The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  I rather hope that, outside of the confines of the Committee itself, this coterie of intellectuals relaxed enough around Mimi’s dining room table to acknowledge the absurd self-seriousness of its members. I wonder how, for example, they responded to a colleague’s martial announcement, transcribed verbatim by the secretary in a purple-bound lined notebook, that ‘there were sufficient forces in London to form an orientalists’ group, and that he would launch it?’ Or to the resolution, that ‘university members should consider attendance at period group meetings a definite Party duty, though the group secretaries should not demand apologies for non-attendance except in special cases’? I suspect, however, that far from chuckling at these announcements, they shared Chimen’s lack of humour about the Party during these years.

  At the time, Eric Hobsbawm lived in a flat in Bloomsbury with Henry Collins, and, as they dunked their biscuits into their stewed cups of tea with Chimen, the three of them would talk about Marx, and about Chimen’s fascination with the minutiae of the texts of and about the socialist prophet. It was out of these conversations that Chimen and Henry’s collaborative effort began, which eventually led to them jointly writing the book Karl Marx and the First International. It was, Hobsbawm came to feel, the fruit of the combination of Chimen’s extraordinary knowledge and of Henry’s ability to winnow down sprawling arguments, to synthesise information on the printed page. Hobsbawm concluded that Chimen had problems condensing his thoughts into written form, because he could never let go of details: ‘He was one of those great Marx scholars we used to have, who really knew the text. They’ve mostly disappeared now. They mostly came out of Poland, places like that. Learned chroniclers of every detail, analysis of every line Marx had written. He found it hard to put it down on paper. He was too scholarly to do that’. Henry, by contrast, had no such issues. He was a pragmatic man, smart, funny, yet utterly orderly in his thinking. A public school-educated English Jew among impoverished Eastern European migrants, he could go from belting out a comic song in Yiddish to, the next minute, having a serious conversation about Marx’s involvement with union organisers in Victorian England.

  ***

  It was in the dining room, during those early post-War years, that one of Hillway’s strangest annual rituals unfolded: the Communist Passover. Around the table some of London’s most stridently anti-religious thinkers would gather and, with nostalgic fondness, solemnly relive the salvation story that had played so prominent a role in their Eastern European, Orthodox childhoods.

  Most years Mimi and Chimen held two Seders – the ritual Passover feasts, held on successive nights, at which the Haggadah, detailing the exodus from Egypt, is read out – one for family, one for friends. It was a huge production. Strictly kosher, they kept an entire separate set of plates for Passover. Should the wrong dish be used, they would bury it in their back garden for a week to purify it. On the first night, all of Mimi’s cousins and uncles and aunts, her mother, her sisters and their families would troop in: at this time almost all the members of her family of her own generation were active Communists. Chimen’s parents, his brother Moshe and his cousins would go to more Orthodox houses for their Passover meal. On the second night Chimen and Mimi’s closest friends, many of them also Communist Party activists, would be their guests. Among them were Chimen’s good friend Izzie Pushkin, who had left Russia as a child in the 1920s; and Alec Waterman, who had been born in the small town of Blonie, outside of Warsaw nine years before Chimen’s birth, and, as a young boy, had spent seven years in a cheder, immersed in religious scholarship: both men served with Chimen on the Party’s Jewish Affairs Committee. They made up a cadre of Jewish Communists, schooled in religious Orthodoxy, wedded to secularism, suspicious of religion, yet devoted to the familiar rituals of Judaism. And with them were their wives (many of them, like Ray Waterman, also Party members and activists) and children.

  The men would all put on yarmulkes and everyone would then listen to Chimen’s rapid-fire Hebrew reading of the Haggadah; despite their avowed lack of religious feeling, they followed the rituals around what food to eat and when to drink their wine minutely. Only after they had feasted on Mimi’s Seder dinner was their irreverence let loose. Late in the evening, Henry Collins would sing his favourite comic song, ‘The Yiddisha Toreador’. ‘Moishe Levy vent to Spain, but not in a yacht or an aero-plane. Oh no; he had to go as a stow-avay …’ Along the way, Moishe makes a fortune and buys the ship he travels on. ‘Moishe arrived in a Spanish sea-port and he sold the ship vot he’d recently bought. He pulled a few vires and started some fires and had a good veek in the bankruptcy court. And so to escape from the toils of the law, Moishe became a toreador. Vot? A Yiddisha toreador. Yes, a Yiddisha toreador.’ And so on, until the climactic scene when Moishe suffers an ignominious death, after losing a fight and ending with a ‘bull’s horn up his tuchas’. It was the Marx brothers meeting the Marxists.

  ***

  Levity included, Passover was one of the central rituals on my grandparents’ calendar, as well as that of their friends: on a par with, say, the May Day workers’ holiday, when they would go to the union-organised rallies; or 25 October, when they commemorated the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. These were people who felt the weight of history – the pogroms of their parents’ generation, the Holocaust of their own youth – and who did not believe that history gave them the luxury to pick and choose their deepest identities. They were Jewish to the core: not revolutionaries who happened to be Jews, but Jews who chose to be revolutionaries.

  They could – and did – debate the implications of this combination of Jewishness and socialism: should they be socialist Zionists or internationalists, and should their primary emotional allegiance be to the Soviet Union or to the new state of Israel. For some, including Chimen, their views on these issues were not fixed, and over time they came to reverse their positions.

  In July 1946, just before his thirtieth birthday, Chimen wrote that ‘For over a quarter of a century Britain has kept Palestine under an iron rule by, at one time, encouraging Jews at the expense of Arabs and, at another time, siding with Arabs against Jews, taking advantage of every situation’. Rather than a Jewish state, he wrote, ‘Now is the time to stretch out a hand to the Arab progressives and fight for an independent, democratic, Palestine’. Fourteen months later he wrote, presciently, that a partition and the creation of a Jewish state would result in a ‘precarious dependence of a partitioned Palestine on foreign imperialist forces, be they British or American’. Yet, the following year, in June 1948, just after Israel had declared independence, my grandfather edited a ‘Special Palestine Number’ of the Jewish Clarion, which included his front page article under the banner headline ‘HANDS OFF ISRAEL’. In it he gleefully celebrated the new country’s birth. ‘The new Jewish state of Israel is a fact’, he opined. ‘It has been recognised by all the leading Powers and welcomed by all democratic Governments. Only the British Labour Government withholds recognition. The British authorities are, in fact, doing all they can to destroy the new state.’ His article concluded with a typical rhetorical flourish. ‘All support to the new state. Long live Israel!’ He was, I am sure, writing from the heart. But it did not hurt that, over the previous months, the Soviet Union had performed a spectacular volte-face on the question of Israel, trading opposition for support, largely in order to irritate the British authorities.

  Whatever the reasons for Chimen’s changed tone about the creation of a Jewish state, it was the beginning, emotionally, of a crucial shift in allegiance. Ultimately, that shift would take him from a vision of international Communism to a vision of Zionism in Israel and social democracy in Britain; from a dream of revolution to a belief that most change in most countries at most moments in time occurs gradually. Ultimately, it moved him from Bolshevism to liberalism.

  The transformation took years to mature, years during which he was still a largely uncritical supporter of the Soviet Union. It was partly a transformation born of shifting politic
al beliefs; and partly one fuelled by a personal tragedy which struck the family in 1948 when Chimen’s nephew, Jonathan (whom Chimen had last seen as a toddler in what was then still Palestine a decade earlier) was shot dead on the streets of Jerusalem during the Palestinian revolt that followed the declaration of the state of Israel. Chimen had helped his older brother, Yaakov David, with his wife and their infant son, to find a flat in Jerusalem when they moved to the city from London in April 1937, just months after finally being freed into exile by the Soviet authorities. At the time, Chimen recalled with amusement, Yaakov David spoke a rarified form of classical Hebrew, elegant, highly polished, yet virtually incomprehensible to ordinary people. It was, he said, as if his brother were choosing to speak Chaucer’s English during everyday interactions on the streets of modern London. Perhaps starved of adult conversation as a result, he had monopolised Chimen’s attention, preventing him from playing with the young boy. Chimen did not recall very much detail about his lost nephew.

  The author Amos Oz wrote about Jonathan’s murder in his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness. According to Chimen, Yehezkel poured out his feelings to a fellow rabbi living in Switzerland, in a long letter, written in Hebrew, after the killing. Shortly afterwards, Chimen told my cousin, Ron Abramski, in a 2003 interview about his life, Yehezkel apparently suffered a heart attack. For the family as a whole, Jonathan’s death must have been a shattering experience. How did the murder of a child, so intimate both in its execution and its consequences, fit into a one-size-fits-all philosophy that preached that, if only everyone recognised the brotherhood of man, a universal, everlasting peace would inevitably follow? How did Comintern slogans, no matter how grandiloquent their phrasing, help with the intense grief unleashed by such a personal catastrophe?

  Bit by bit, at first subconsciously, later quite explicitly, the ground was being laid for a new political perspective, for a new, less utopian, understanding of the human condition. Decades later, Chimen attempted to explain this shift. ‘When I was involved in politics and had contacts with leading Arabs in every Arab country in the Middle East I realised, fully, the total hostility of all the Arabs that I encountered, and their leading representation of the Left in Arabian countries, to the existence of the State of Israel’, Chimen wrote to his friend Walter Zander in June 1976. ‘Without exception, all were for its total destruction, and I became utterly despairing of discussing the Jewish question with them: they showed no compassion or feeling for it’. He ended his letter by warning against ‘idealism in a vacuum’. Many of the guests around the Seder table went through a similar change of heart.

  But, while they debated most things political – from Communism to nationalism, from Zionism to colonialism – what Chimen and this circle of first generation Jewish Communist immigrants from Eastern Europe never questioned was their adherence to at least the rudiments of Jewish ritual, to the modes of behaviour that had governed the lives of tens of generations of their ancestors in the little villages and shtetls of Eastern Europe. That, they would leave for future generations. They would leave it to their children and grandchildren, to the younger generations who were reared in democratic, assimilationist cultures, their realities far removed from the deadly violence of the pogrom, the Holocaust and the wars of the Middle East.

  ***

  In many ways that circle of friends around the dining room table at Hillway were the latest incarnations of a long line of Jewish thinkers, scholars and revolutionaries whom the writer Isaac Deutscher described in his posthumously published 1968 essay ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’. ‘The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition’, Deutscher wrote, in a book to be found in Chimen and Mimi’s dining room, to the left of the little piano. ‘Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxumburg, Trotsky, and Freud. You may, if you wish to, place them with a Jewish tradition. They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond it, and they represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in modern thought, the sum and substance of the most profound upheavals that have taken place in philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics in the last three centuries’. Initially, Chimen had slammed Deutscher. Writing in a Party publication, C. Allen had penned a long essay accusing the author of being an anti-Soviet Trotskyist. Later, he came to appreciate Deutscher’s writings on the radical Jews of the modern era. For Deutscher, who saw himself within this intellectual lineage, ‘they were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their mind matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations’. In the immediate post-war years, one such nook was the Communist Party and its various committees.

  The original mandate of the Historian’s Committee was to update A.L. Morton’s A People’s History of England, which had served as the Communist Party’s de facto reference guide for English history since its publication in 1938; and Maurice Dobb’s huge book Studies in the Development of Capitalism. Dobb, a colleague of Piero Sraffa’s, at Trinity College, Cambridge, was a leading Marxist economist at the time. To those ends, the members divided up the work, setting up committees on different themes, working to build alliances with historians around the country, and, ultimately, around the globe. Some (including Christopher Hill) specialised in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history and the religious schisms, civil war and economic transformation of that era; others (most notably Eric Hobsbawm) focused on nineteenth-century imperialism; while another group, including E.P.Thompson, John Saville and Raph Samuel concentrated on the history of labour and the working class in the era of the Industrial Revolution. ‘It was’, Hobsbawm recalled sixty years later, ‘in effect a ten year seminar, in which we talked with each other and talked over historical problems’.

  Members of the group, convinced that their work would help establish the tone for the coming revolution in Britain, set up the influential journal Past and Present. When the revolution did not unfold as planned, they set out to understand why. And, later on still, in the more critical, anti-USSR years of the late 1950s, as the Party line became increasingly hard to swallow, Chimen’s good friend John Saville, along with E.P. Thompson, established the heretical journal Reasoner, to challenge the Party orthodoxy. In the Reasoner they tackled the issues laid out in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘Secret Speech’ (a speech that was not, in fact, at all secret), which bluntly acknowledged the horrendous crimes that had occurred, in the name of Communism, under the rule of Stalin; they also used the journal to air grievances after the British Communist Party’s executive committee attempted to stifle the burgeoning dissent that emerged within its ranks in the wake of that speech. Palme Dutt, the Party’s leading theoretician, and Chimen’s friend from the war years, had gone so far as to dismiss Khrushchev’s revelations as ‘spots on the sun’.

  Saville and Thompson insisted on their right to dissent from this view. The Party, used to absolute obedience to its diktats, was not amused. In a series of increasingly acrimonious letters, members of the Executive Committee ordered Saville and Thompson to cease and desist publication; to appear before the Political Committee to answer for their sins; and to acknowledge that the Party was ‘the envy of every other working class organization for the level of its activity and the devotion of its membership’. There is an Alice in Wonderland quality to the language. As people around the world were shuddering at the horrors detailed by Khruschev – and as Communists throughout the West were being forced to acknowledge that the critiques of the Soviet Union that they had so long dismissed as capitalist propaganda were largely true – the Party’s General Secretary blithely asked the two historians, ‘Can you seriously compare our inner party democracy with that of any other organisation? Do you honestly expect to find a better party elsewhere?’ Used to living under siege, the Party could not tolerate any dissent, Pauline Harrison, a molec
ular biologist and the wife of Royden Harrison, another dissident historian, came to believe. Dare to strike out on your own, to think for yourself, to exercise your critical faculties, and its leaders immediately moved to censor you or, worse, to ostracise you: your erstwhile friends and comrades would simply refuse to talk to you, to acknowledge your existence. ‘I wouldn’t call it a cult exactly’, Pauline noted wryly, in conversation fifty-six years after she left the Party, but ‘it was a tightly knit organisation. There were Party lines, and you were supposed to obey’. Instead of accepting the Party’s convoluted logic, and embittered by the revelations of atrocities, outraged by the Soviet invasion of Hungary which followed quickly on the heels of Khrushchev’s speech, and sickened by the Party’s authoritarian treatment of intellectual dissent in Britain, Thompson and Saville resigned their Party membership. A few months before his final resignation, Thompson wrote that the Executive Committee of the Party would, if it ever achieved power in Britain, instantly destroy liberties carefully nurtured over three hundred years.

  During those same months of 1956–57, Mimi, her sisters, Raph, several of her cousins and many close friends, all joined Saville and Thompson in fleeing the Party, although, nearly forty years later, Mimi wrote to me that she did not like the word ‘flee’ in this context. ‘People “flee” when they are pursued by terror’, she explained. ‘The people who “fled” were the people who lived in a modicum of freedom. They “left” the party because they no longer believed it represented what they believed in’. Yet it seems to me that ‘flee’ is not too strong a word here. Forced to view the true visage of the Soviet Union, they shuddered in horror not only at the nature of the beast but also at their own complicity in its actions. ‘Crimes were perpetrated in the Soviet Union and in the New Democracies which in character (using physical and mental torture of the vilest kinds, terror against relatives and friends of victims, deportations of whole nationalities, etc.), and in results (frame up and murder of hundreds of thousands, and imprisonment of millions of honest communists and people friendly to Socialism, including some of the most outstanding fighters for our cause) – were amongst the worst the world has ever seen’, Mimi’s sister Minna wrote to her Branch Committee, on 22 May 1957, explaining her decision to leave the Party. ‘I know that most Party members, at all levels, are basically not only very good people, but people who have dedicated themselves to work for the betterment of mankind. It has shaken me to the core to find that they can view with comparative equanimity mass murder, torture, and unspeakable crimes committed in their name against their own comrades’.