The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  ‘I met him because of a book’, remembered Marion Aptroot, a Dutch scholar of Yiddish, who was working on her PhD dissertation at Oxford in the late 1980s. She was trying to find the first edition of a Yiddish Bible, printed in Amsterdam in 1679. But wherever she looked, she could only find the second edition, printed almost simultaneously with the first, but, she suspected, containing a number of textual differences. None of the libraries that might have had such a book did so. A copy had, apparently, once been owned by the Jewish Theological Society in New York; but it had been destroyed in a fire. Finally, her supervisor, Dovid Katz, told her to write to Chimen. She did, and promptly got a letter back. Yes, he had the book in his collection, and she would be quite welcome to come down to London to look it over.

  Aptroot made an appointment to visit Hillway. She arrived, and Chimen promptly took her upstairs to the front room. There, he subjected her to what she thought of as a kind of entrance exam. ‘He’d open a book and say, “What is this?” Just to test me. I passed the test. We had coffee. And then he let me work upstairs with the books’. She returned to the house several times subsequently, as she compared the texts of the two editions. ‘He’d invite me downstairs for lunch. I’d go back upstairs and work. He’d invite me down for tea. And then I’d leave’. She found, in her work at Hillway, that her suspicions were correct: the first edition – the only known copy of which had somehow ended up in Chimen’s collection – had been financed by a man who had held back a number of its pages as collateral. After he quarrelled with the original publisher, he decided to publish his own edition of the Bible, using some of the pages in his possession to differentiate it from the original. Chimen was thrilled by the discovery. It helped to bring to life these publishers, who had lived three centuries earlier, to add emotions and human drama to their names. He thought, said Aptroot, that ‘it was exciting, from the point of view of book lore’. They began a correspondence in Yiddish. When she visited, they would often lapse into the mamaloshen. ‘He was just so friendly, and the house was open. He was just a wonderful person to talk to and to discuss things with. He knew a lot, and also became a friend’.

  ***

  For much of his adult life, Chimen had been guided by Karl Marx’s admonition to action: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’. Now, as he aged, a subtle shift kicked in. Increasingly, he looked not to Marx but to Spinoza for moral guidance. ‘To be is to do, and to know is to do’, Spinoza had written at his desk in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century. It was also a call to action, but it was no longer an explicit call to revolution. Chimen remained vitally engaged in the world around him, but he no longer felt compelled to shake the pillars of the temple.

  Thus, in later years, the upstairs front room, rather than the bedroom, became the intellectual epicentre of Hillway. Eventually, when Chimen was a very old man, he needed live-in help to be able to continue living in Hillway. To pay for it he sent a page from a twelfth-century manuscript to auction in New York, and the room became a bedroom once more, for a succession of Eastern European carers, economic exiles from the ex-Soviet Union and its satellite states. Occasionally, Chimen would still venture in, especially when his old Sotheby’s friends came around to visit and to show him manuscripts. Then, his enthusiasm fired up again, he would order his carers to strap him into the chair lift that carried him up to the first floor, would press the start button and – to the horror of those watching from below – would accelerate up the stairs as fast as possible. At the top, he would be unstrapped and then, with infinite solemnity, would totter into the room in search of hidden treasures.

  But that was all in the future. Chimen, building up his Judaica collection, still had work to do; and the salon in which he and Mimi lived still had years left to run.

  Dining Room Resurgent:

  Rebirth

  We could then say that rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience. It is fundamentally an attitude of admitting that ‘I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth’.

  Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).

  AS CHIMEN AND Mimi’s politics shifted, and as Chimen’s book collecting priorities evolved, so the timbre of the gatherings at Hillway underwent a metamorphosis. Many of their firmest friends from the Communist Party had also left the Party in the years following 1956. But those who had remained members now broadly disappeared from the Hillway scene. Some no longer wanted anything to do with the Abramskys. Party leaders such as Harry Pollitt – to whom, nine years earlier, Chimen had sent a copy of Churchill’s memoirs ‘so that you can enjoy yourself reading what that “bastard” has to say’ – and Palme Dutt viewed those who handed in their membership cards as turncoats, renegades, class traitors; and they discouraged their acolytes from maintaining personal relations with such individuals. They were, wrote Dutt contemptuously in Labour Monthly, deluded dreamers. ‘To imagine that a great revolution can develop without a million cross-currents, hardships, injustices and excesses would be a delusion fit only for ivory-tower dwellers in fairyland who have still to learn that the thorny path of human advance moves forward, not only with unexampled heroism, but also with accompanying baseness, with tears and blood’. For those who had lost the stomach for that bloodshed, who felt that their ideals had been utterly abused, Dutt had nothing but vitriol. With others, too quick to toe the party line, too quick to stifle dissent among friends, it was Chimen and Mimi who cut the contact. For still others, among them Eric Hobsbawm, it seems to have been a mutual decision: when they saw each other, they fought; life was more harmonious apart. After a while, the invitations to Hillway stopped and the casual visits for a cup of tea and a chat about history ceased.

  There was some continuity, however. Hillway remained an epicentre for the huge family; old friends like the Pushkins and Watermans continued to visit; Chimen’s great friends from the Hebrew University days made their way to north London as regularly as ever. But, over time, the tone of the gatherings changed dramatically. Marxist historians and Communist activists were replaced by liberal philosophers and historians – or were, at the very least, expected to discuss events other than goings-on in the Soviet Union and the expected, imminent revolution in Great Britain; by relatives visiting from America, taking advantage of the rise of affordable air travel; by a growing number of wealthy businessmen-cum-book collectors; and, within a few years, by a new generation – me, my siblings, my cousins. Hillway filled with friends and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s friends.

  Politically bereft, my grandparents began to fashion a new community. For Chimen in particular, who had spent nearly twenty years in the Party’s inner circle, it was not always easy. There was something plaintive about Chimen’s post-Communist persona: loathing his past, he felt grubby when he recalled his enthusiasm for Stalinism and his defence of the show trials, yet he was nonetheless anxious to maintain contact with it. To Lazar Zaidman, his fellow theoretician on the Communist Party’s National Jewish Committee, he wrote on 28 March 1959, ‘Dear Lazar, members of my former branch are boycotting me as an untouchable. When I left the Party nobody cared a damn, and nobody came to talk matters over. I still feel rankled [by] the way Hyman Levy was, and is, treated’. Chimen went on, his small, precise lettering slanting gently to the right, to say that despite the Party leadership turning against him when he published Levy and Lukács, ‘personally I want to remain on very friendly terms with all party members irrespective of the differences I have with the party, and when one meets [wish] that we could freely discuss political differences rather than avoid them’. He had finally stopped capitalising The Party.

  Chimen missed the camaraderie of that organisation. For years he and Mimi had taken the children to the annual Communist Party-sponsored Russian Bazaar held in the austere Victorian surroundings of St. Pancras Town Hall, where they could buy Ukrainian and Georg
ian embroidered blouses and other exotica. They had gone on May Day rallies, at which the whole extended family would proudly march through the streets of London. They had stayed in socialist guesthouses in southern England, where Jack had learned to play chess, and they all spent the evenings watching grainy black and white films on such topics as the life and death of Lenin. But to stay within the Party culture while critiquing its policy positions was impossible. The Communist Party could brook no dissent. Its very raison d’être was orthodoxy, requiring the rigid, unquestioning submission of the individual to the needs of the organisation. When they were die-hard Party activists, Chimen and Mimi had themselves broken with several close friends, including Mimi’s first boyfriend, who had dared to criticise the Soviet Union. For years, Chimen had even avoided contact with his dear friend Shmuel Ettinger, after Ettinger had returned from a trip to the USSR deeply critical of what he had seen. To live and let live, as Chimen was now proposing, was apostasy. Even though Chimen was, at that very moment, frantically trying to complete his book on Karl Marx, travelling back and forth on research trips to socialist historical institutes and libraries in Amsterdam and elsewhere, and was already planning to write the definitive English-language biography of Marx – the project left forever unfinished when Henry Collins died of cancer in 1969 – he came to realise that the relationships that had come from his decades as a Party theoretician and activist were finished.

  Over the years, Chimen’s attempts to stay on good terms with former comrades like Eric Hobsbawm, and indeed with Zaidman himself, floundered. Sam and Lavender Aaronovitch, who lived around the corner from Hillway, ostentatiously crossed the street when they saw the Abramskys coming; hostility crossed generational lines – it seemed to the twelve-year-old Jenny that the Aaronovitches had instructed their daughter, Sabrina, to stop playing with, and even talking to, the Abramsky girl. Other Party stalwarts from the neighbourhood also very deliberately cut off contact.

  ***

  Yet, for all the emotional turmoil which the breach with Communism entailed, Chimen and Mimi didn’t permanently step back from their role as hosts. They could not. Without company around her dining room table, Mimi would have withered away; without a crowd of fellow philosophes in the front room, Chimen would have crumpled.

  As Hillway began a long march to becoming a liberal salon, its formerly Red hues bled down to a more muted pink. Where once the house counted among its most frequent guests the Marxist historians of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, their places were filled by rising stars in the world of Jewish Studies, American academics and civil liberties advocates, and European liberals and intellectuals. Isaiah Berlin took the place of Hobsbawm; Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, of the World Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Congress came instead of E.P. Thompson. There were other new friends, too, such as the head of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Leo Stodolsky and his wife Cathy; and the Israeli poet and playwright Dan Almagor, who had made a name for himself translating Shakespeare’s plays into modern Hebrew.

  As time passed, dealers in religious manuscripts and books on Jewish history became more regular guests than the dealers in socialist literature. Where once Piero Sraffa had eaten Mimi’s food and discussed rare volumes by Marx, Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg, now Jack Lunzer popped in for conversations about incunabula. On occasion, Isaiah Berlin visited Hillway, although Chimen and he more often met either in Oxford or for lunch at Berlin’s London club, the Athenaeum, which Chimen regarded as practically hallowed ground. They would, perhaps, start with a drink in the bar, to the right of the entrance, its wallpaper patterned with gilded gold, a full-length portrait of Charles Darwin over the counter, settling into the deep-green leather armchairs as they began their discussion. After a while, they would move into the long dining room on the other side of the entrance, sitting at Berlin’s favourite table, in the corner of the room by the windows overlooking Lower Regent Street, for a leisurely meal. After lunch, Berlin would escort Chimen upstairs to the coffee room, a high-ceilinged room with marble columns, quail-egg blue walls and ornate salmon-pink draperies. On the shelves was a somewhat random conglomeration of large, antiquated, tomes, with such titles as Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages and Spanish Scenery. ‘In those days’, Eric Hobsbawm recalled shortly before he died, ‘the food wasn’t particularly good. You sat down, nobody disturbed you. It’s one of those grandiose buildings built in the days when the English ruling class was totally certain of its place in the world. 1835. Classical style. Great staircase. Marvellous drawing room on the first floor. With busts of the leading English intellects from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries’. Berlin would give long, very entertaining monologues, ‘about everything: himself, gossip. Sometimes Isaiah would ask Chimen about Jewish matters. He may have asked him about Communist matters too. He liked to think he knew about what the Communists were doing. Primarily they would have talked about Israel’. And, in talking about Israel, in all likelihood they would have discussed their mutual friend Jacob Talmon.

  Berlin had long been closely associated with Chimen’s old friend from his Hebrew University days. Talmon had migrated permanently to Israel after the war (changing his name from Fleischer – the name by which Chimen had known him during their student years – to Talmon, taking the name of a Biblical family who returned from the Babylonian exile to serve as gatekeepers for the new Temple in Jerusalem) and had spent decades researching and writing a massive trilogy of books on Europe’s violent revolutionary history from 1789 onwards. For Talmon, nationalism, fascism and messianic Communist movements were all the heirs of the Jacobins: as descendants of Robespierre and Marat, their casual resort to extreme violence was the logical outcome of their admiration for the Jacobin Terror and use of the guillotine against their enemies. Carried away by their fervent rhetoric, intellectuals who defended these movements were, Talmon argued, at least partly responsible for spreading the virus of extremism that had done so much damage to so many people throughout the twentieth century. ‘If modern ideologies were essentially a translation of old religious yearnings into secular and political frameworks’, wrote the historian Arie Dubnov, in a 2008 essay on Talmon’s life and work published in the journal History of European Ideas, ‘then the intellectuals, who were functioning as modern priests, were also responsible for this conceptual laicization’.

  In 1952 Talmon published the first of his three volumes, entitled The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Perhaps he had Chimen – the man who had helped him in England after he had had to flee Nazi-occupied France, and who was now mired in Stalinist dogma – in mind when he wrote that ‘Totalitarian Messianism hardened into an exclusive doctrine represented by a vanguard of the enlightened, who justified themselves in the use of coercion against those who refused to be free and virtuous’. Chimen must have felt himself personally attacked by Talmon’s damning critique of those who participated ‘in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose’ and been dismayed by how his friend had lost his way and joined the reactionary ranks of the bourgeoisie. ‘Modern totalitarian democracy’, Talmon sadly noted as he sat writing at his desk at the Hebrew University, ‘is a dictatorship resting on popular enthusiasm’. It was an enthusiasm that he wanted no part of.

  By 1960, when Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, the second volume of Talmon’s trilogy, came out, Chimen wholeheartedly endorsed its conclusions. Talmon, now firmly in the camp of Cold War liberals, explained to his readers that messianic politics ‘postulates an all-embracing exclusive doctrine, which is held to offer a binding view on all aspects of human life and social existence, including religion, ethics, the arts’. Chimen might not have agreed with Talmon in placing all the blame for this development on Karl Marx and the other great socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, but, assuredly, he would no longer have argued with its central premise: that individuals, in terrifying numbers, had been sacrificed to false idols in the political conflicts that had spanned the course of the twentieth ce
ntury. To him ‘freedom’ now meant not the ultimate triumph of the working class, but something much more individual, more classically liberal. It meant, he wrote in a tribute to Isaiah Berlin in the mid-1970s, ‘freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to other men – all other senses of freedom are an extension of this’.

  By then, Chimen was rapidly rising to the top of the academic world, propelled there in large part by the interventions of Berlin. Ten years earlier, it was at Berlin’s recommendation that Chimen was invited to give a series of public lectures in Oxford in the early 1960s; and it was also at Berlin’s instigation that he was subsequently elected to a senior fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1965. Chimen knew, all too well, how much he owed his friend.

  ***

  As he approached the age at which most men slow down and gently slide into a well-earned retirement, Chimen grew increasingly proud of his academic achievements and stature, and, quite self-consciously, began modelling himself as an éminence grise. In the late 1960s, still self-identified as a leftist of sorts – though he was no longer entirely clear of what sort – and now a part-time lecturer in Modern Jewish History at University College London, he had tremendous cachet with the revolutionary graduate students. He would attend official meetings tieless and in a rumpled jacket, and would sit with students in the basement cafeteria. By the late 1970s, however, he had graduated to wearing a suit and would sit holding court in the senior common room, surrounded by historians, philosophers, even physicists. His black and white faculty photograph showed him in a pressed black suit and tie, his hair grey and bushy at the back like Einstein’s, his eyes sparkling behind square glasses, one eye-brow raised slightly in what I take to be sheer delight.