The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  About the only thing good that he saw in the myriad revolutions in personal behaviour and artistic expression unleashed by the 1960s was that they broke down the boundaries of formality to the extent that it allowed him to call people like Isaiah Berlin by their first names. In their correspondence at this period each asked the other the gleeful question: ‘Do you mind if I call you by your first name?’ and there followed a series of missives in which they experimented with just how to do so. Dear Isaiah, Sir Isaiah, Isaiah.

  There was, however, one exception to the overwhelmingly high-culture rules of Hillway, and that was Mimi’s addiction to the BBC radio soap opera The Archers. It had been running since 1951, and it was entirely possible that Mimi knew its plotlines better than those of any piece of great literature and understood its complex family relationships as well she did those of the extended Nirenstein–Abramsky clan. Like a religious ritual, every afternoon when the programme came on air, Mimi would retire to the front room, lie down on her sofa-bed and listen to the radio. For a woman who never stopped cooking, hosting, counselling her numerous psychiatric patients from the Royal Free Hospital, and solving other people’s problems, it was the one meditative moment in her busy day. No one was allowed to disturb her. If you telephoned at that time, Chimen would curtly tell you that Mimi could not talk, that it was ‘Archer’s Hour’. If one of the grandchildren made the mistake of barging into the front room during those minutes, they would be shooed away by Mimi; it was the only time when she showed impatience.

  ***

  The wall against which Mimi’s Archer’s Hour sofa rested was the only wall in that room with no books on it. From the time of his death in 1976 onwards, an intimidating black and white sketch of Yehezkel Abramsky hung there instead. It was drawn by the artist Hendel Lieberman in London in 1950, the year before Yehezkel retired from the Beth Din and, seen off by thousands of his followers at the railway station, moved to Jerusalem. The lines of Yehezkel’s face were firmly inked, the long rabbinic beard pulling the head slightly downward, the eyes piercing in their intensity. Everything about that image was intended to bear witness: this was a portrait of a man who was used both to observing the world around him and to having a crowd hang on his every word. This was a Gedolem, a great sage. While Chimen and Mimi were not religious, the placing of the portrait in their front room spoke to the fact that Yehezkel’s influence over the inhabitants of Hillway was, until the day Chimen died, extraordinarily strong.

  After the Second World War and the destruction of millions of Jews, the head of the Beth Din in London could lay claim to being one of the most – perhaps even the most – influential figures in European religious Jewry: Chimen certainly averred that his father had been recognised as the foremost contemporary scholar of the Talmud. It was a role in which the conservative Yehezkel excelled and one for which his followers would come to venerate him. Three-quarters of a century after he was made a dayan, and nearly forty years after his death, as I write this, Yehezkel’s letters still turn up at auction houses; he regularly appears on lists of the most important rabbis of the last two and a half thousand years; and a Facebook page has even been set up for him by his admirers. Yehezkel’s fame was quite a shadow for his sons to live under.

  In religious Jewish circles, stories continue to circulate about my great-grandfather. One goes like this: Yehezkel was called to court to defend the practice of ritual slaughter. The judge looked at the deposition in front of him, and then asked, ‘Rabbi Abramsky, it says here that you are the foremost authority of Jewish Law in the British Empire. Is that true?’ Yehezkel answered, ‘That is true, Your Honour’. The judge continued, ‘And that you are the most eloquent spokesman for Jewish Law in the British Empire?’ ‘That is also true, Your Honour.’ Probing more deeply, the judge threw out another question: ‘It also says here that you are the most senior rabbi in the British Empire. Is that correct?’ Once more, Yehezkel replied ‘That is correct, Your Honour’. At that point, the judge apparently got a bit flustered. ‘Rabbi Abramsky, how do you resolve your answers with the Talmudic teachings of humility?’ Yehezkel looked at the judge, and, presumably with a twinkle in his eye, said, ‘It is indeed a problem, Your Honour, but I’m under oath’.

  When Yehezkel died in September 1976, Chimen immediately flew to Jerusalem and arrived in time to join the more than forty thousand mourners who accompanied his father’s bier to its burial in the Har HaMenuchot cemetery, on the hilltops on the western edge of Jerusalem. It was one of the largest funerals ever to take place in Israel. According to instructions that Yehezkel left for those in charge of his funeral, two students walked behind his bier carrying all twenty-four volumes of the Chazon Yehezkel, his monumental commentary on the Tosefta, which had won the first Israel Prize for rabbinic literature. Yehezkel Abramsky, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter assigned to cover the funeral noted, was the ‘dean of Israel’s rabbis and [was] widely considered the foremost Talmud scholar of the age’. In a tribute written for the Jewish Chronicle, England’s former Chief Rabbi, Sir Israel Brodie, described him as ‘a Prince of the Torah’. There is, today, a square named after Yehezkel in Jerusalem.

  Wherever a person sat in the front room at 5 Hillway throughout the last three decades of the salon’s existence, Rabbi Abramsky stood watch. The sketch weighed heavily on Chimen as he grew older, his father’s presence almost as powerful in death as it had been during his long life. Chimen often looked at that portrait during those decades in which he tried so hard to distance himself from his earlier support for Stalin’s world vision. He would stare at the stern black and white sketch of his father’s face, and, I believe, silently apologise for the Communist Party autobiography that he had penned in which he had insulted his father’s character. Fascinated by Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, with its themes of sin and redemption, he was, I think, performing his own, very personal, version of Teshuvah, the atonement for past wrongs that plays a central role in Jewish ritual life. It was why God did not punish Cain for killing Abel. It was a way to come back from moral death. It was how one could make oneself anew.

  In 1971, Chimen attempted (successfully) to convince Isaiah Berlin to write an essay for the collection that he was editing in honour of the left-wing historian E.H. Carr, who had long been a close personal friend of Chimen’s. Berlin expressed reservations and asked about the political leanings of other contributors. On 1 June, Chimen wrote back that he did not know how to describe the contributors, ‘except for yours truly who could, possibly, be classified as an ex-communist, ex-Marxist, a mixture today of a radical-liberal-conservative-cum-counter-revolutionary; one who has lost his faith and has not yet found a new one, in a word a person who searches, gropes, doubts, constantly making “post-mortems” on his own thinking…and somehow still believes in humanistic values’. It was the most introspective note that Chimen ever hit. And it summed up the philosophical and political dilemma that he would be caught within for the rest of his life: all of the easy solutions, the formulaic responses to the messiness of life, had failed. Chimen knew this, knew that he could no longer subscribe to utopian beliefs; yet he could never quite set aside the dreams of his youth.

  Eighteen years later, Chimen wrote another letter, equally frank, to Berlin. ‘We, your admirers see you as a great champion of liberty, of freedom as a profound value in itself, freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement spiritually and physically, to other people’, he wrote, to commemorate Berlin’s eightieth birthday in 1989, elaborating on both his earlier letters to Berlin on the topic of freedom and also his 1982 retirement speech. ‘Your skepticism and high moral ideals are a beacon of enlightenment in a confused age.’ It seems he was thanking his friend for having arrived early at conclusions which Chimen had only belatedly reached.

  ***

  Into his old age, Chimen remained a man fleeing his past: his lonely childhood in the Soviet Union, his infatuation with Stalinism, his messy break with the Party and the friends who no longer talked to him. T
he flight – and the fears associated with it – had literal as well as metaphorical implications. Having left the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, Chimen avoided returning to Moscow for sixty years, increasingly fearful, he told friends and colleagues, that if he went behind the Iron Curtain he would be arrested or suffer some alternative, crueller fate, like those inflicted on other prominent Jews, some of whom had been comrades and visitors to Hillway. The only exception he made to this rule was in 1963, when he visited Prague to rescue the fifteen hundred Torah scrolls from their anonymous resting place in a disused synagogue. Notwithstanding the favourable reviews his book on Marx had received in the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet press, he declared, in declining an invitation to visit Warsaw in the 1980s – presumably to discuss the book The Jews in Poland, which he had co-edited in 1986 with the Polish scholar Maciej Jachimczyk and the South African-born American academic Antony Polonsky – had personally and harshly criticised him in the past.

  Finally, in 1991 he was persuaded to go back. By then Chimen had been absorbed for some years in studying the fate of Soviet Jewry, publishing a number of articles in the journal Soviet Jewish Affairs: there was an overview of Jewish history in Russia and Poland from the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth; an article on Soviet Yiddish literature; and another on Hebrew incunabula kept in the library of the Leningrad branch of the Oriental Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He had also devoted an increasing amount of his seemingly endless intellectual energies to studying the phenomenon of Soviet anti-Semitism. ‘Soviet Jews today are without an address’, he stated, in a speech given to a gathering of English clergy in the Conference Hall of Westminster Cathedral on 27 April 1977, which included among the audience the Archbishop of York. ‘They have no means of expressing themselves either in Russian, or to revive the Hebrew national culture, or the Yiddish language.’ They were, he continued, ‘the only Soviet national minority that was deprived in this fashion’. Worse than being vilified, he averred, Russian Jews and their culture were being ignored, ‘soon to become also a people that must not even be mentioned’.

  Now, in 1991, after decades of repression and stagnation, it seemed as if things were finally changing in the Soviet Union. And, despite his hard-come-by cynicism toward all things Soviet, Chimen wanted to see what this meant in practice. Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, and had spent the next several years liberalising the state’s stagnant economy and opening up its political processes to scrutiny. These twinned experiments, known as perestroika and glasnost, were leading to extraordinary changes. The Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961 and the great symbol of the divide that had rendered Europe in two since the end of the Second World War, had fallen nearly two years earlier; a number of Soviet republics in the Baltic and Caucasus regions were moving toward declaring their independence from the USSR; and the Cold War, the game of nuclear chicken and of proxy wars, played out globally between NATO and the Warsaw Pact for more than forty years, was drawing to a conclusion. The Soviet experiment would fast recede into the same mists of time that shrouded the key events in Chimen’s historical landscape: 1848, Europe’s year of failed revolutions, the formation of the First International, the Paris Commune, and the Russian Revolution itself.

  In mid-August 1991, the new order was by no means settled. But putting aside his terror that KGB agents would start shadowing him as soon as he set foot on Soviet territory, Chimen boarded a plane at Heathrow. Trademark black briefcase in hand, he flew to Moscow to attend a conference on Soviet Jewry. His timing was, to put it mildly, far from perfect.

  In the third week of August, the bitter remnants of the Communist Party’s old guard launched a coup d’état. They placed Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev under house arrest at their Crimean country dacha on the Black Sea coast, and established a State Emergency Committee to attempt to restore the one-party state of Bolshevism in its heyday. Nearly two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the Soviet state fissuring, the military, the police and the KGB were attempting to seize control of the country, to put a stop to what they saw as a spiral of chaos. Suddenly, there were tanks on the street. And, in reaction, there were enormous crowds of protestors, marshalled by the mayor of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, furiously demonstrating their opposition. Chimen – who had been touring the Kremlin barely a few hours before – looking out of his hotel window must have suffered a sense of delirium, a shuddering, nauseating feeling of having entered a hideous time warp.

  In a panic, fearful that he would somehow be recognised as an ex-patriot, or – worse – as an ex-Communist, and held hostage as his brothers had been decades earlier, he phoned the BBC offices in Moscow, pleading with them to assist him in getting out. They all knew Jenny – she was, by now, fast rising up the corporation’s ranks – and they agreed to help him flee Russia. He paid a fortune, but got a flight out of the tumultuous city, flying home via Israel. Adding a ludicrous twist to the adventure, as Chimen left Russia, he somehow found the time and inclination to stop at the Duty Free shop (which, bizarrely, had remained open for business throughout the days of the coup) to buy three jars of caviar for the family back home in London.

  And so, for the second time in his life, Chimen retreated from Moscow, leaving unpropitious circumstances behind. As he fled, the coup collapsed, in the face of Yeltsin calling out the masses into the streets and squares of the capital, there to block the tanks and paralyse the movements of the army. Far from restoring the Bolshevik old guard to power, the move to roll back the clock had been the catalyst for a massive revolt. Within four months, the Soviet Union ceased to exist; Gorbachev was shunted aside in favour of Yeltsin; and the Communist Party itself, heir to Lenin’s 1917 revolution, was temporarily outlawed. The caviar that Chimen brought home for my parents fared no better. It sat, uneaten, in our fridge, waiting for what my father deemed to be a sufficiently important dinner party. One night, the refrigerator electronics malfunctioned and the insulation either caught fire or melted. When my parents came downstairs the next morning, the contents of the fridge were covered in a sticky, yellow gloop. The caviar, acquired at such a critical moment in history, had to be thrown away.

  ***

  Chimen’s visit to Moscow was one of the last long-distance trips that he took before Mimi died. She was, by then, increasingly ill, her kidneys failing, her heart unsound, her blood pressure gone haywire. Her legs, which had given her trouble since a horrendous fall down a flight of concrete steps during a trip to Israel more than a decade earlier, were now prey to blood clots and spasms. One hospital stay followed another; one pill after another was added to her daily regimen. When people asked her how she was, she would wave their question away, as if it was a fly buzzing around her head, ordering them not to talk about such matters. ‘At night (nearly every night), I write you page after page of letters’, my grandmother wrote to me in early October 1994, a year after I had moved to New York. ‘I climb mountains; walk for miles over the Heath or through the City; cook mountains of food for throngs of visitors and rarely have a dull moment. During the day, I torment myself for not having written to you but I have a complete blockage. I do not know where to begin, what to put in and what to leave out. I have so much I would like to say and leave unsaid. The Atlantic leaves a big space between us’.

  To take her mind off the pain that was now her constant companion, Mimi continued as a hostess-extraordinaire. It was as if she could ward away the imminence of death by cooking just one more meal, and then another after that. ‘But the main thing is she continues to smile, in spite of disabilities’, Chimen noted optimistically in early December 1993. ‘We still entertain, visitors flock to the house, and she is busy preparing wonderful meals’. Later, however, as her chronic pain worsened, her eyes started to look haunted as she answered questions about her state of health. Gradually, she wound down her cooking endeavours. Now, too weak to move about, she cooked vicariously, ordering her helpers to add a pinch more salt, to give a more ass
ertive stir to a pan, to turn up the gas on the stovetop. Eventually, in her last months, she was so consumed by pain that she seemed to retreat entirely into herself, physically shrinking, cocooning herself into her skin, her eyes tiny, glassy beads in a mask of agony. She was, by the end, almost entirely unable to communicate with the friends and family who still trooped through her front door to visit.

  As the decline in her health accelerated – she had suffered a ‘setback’ was what Chimen would say euphemistically whenever I phoned from Oxford or, later, from America, to talk – the downstairs front room became Mimi’s sickroom. It was the place where she lay, on the rickety old couch, before and after her awful visits to the hospital, three times a week, for dialysis; where she tried, and failed, to recuperate after a series of surgeries in the last years of her life; the place visitors would come in to hold her hand and talk. Eventually, it served as her make-shift bedroom, and the couch was replaced by a metallic hospital bed when she could no longer make the gargantuan effort required to navigate her way to the stairs and up to the first floor Marx library which she and Chimen had slept inside of for so many decades. For the first time, in many, many years the books were cleared from the tables in the front room, to be replaced by her bewildering array of medications.