‘There were’, remembered Peter Waterman, ‘loud and noisy discussions, and arguments. Because Chimen wasn’t the only one who could get very annoyed at being opposed in an argument. My father [Alec] also could lose his temper. These were very highly politicised people’. When, as schoolboys, Peter, Raph and other friends poked jokes at the Communist Party, Chimen, prickly on this point, quickly put a stop to it. Communism, in the 1940s and 1950s, was not something to laugh about in Chimen’s presence, any more than the Torah was something to be mocked in Yehezkel’s.
All too often during these years, rigid political beliefs led to a willingness to defend the show trials, purges and other arbitrary brutalities of the Stalin regime. Mimi and Chimen feuded with those who had grown disillusioned with the Cause; at times Chimen was even known to throw people who critiqued the USSR too vociferously out of their home. The more I research this period, the more I come to suspect that the front room of the 1940s and early 1950s was not a particularly pleasant place for non-believers to visit. And I think I am glad that I was not born early enough to test this thesis out. Far better for me to remember the house as the tolerant and broadminded place it would be throughout my childhood.
In 1949, when the Jewish Chronicle published an editorial accusing Stalin’s Soviet Union of anti-Semitism, Chimen, outraged, typed out a response – or, since he could not type himself, he probably dictated it to Mimi. ‘You mention the attack on Zionism in Pravda [the Soviet Union’s pre-eminent newspaper] and you write “The distance from baiting Zionists to baiting Jews is short”. It seems you confuse criticism of Zionism with anti-semitism. The Soviet government since its establishment always had an anti-zionist attitude, but at the same time it was the first Government in the World to introduce legislation making antisemitic propoganda [sic] a crime, a crime not only against Jews, but a very serious offence against the Soviet State as a whole.’ He continued: ‘It seems to me, Sir, that you are deliberately deceiving your readers by attributing antisemitic motives to the Soviet Government’. He fired off another letter, to his friend the journalist Ivor Montagu, urging Montagu, who had recently visited the USSR, to write an article himself ‘refuting the allegations against the Soviet Union’. And he wrote angrily about how ‘reactionaries in the U.S.A. were using allegations of Soviet anti-Semitism in their own propaganda campaigns’. That same month, Chimen and his comrades on the Party’s Jewish Affairs Committee decided to revive a defunct publication called The Jewish Clarion (which Chimen had edited on and off since December 1945, and which had ceased publication a few months earlier due to financial difficulties) in part to deal with the growing chorus of ‘slanders’ about the poor treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.
And so, just as Stalin was unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish purges, marshalling the full force of the Soviet state against ‘cosmopolitan’ Jewish intellectuals, just as the Jewish Autonomous Region was being purged and the dream of a Soviet Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan was destroyed, the Party’s faithful in Britain, Chimen among them, were working to convince the world of the Soviet system’s humanistic impulses.
It would take several more years before Chimen was willing to confront the awful truth: that anti-Semitism was alive and well in the Soviet Union – not to mention the fact that the system as a whole was light years away from being any sort of free and democratic beacon. And it was then, in that swirl of disillusionment, that he began to embrace Zionism. If Russia was not the place of refuge, somewhere else had to be. There had to be one country that could serve as what the early Zionist theoretician Ahad Ha’am, in the late nineteenth century, borrowing from a Biblical phrase, called Eretz Israel; or, as Chimen explained the idea in a 1976 lecture, a place where ‘the Jewish spirit’ could thrive, a spot on earth that could nurture ‘the moral, creative forces of the Jewish people that were and are suppressed brutally in the diaspora’.
If Communism could not deter cruel thoughts and terrible actions, other ideologies had to be found that could. Much of Chimen’s rethinking would have taken place while he pored over books from the shelves of this front room, and, afterwards, while he talked over his concerns with comrades over cups of tea in the same room. In later years, he would go on long, late-night walks around Oxford, with his friend Beryl Williams – then a young history tutor at the University of Sussex – and others, talking about how guilty he felt for having stayed in the Party for as long as he did. He told Beryl that he lost sleep over it. He denounced himself, in conversations with Eastern European intellectuals, many of whom were serving out their exiles at Sussex and a handful of other British universities – for having bought the Stalinist line that one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs. ‘He saw the Revolution as something that went wrong rather than something that shouldn’t have happened at all’, Williams concluded. ‘He became anti-Soviet, but he always remained a socialist, in a vague way’.
***
When I was a teenager, involved in the pacifist anti-nuclear movement and other left-wing activism in London, Chimen, still in full flight from his Communist past, still mortified by the nonsense that he had written as a young man, would lecture me on my youthful follies. It used to infuriate me. His fury, I thought, reflected a lack of passion, a calcification of his political nerve-ends. Today, as I sit at my computer, a middle-aged man trying to put together the pieces of my grandparents’ lives into a coherent narrative, I think I understand why he became so suspicious of what he saw as the naïve idealism of youth. Wanting to change the world for the better, caring passionately about the human condition, Chimen, Mimi and so many of those they loved and respected had spent years defending a brutal and totalitarian system. It was, I believe, Chimen’s most humbling realisation.
In an archive at the University of Sheffield, I sit and explore microfilms holding ten years’ worth of The Jewish Clarion. They contain articles by many of Chimen’s closest friends from the post-war period: Izador Pushkin; Alec Waterman; Hyman Levy; Andrew Rothstein; Sam Alexander; Lazar Zaidman; Jack Gaster. Under an array of names, Chimen wrote dozens of articles for this paper over the years. Sometimes he would appear under flimsy noms de plume: C. Chimen was the first, then A. Chimen. Occasionally, he would write as C.A. On rare occasions, mainly when he was publishing an innocuous historical essay or book review, he used his real name. For his most overtly propagandistic pieces, however, the son of Yehezkel Abramsky, exiled rabbinic scholar and head of the London Beth Din, went under the pen name C. Allen.
The summer I left secondary school, I needed to earn money to fund a rail trip around Europe. For some weeks, I worked at odd jobs – in a deli, cleaning tables at London Zoo, even scrubbing school toilets. Then Chimen took pity on me, and hired me to spend a few weeks with him trying to bring order to the chaos that was his upstairs study. We spent those weeks together, in the tiny room, burrowing through piles of papers, filing letters, chronologically ordering articles. Chimen, who never threw any written words away, found piles of his old Communist Party writings. Over my protestations, he made an exception to his rule: into a big, black rubbish bag went the papers, one after the other. Once the bag was filled, Chimen double-knotted it, as if he were trying to seal away toxic waste. And then he put the bag in the bin outside the house that the dustmen emptied into their lorry each week. At the time, I was flabbergasted. What vandalism! What a reckless disregard for the past! Now, having read the articles, I understand his horror. The writings were ghastly. Claptrap. Massively propagandistic. There is simply no other way to put it. I think that, had I known Chimen when he was writing them, I would have found it hard to remain on friendly terms with him. I know that Chimen felt the same way. For him, C. Allen and A. Chimen and the others were young lunatics with whom he wanted nothing more to do.
In July 1952, a certain ‘C.A.’ wrote a review of a volume entitled The Jews of Russia, a work that explored the changing condition of Russian Jewry before and after the revolution. ‘Only the revolution of 1917 put an end to the persecution of Jews
’, wrote the man whose father, two decades earlier, had narrowly avoided execution, had been sent to Siberia because of his religious work, and whose family had then been expelled from the Soviet Union. ‘The need to run away from the country stopped. Jews became equal in every sense of the word.’ In November 1952, summarizing the proceedings of the nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the thirty-six-year-old Chimen reverted to his deeper alias, C. Allen. After explaining to his readers that Western economies were being destroyed by American militarism, and that the senior Soviet politician Georgy Malenkov had detailed how the Soviet economic engine was out-powering that of the ‘forces of capitalism’, C. Allen concluded with an observation of his own: ‘The Soviet Communist Congress is a beacon of light for the peoples of the world. Its discussions and decisions will be studied by progressive people everywhere. It will render great assistance to the fight for peace and for socialism, to the inestimable benefit of the whole of mankind’.
It is C. Allen’s obituary of Joseph Stalin, published as a full-page spread on the inside back-page of the May 1953 edition that I most don’t want to read. I know it’s going to be awful; I know, from everything I have managed to reconstruct of Chimen’s world view when he was in his twenties and thirties that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist. What I don’t realise, going in, is just how phenomenally awful it really is, just how much he had bought into the cult of the personality. It leaves me gasping for breath, makes me want to run into a shower and scrub myself clean. This isn’t the sweet old man I loved so much; this isn’t the insightful humanist, so suspicious of even a whiff of totalitarianism and who so prided himself on his friendship with the great liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Titled ‘The Debt Jews Owe to Joseph Stalin’, and written five years after Stalin had embarked upon his massive campaign to eliminate Jewish intellectuals from public life in the Soviet Union, the obituary begins: ‘Progressive Jews everywhere grieve deeply over the death of Joseph Stalin, leader of progressive mankind, builder of Socialism and architect of Communism. To Stalin above all goes the credit for the great change in the position of Jews, from the violent oppression which they endured in Czarist times to the full equality as citizens which they enjoy in the Soviet Union… Stalin’s leadership was a tremendous contribution to the ending of exploitation of man by man, the root cause of anti-Semitism and racial discrimination’. C. Allen explained that, in an article written in 1912, Stalin had ‘analysed the position of the Jews, of whose life he showed outstanding knowledge’. Stalin created the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan. He allowed Yiddish culture to flourish.
The obituary outlines all of Stalin’s achievements through the late 1930s, and then details how he heroically commanded Soviet forces in their battle against Nazism from 1941 onward. Of the period from August 1939 to June 1941, the years of the infamous Nazi–Soviet Pact, there is literally no mention. C. Allen’s obituary of Stalin concludes with a flurry of hyperbole, of the kind one still sees today when a Great Leader passes away in North Korea. ‘The world has lost one of the greatest geniuses in all history. But Stalin’s heritage lives on in the mighty Soviet Union marching toward Communism. Stalin is dead but his ideas and his work will live forever.’
***
I want to grab C. Allen by the throat and punch him. I want to shout at him for being a damn fool. I want to scream that he’s sullied my memory of my grandfather. But C. Allen is nowhere to be found.
The Dining Room:
Rituals and Rebels
In Western Europe there are hardly any people who have lived through revolutions that are at all serious; the experience of the great revolutions is almost entirely forgotten there; and the transition from the desire to be revolutionary and from conversations (and resolutions) about revolution to real revolutionary work is difficult, slow and painful.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Letter to the German Communists’, 14 August 1921.
C. ALLEN HAS taken off his disguise, washed the low-grade printer’s ink from his hands, and returned home to Mimi’s warmth. He has become Chimen Abramsky, bookseller, husband, father and historian once more. And he’s sitting at his simple wooden dining room table, his children telling him about their days at school, while Mimi gives all of them their dinner. At some point the doorbell will ring – he knows it will, it does so every night – and one or more of their friends will come through the entrance, barely breaking into their conversations and their spirited political debates long enough to say hello, heading down the hallway and into the dining room to join the meal. There will be enough food for them all: despite post-war rationing and lack of money, Mimi can always stretch her meagre provisions to feed her guests. There will always be tea and biscuits, perhaps some herring or cheap pound cake. There will be beer; maybe, if the money can be found, there will be wine, imported from Israel or Morocco.
***
In these years after the war and into the 1950s, the members of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party were among the most regular visitors to Hillway. Even after several hours at the New Scala restaurant in Soho, or at Garibaldi’s, a little Italian place off the Farringdon Road, the historians could be relied on still to be hungry; they had, after all, been expending their energy pondering great historical questions, exploring how societies down the millennia had evolved, and trying to understand how this all fit into their Marxist schema. Chimen was not a particularly active member of the Historians’ Group, and he rarely attended the restaurant gatherings: throughout his Communist years he remained rigidly kosher and reluctant, especially in London, where he might be seen by religious relatives or acquaintances, to eat in non-kosher restaurants. And, during these years, he frequently did not have two pennies to rub together, and, in the circumstances, even a cheap meal with his Party comrades would have seemed an unreasonable luxury. But, despite his financial straits, he was one of the twenty-two members who had scrimped and saved to come up with the five-shilling membership fee. After the committee meetings, Eric Hobsbawm, who was the group’s first treasurer, and who also presided over the inelegantly named ‘Polemics Committee’, and various others would decamp from Garibaldi’s, get on the Underground, and set off for Hillway to eat and talk into the night.
The dining room in those years, before the house was extended out into the back garden by several feet, was quite cramped, almost all the space taken up by a little table and dining chairs as well as two or three armchairs. Mimi brought the trays of food around from the kitchen, into the hallway, and then through to the dining room. She had to sidle between the chairs, leaning over her guests to reach the table. Elbows jostled elbows. Used plates had to be rapidly cleared, not for etiquette’s sake but simply to make room for incoming food.
On the walls near the table were two prints by the Israeli artist Mordechai Ardon. Those at the other end of the room, away from the table, were shelved. Increasingly, as the collection grew, they housed books on Jewish history, many in Hebrew or Yiddish. Here were rare books on Jewish artists, included among them collections of high quality reproductions of sketches by Marc Chagall, ‘the central figure among Jewish artists’ in the period of the First World War, as Chimen wrote in the essay that accompanied a catalogue for an Israel Museum exhibition in Jerusalem, Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928. The artist, Chimen wrote, painted ‘a dream world of poetry and magic’. His imagery spoke to the experiences of the Jews of the shtetl, as well as to the heartache of a people torn between past and future, between the pull of modernity and the familiarity of the old ways. It was sometimes whimsical, but often deeply melancholy. Many of his paintings, wrote Chimen, were intended to convey Chagall’s feelings of horror ‘after the pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine during the civil war.’
There was also a volume of coloured, numbered and signed lithographs, by the Russian painter Anatoli Kaplan, illustrating stories by Sholem Aleichem, including ‘Tevye der Milkhiker’, and ‘Mottel The Cantor�
�s Son’ – stories that formed the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. There were collections of rare woodcuts, books of illustrated poems, and graphic art from the early Russian revolutionary period.
Around the crowded table and amid the clutter of books and artwork, the seated guests during these years would have included Edward and Dorothy Thompson; the Oxford historian Christopher Hill, whose wife (also a historian), Bridget, for some time implausibly thought that Chimen was an Irishman, Seamus O’Bramski; Hobsbawm; and, of course, Raph Samuel. The youngest member of the Historians’ Group, Raph had joined the Young Communist League in 1942 or 1943, at the astonishingly precocious age of seven, and by the time he began attending Balliol College, Oxford in the early 1950s, was already a gifted polemicist and historian. Raph would bring with him his Balliol friends, as well as his girlfriend, who was Harold Laski’s granddaughter. So, too, would be seated some of Mimi’s female friends: Mimi liked to play her hand at matchmaking, though the eligible Hobsbawm did not take the bait.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 20