrily with Leo Koenig during these years that in a fit of utterly irrational, counterproductive, pique he returned an original piece of art by Chagall that Koenig had given him; it was equally likely, however, that Manger had just let his tongue run rampant against an erstwhile friend.
Despite my grandmother’s attempts to smooth things over, Chimen could not forgive the poet. The two men never spoke again. But Chimen continued to love Manger’s poetry and music. Every Seder, after the serious work of reading the Hagaddah and eating Mimi’s feast was finished, Chimen would belt out a rendition of Manger’s whimsical love-poem ‘Rabbeinu Tam’, complete with the meaningless refrain, ‘haydl, didl, dam’. He would read through the Yiddish quickly, semi-melodically, pause at the chorus line and wait for us all to jump in. Without fail, we did. Over the years, we learned to sing much of the Yiddish storyline too, simply by memorising the inchoate sounds of the words. There, in late twentieth-century London, Chimen had a table of thirty guests singing Manger’s song, in a language most of us did not understand, about events we had no inkling of. Until I researched the song for this book, I had had no idea that we were all singing about a lovelorn queen of Turkey, sending her yearning letters to the Rabbi Tam, the missives carried by a golden peacock across the ocean. I had no idea that when Rabbi Tam’s wife intercepted the letters she would thwack him with a rolling pin. Or that Tam himself would seek refuge from the complexities of his life by talking to a goat in his stables. I can, all these years later, still remember Manger’s rhythms, his sounds. I can still almost feel the vibrations of the sonorous, melodramatic basso in which Chimen and Mimi’s friend Manny Tuckman (whose wife, Ghisha, was Leo Koenig’s daughter) would slowly build up to the final, climactic, ‘Haydl, didl, dam’, the last word lingered on, a gradual glissando from major to minor.
Many of Mimi and Chimen’s other musical tastes were, however, only comprehensible in the light of their politics. Among the records of symphonies conducted by Otto Klemperer and operas sung by the great Russian bass vocalist Feodor Chaliapin (who, when he was still a child, Chimen’s mother had taken him to see) were recordings by the American singer Paul Robeson. Robeson’s sonorous voice was truly beautiful; but the reason the Abramsky family listened to him, rather than to, say, Frank Sinatra, had more to do with the fact that he was a Communist Party sympathiser than that he could hit a perfect low-C, and that he spoke out in defence of, and sang for the sympathisers with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who, on 19 June 1953, were executed for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. At the height of the McCarthyite purges, the American government confiscated Robeson’s passport because of his left-wing political activism; in 1958, under pressure from an international campaign, the US Supreme Court restored his passport – and immediately afterwards, he flew to England to give a series of concerts. Three years later, the star sang at a 1961 concert at London’s Albert Hall celebrating the Daily Worker newspaper’s thirty-first birthday. Robeson’s records were advertised in Party brochures, and purchasing them was thus akin to a political obligation. So, too, back in the early post-war years, was the playing of Russian Communist airs such as ‘The Tractor Song’ and ‘Varushka’s Sorrow’, homages to the Russian workers, toiling to transform their Fatherland into a workers’ paradise.
There, in suburban north London, Chimen, Mimi and their Communist comrades would gather to listen to the music of revolt. ‘The Party’, Raph Samuel wrote, with the benefit of hindsight, ‘had some resemblances to a “gathered” church: a people apart, in the world but not of it. We comported ourselves as an elect, a moral aristocracy, a congregation of true believers’. Party members, he observed, ‘never tired of proclaiming their faith in the masses, even when it seemed that their arguments were spurned’.
Anyway, it did not really matter what music Mimi and Chimen had in their collection, or how unsubtle the music’s message was. Unless Chimen was travelling (when Mimi would temporarily put the salon on hold, and catch up on her own reading and correspondence and maybe even listen to some of her favourite LPs), when their children were at home and the cares of daily life and work were layered atop the obligations of running a house like 5 Hillway, there was almost never a moment, during waking hours, when the house was quiet enough to really listen to music. Just as, in a city, there is always background noise, so omnipresent that one ceases to be consciously aware of it, so too at Hillway there was a continual hum of animated, multi-accented conversation, the clatter of cooking utensils and the clamour of people calling from one room to the next. Chimen, in particular, would call out ‘Mir-ri’ from wherever he was, and would hope she would hear him; whether she would often depended on how loud was the sound of food frying in the kitchen. If she did, she would call back, ‘Yes Chim!’ her voice tinged just slightly with exasperation. ‘Our guests are getting hungry!’ Children would run madly between rooms. A critical mass of adults would gel into small knots, each with their own argument or analysis or joke underway. Then, like a kinetics experiment in a laboratory, the individuals would shift, new groups would form, and then new ones again. The doorbell would ring, or someone would loudly bang the knocker. The roar of a moped coming up the garden path to the steps leading up to the front door would signal Rose’s imminent arrival.
Above the fireplace was a large reproduction, the colours muted, of the famous Marc Chagall painting of a fiddler on the roof, created by the artist in 1912–13. And on either side of it were shelves: thick, dark, unfinished wooden planks, ranged all the way up to the ceiling. On these shelves were hundreds of books on Jewish history, many of them on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual movements in Eastern Europe. It was a rich vein to mine. From the late eighteenth century onwards, the writings, the friendships, and the political campaigns of the German Jewish religious scholar, philosopher and literary cr
itic Moses Mendelssohn, were the catalyst for a Jewish Enlightenment, known as the Haskalah, which made its way eastwards from Germany.
Mendelssohn, who was born in the town of Dessau in 1729 and moved to Berlin as a young man, sought to use the rational principles and language of the Enlightenment to prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul and the necessity of the Talmudic code, and at the same time to emancipate Europe’s Jews, both from the age-old restrictions imposed on them by the state authorities (limiting what work they could do and where they could live, for example), and also from the self-imposed isolation that separated most Jews from the broader intellectual culture of the time. His theories on the immortality of the soul, developed in his book Phaedon, were unconvincing; his commentaries on emancipation were more profound. Preaching a form of separation of church and state, he attempted to bring the Jews of Europe’s ghettos into the intellectual mainstream. In his homeland he sought to teach them German in place of the Judeo-German that most of his contemporaries spoke; to have them read the great works of literature and science of his age; to have them engage in the great philosophical debates of the day. In a project that was, in its way, as ambitious as that of the Protestant reformers, centuries earlier, who had translated the Christian Bible into vernacular languages, in 1783 Mendelssohn translated the Hebrew Bible into German. It caused consternation among many rabbis, who feared their influence would decline if the populace could actually understand the Holy Book without their mediating power, and who encouraged their more rowdy followers to burn the offending volume. But the translation found a ready audience of book-buyers, who rapidly made his effort a best-seller. In his book Jerusalem, or, On Religious Power and Judaism, published in the same year, Mendelssohn made a powerful – albeit ultimately flawed – attempt to reconcile age-old Jewish traditions with the philosophical rationalism espoused by Immanuel Kant that was so in vogue among his contemporaries. Kant had, after all, urged his readers to ‘dare to use your reason’.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 15