The House of Twenty Thousand Books (13 page)

In these letters, for example, was discussion of an early edition of Karl Marx’s magnum opus on economic theory,
Das Kapital
, signed by Marx himself, and dedicated to the German Workers’ Association in London. Chimen had bought it in the late 1950s and sold it on to Sraffa for the then-staggering sum of £750 – £600 of which was paid in cash, the remainder in kind: Chimen wanted another Marx volume in Sraffa’s possession. The total amount that the book sold for was roughly the annual salary for a junior level civil servant at the time, according to annual salary estimates produced by the country’s Ministry of Labour in 1960. (The
Das Kapital
volume was subsequently stolen, turning up only decades later, in Switzerland, whence Trinity College ransomed it back.)
Here also were references to letters by Marx; to original Lenin pamphlets and newspaper writings; to a first edition of Malthus on over-population, which Chimen bought and promptly sold to Sraffa for £15. Here were intimations of letters he bought and sold from Russian authors such as Ivan Turgenev (Chimen was scornful of the Soviet government’s decision not to bid a decent amount for the Turgenev manuscripts, which thus allowed him to pick up more than thirty of the author’s handwritten missives); and of negotiations conducted with the Soviet government in Moscow for the purchase of rare Marx documents in Chimen’s possession. He explained, in gleeful detail how he had acquired Marx’s membership card of the First International (which Sraffa had put up for sale) and a signed letter by Marx, as part of a Marx collection sold at Sotheby’s, for what he regarded as the
knock-down
price of £110 in early April 1960. He would, he acknowledged after the fact – gently teasing his friend that he could have received more money for his treasures – have been quite willing to go as high as £250. And he played Sraffa off against the Soviet government, using the Soviets’ interest in materials that he owned to encourage his friend to make a counter-offer. ‘Moscow has offered me for the two Marx pamphlets on Palmerston [the mid-nineteenth century British statesman] one hundred and fifty pounds in cash’, he wrote, in a note quickly scribbled on cheap lined paper on 20 June 1960 (which was, incidentally, his and Mimi’s twentieth wedding anniversary). ‘If you are willing to give a bit more you can have them. I want one hundred and seventy five pounds.’

To another correspondent, Leo Friedman, in Boston, Massachusetts, to whom he periodically sold books and other documents, he wrote of acquiring a two-page letter that the poet, essayist and journalist Heinrich Heine had written from Paris in 1844 to the editor of the
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.
‘This letter has never been published before and is of the utmost 
historial interest regarding Heine,’ he opined, ‘and his attitude to the radicals of the time.’

It was in these letters that Chimen-the-intellectual, rather than Chimen-the-propagandist, came out. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Chimen’s public writing, often written under aliases, was more propaganda than scholarship. He had contact with the Communist Historians’ Group, for a time, and, when he could conjure up the annual dues, was a member; but he was not a regular attender. He wrote the occasional historical paper for them, but most of his Communist writing was either leaflets aimed at the Jews of London’s East End or articles and editorials published in the Party’s
Daily Worker
, the
Jewish Clarion
and other journals and newspapers. More often than not, the articles were predictable and filled with jargon. A ten-point leaflet, from the late 1940s, entitled ‘Why Jews Should Vote Communist’ was a typical example. Point Six patiently explained that ‘The Communist Party denies that the standard of the life of the working class must be lowered merely to meet the greed of American dollar financiers’. In 1946, when writing critically about the growing pressure for the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, as ‘C. Chimen’ he wrote that ‘The unhampered defeatist propaganda, which avers that there is no future in Europe for the Jews, has helped considerably to make the displaced Jews a catspaw of imperialism’. Only in Chimen’s private correspondence did he allow the panoramic range of his interests to clear a path through this fog of jargon. He wrote to Harold Laski on the workings of Parliamentary democracy. He penned notes to Isaiah Berlin discussing whether or not Machiavelli had influenced Marx. He wrote letters on Jewish history and pages of musings on the great philosophers. He bounced from current affairs to medieval political dramas.

For Chimen, letters were his great intellectual safety valve, the genre in which he could most freely and fluently express himself.
He subscribed to the notion that Alexander Herzen had proclaimed in 1862, when writing to his friend Turgenev: ‘It is for the sake of digression and parentheses that I prefer writing in the form of letters to friends; one can then write without embarrassment whatever comes into one’s head’. Over the decades, Chimen wrote tens of thousands of letters, carbon copying them for posterity; or, when he had no access to carbon paper, simply re-writing his missives before sending off the signed originals, and then filing the duplicates. They ranged in length from one or two line notes setting up meetings, to multi-page treatises on the great political thinkers, philosophers, historians, artists and musicians of the last millennia. Some were about arranging fellowships for needy students; others about the great political events of the day. With friends such as Sraffa and Isaiah Berlin – he had been introduced to the famous philosopher in 1958 by the Oxford Slavonic scholar and librarian John Simmons, and had, the following year, sold him roughly £150 worth of Russian literature by Pushkin and others – he covered an utterly extraordinary intellectual terrain. ‘You are’, wrote Berlin to his friend in June 1979, ‘an exceptionally honest, penetrating and sensitive man and scholar; and the fact that you think me to be some good, fills me with much needed confidence’. Chimen called these missives
megile,
a Yiddish term roughly translating as ‘a lengthy, detailed explanation or account’. Elsewhere, he described them as
megilah
, a Hebrew word meaning ‘scroll’. Thousands of these letters still remain in the archives of University College London. In a storage unit that my father rented after Hillway was cleared out, there were several large cardboard boxes, choc-full of correspondence. Elsewhere were kept twenty-four more folio boxes, each containing hundreds of letters written and received by Chimen.

When Chimen died, my aunt and my father found, in a hidden compartment in the back of the huge roll-top desk in his
bedroom, a collection of letters, many of them handwritten, addressed to Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. They were from such luminaries as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the editor and owner of the
Manchester Guardian
, C.P. Scott, and the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb – the latter of whom, in a sloppy, at times almost illegible scrawl, exhibited a surprising infatuation with Mussolini’s Fascists in correspondence to Laski from the mid-1920s. In another pile was a fading handwritten letter from Turgenev, written in English interspersed with Russian, and signed in Cyrillic script, in Bougival, France in 1881, to an unknown friend, the only one of the trove of Turgenev letters that Chimen ended up keeping for himself. ‘I am staying here alone with a tremendous grippe, and shall not go back to Paris before the end of next week’, the great author wrote. ‘Believe me. Yours very truly, Iv. Turgenev’. Chimen reported to Sraffa that he had resold almost all of the Turgenev manuscripts, including four pages of an unpublished Turgenev story. There was, however, one other exception: correspondence between Isaiah Berlin and Chimen indicates that he gave one of the letters to Berlin in June 1984, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. Turgenev was, wrote Chimen in explanation of his gift, a man ‘whom we both admire and on whom you wrote so brilliantly’.

A handwritten, signed letter from Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who would one day become Israel’s first president, to the Liverpool-based Rabbi Isaiah Raffalovich, dated 21 June 1917 was also found in the desk. ‘Our enemies will not rest and try and devise means to hurt us mortally’, Weizmann wrote. ‘We must watch things and be on the alert and before all organize and organize an all Jewish congress, which would definitely consolidate our position.’ In a handwritten list of some of his more important possessions, which he wrote late in his life, Chimen referred to an original letter by the French philosopher Voltaire,
on the topic of Europe’s Jews. The letter was not found when his house was emptied out. Like the Laski correspondence, he had probably secreted it away somewhere and simply neglected, or forgotten, to tell anyone else where it was. Maybe it was in a hidden drawer, the lock of which could have been opened by one of the dozens of tiny unlabelled keys also found in his great desk. In all likelihood it accidentally ended up in one of the hundreds of rubbish bags which were filled with all the printed matter that Chimen himself could never throw away: old receipt forms from Shapiro, Valentine & Co; utility bills dating back half a century; bank statements from decades past. But maybe it did not. Perhaps, somehow, the letter escaped. Perhaps, one day, generations from now, someone will buy the old desk in a junk shop in some nondescript place or another and discover the Voltaire letter, a time capsule inside a time capsule from the past. Whoever that person might be, I hope they recognise the exquisite beauty of what is resting in their hands.

Further down the hallway, in between the doors to the living room and the dining room, opposite a little closet with a toilet and sink, was another set of images: black and white photos, taken by my cousin Rob, as part of a school photography project. The space where they hung had been grudgingly saved from books, probably because the hallway was so narrow that had bookshelves been placed opposite the toilet, there would have been no easy way to use that important room. The images showed Chimen in action, and included, also, one photo of Mimi and of Jenny, ‘the two women of his life’, as Rob put it: there, on that wall, was a zoomed-in photograph of Chimen in a wool hat; another of his hat resting on bookshelves; Chimen hunched over a chessboard, deep in concentration. Sometimes there would be a person on the
other side of the chessboard – myself, or one of the other grandchildren; other days, Chimen would simply recreate a grand master’s game that he had read about in that morning’s edition of the
Times
, carefully poring over the moves, studying them as he would the text of a rare book. ‘Chess was his sport’, Rob noted, as he explained his choice of photographic imagery. ‘Like so much of his life, the muscle he liked to exercise was his mind.’ In 1995, when he was nearly eighty years old, Chimen wrote the foreword to Victor Keats’ book
Chess in Jewish History and Hebrew Literature
. There was, apparently, almost nothing about Jewish life upon which Chimen could not expound.

It was at the end of the hallway, where the route branched off either to the dining room or the kitchen that I recall frequently standing and watching as my older cousin Raph would enter the house, walking deliberately slowly, hands in light brown suede jacket pockets. I would feel a shiver of excitement at Raph’s entry, fuelled by my half-knowledge that he and Chimen had been feuding for years, with an intensity born of deep love and extraordinary intellectual competition: both were leading historians of their generation; both book collectors of remarkable importance; both were fascinated by socialism and both felt rather proprietary about the movements they chronicled. Some of that I knew, some of it I intuited. But, what was clear to me, even as a young child, was that when Raph came through that doorway, the atmosphere at Hillway would change: Mimi would almost cry for joy that her beloved nephew was visiting her, but then she would glance around at Chimen to see how he was reacting. And, every time, a tension would descend, Chimen’s blood pressure would visibly go up, voices would soon be raised. It was predictable, but it was, nevertheless, often spectacular.

Through it all, Raph would keep up his insouciant expression, his sort of deliberate cool-intellectual appearance; he had wispy hair, falling forward chaotically onto his forehead; round glasses
perched atop his thin nose; that wonderful, tattered suede jacket. There was about him the permanent smell of cigarettes; his voice was desperately gentle, slightly nasal, and as full of passion as any voice I had ever encountered; and there was an almost beatific expression in his eyes. And yet, for all the other-worldly qualities that Raph exuded, when he got into arguments with Chimen over Israel, or the activities of left-wing trade union leaders or the validity of direct action protests, there was something steely about those eyes and that voice. Chimen knew it; and it bothered him – at least in part, I came to think, because it reminded him of who he had once been. I loved the anticipation. I loved being a spectator of, and, as I got older, a participant in, these epic verbal jousting contests.

The hallway, I knew, was somewhere special. Not just a narrow stretch of carpeted terrain from portal to kitchen, but a carefully constructed gateway to debate and conversation, to a magic realm. ‘This world is like a hallway before the world to come’, the Mishnaic-era Rabbi Yaakov was quoted as saying, in the Talmudic commentary
Pirkei Avot
, nearly two thousand years ago: ‘Prepare yourself in the hallway so you may enter the banquet hall.’

H
ILLWAY
WAS A
unique salon because the two obsessions of two obsessive people gelled there in a most unusual way: Chimen’s passion for his books and the ideas they contained, Mimi’s for nurturing and nourishing an endless stream of people. Left to his own devices, Chimen would quite probably have collected books and ideas in his house, and done his socialising in more public places – in the cafes around Shapiro, Valentine & Co, in university dining rooms, and at academic conferences. As a child, he would sometimes recall, he had been desperately lonely. He, along with his elder brothers, was educated at home because his father was anxious to avoid his sons coming into contact with the world around them: Yehezkel had repeatedly sought an exit visa from the Soviet Union, in large part because he was so nervous about his sons becoming contaminated by Bolshevism. As a result of this enforced isolation, Chimen had been unable to develop any friendships with other children. It was, my grandfather said sadly,
the single biggest regret of his youth. He claimed that once, with little else to do, over a period of several weeks he had counted aloud to one million, breaking into his task only to sleep and eat. Had anyone else told me that, I would have dismissed it as exaggeration; Chimen, however, I was inclined to believe.

To be sure, the apartment in Moscow to which Yehezkel had moved his family so that he could daily petition government bureaucrats to grant them an exit visa from the country, had housed many guests, mainly Torah scholars seeking illicit intellectual solace in a Soviet Union that Yehezkel had taken to calling a ‘house of bondage’. At times, guests, who were fed the few potatoes which could be bought in the shops by Raizl, had slept on, and even under, the table. There is a sense of a gathering of the doomed in the descriptions of the apartment that eventually made their way into Yehezkel’s biography, of individuals waiting to be arrested, to be sent to labour camps in Siberia or executed. In that tableau, there were no children in whom Chimen could confide or with whom he could make friends. The experience left him craving human interaction; but at the same time it also left him strangely unable to communicate on a mundane level about the little things, the nuances, that cumulatively make up the fabric of most people’s lives.

Uncomfortable with small talk, Chimen could, I think, had his life taken some different turns – had he not found Mimi, had he not been given an opportunity to let his gregarious nature run free at home – have evolved into one of those lonely, eccentric, somewhat contrary antiquarians who inhabit so many of Dickens’s pages. Taken to an extreme, had that gregariousness not been allowed to take root and flourish, as he aged he might eventually have become the character in Elias Canetti’s
Auto da Fé
who literally walled himself up in a house of books, able only to relate to the printed page. But Chimen was not left to his own devices. For Mimi, collecting people was as important as were Chimen’s
books to him. She simply always
had
to be a hostess, and, by extension, once she had invited you into her
Yiddish hoyz
, she had to feed you. ‘She is the one who tends, cares for and above all feeds the family’, Zborowski and Herzog wrote of Jewish wives in Eastern Europe, in
Life Is With People
. ‘When she offers food, she is offering her love, and she offers it constantly. When her food is refused it is as if her love were rejected’. At the end of week dinner which celebrates the Sabbath, a Jewish table is filled with good food, ritual wine is drunk, prayers are said and, of course, strangers are welcomed and hosted. Around that table, community is renewed. At 5 Hillway, almost every day was a Sabbath.

For Mimi, food was a vicarious pleasure. From childhood onwards, her health had been fragile. When she was in primary school, in the East End of London, she had almost died of an infection; for the rest of her life, she bore a long, curving scar on the side of her neck, as a reminder of the emergency surgery that she had had to undergo to drain the site of pus. A diabetic who failed dismally to adhere to her no-sugar, low-salt diet, from middle age onwards she was beset by health problems. Increasingly overweight, she accumulated pills that she had to take daily to keep her blood pressure in check, her heart in order, her kidneys functioning. After she had a few awful falls, one of them down a flight of concrete steps while travelling in Israel, her legs became increasingly unreliable, criss-crossed like a street map with varicose veins, her thighs prone to unsightly bruising at the slightest knock. However, when people asked her about her health, she would pooh-pooh their concerns, tell them that ‘we don’t need to talk about such things’ and quickly change the subject. While feeding thick, creamy sauces and heavy, rich, delicious desserts to her myriad guests – roulades, trifles, cakes she had decided her grandchildren liked and therefore had to be served repeatedly and in copious quantities – Mimi could snack
illicitly without feeling that she was utterly ignoring her doctors. They were her improbable masterpieces; I might even say they were her culinary versions of the deaf Beethoven’s symphonies. And so, whenever you entered the house, you were greeted by a rush of competing aromas: the smell of ducks roasting, the fat bubbling off them as the oven heated up; the gorgeous aroma of chicken soup, so saturated in salt, in my cousin Maia’s recollection, that ‘it was just like the Dead Sea’; or chocolate cakes baking; of thick rye bread cut into slices; and the tart odour of herrings sitting in brine in their glass jars. My grandmother’s guests would eat a lot; she would eat a little – and everybody would feel sated.

Over the decades, Mimi acquired layer upon layer of friends, one generation atop the next, of people who regarded 5 Hillway as their second home, who regarded Mimi as an extra mother, a supplement to their biological family. During the final year of the war, a number of refugees found safe haven at Hillway. Later, a succession of lodgers became honorary members of the family. Minna’s son, Raphael, spent more time at Hillway than in the home of his recently divorced mother, coming to view its occupants as his surrogate parents. He brought future academic and journalistic luminaries such as Gareth Stedman-Jones, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, and Peter Sedgwick to the house. Henry Collins, Chimen’s urbane literary collaborator, practically lived in the downstairs front room at times. One night, when he was exhausted and could not convince the other guests to vacate his quarters and let him sleep, he simply took off his clothes and climbed into bed in front of the surprised guests. Whether that did the trick, or whether they continued debating Marxist theory over Henry’s snoring, was not recorded.

Several young French cousins, whose families had been partially destroyed in the Nazi death camps, spent months at a time living there. My father’s best school friends all camped out
at the house. There they engaged in furious chess competitions and equally frenetic games of table tennis on a table my dad had jerry-rigged in his bedroom. My aunt, five years younger than her brother, and less enamoured of the chaos, was more reluctant to bring her friends around. Later on, a young girl named Elisabetta Bianconi, whose parents, Margaret (a colleague and close friend of Mimi’s) and Roberto, had both died in a car accident, became a part of the inner circle. Chimen’s best friend, Shmuel Ettinger and his wife Rina visited several times a year from Israel.
Left-wing
English historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, James Joll and E.P. Thompson, came through the house and were drawn, irresistibly, towards Mimi’s table. So too were economists, including (of course) Piero Sraffa; Communist world-travellers such as Freda Cook, a correspondent for the
Morning
Star who had moved to Hanoi to express her political solidarity with Ho Chi Minh; some leading character actors; a businessman named Danny Nahum, who corresponded with Chimen on expensive, embossed letterhead paper, and who, during the good times, would arrive at Hillway in a Rolls Royce and during bad ones would arrive bedraggled and looking for one of Mimi’s meals to tide him over; and innumerable others. Artists and musicians made their way to the house, as did rabbis and philosophers. For a time, an American butterfly scientist was a staple of the salon. A Canadian government official and his wife also flew in on a semi-regular basis to visit. Claudia Roden, the renowned cookery writer and author of well-received books on Jewish and Middle Eastern food, came to the kitchen, there to discuss food with Mimi and history with Chimen. Each visitor was what was called in Yiddish an
oyrekh
, a guest, to be hosted, fed and cared for as etiquette and tradition dictated.

I doubt that anyone ever attempted to calculate how many visitors tramped through Hillway over the years, though it would have made for an entertaining school maths project. Certainly, it
was in the thousands, quite possibly in the tens of thousands. It is entirely possible that the number of people for whom Mimi cooked meals over the decades rivalled the number of books that Chimen accumulated. It was through her hospitality and the energy and wisdom that she put into making Hillway a gathering place that Mimi sought to manifest the ideal virtues of Jewish women described in the Book of Proverbs. She had much in common with Rahel Levin, Henriette Herz, or Fanny von Arnstein, Jewish women who held salons in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Berlin and Vienna. These
salonnières,
wrote Emily Bilski and Emily Braun in
Jewish Women and their Salons
, ‘presented an ideal of social interaction free of considerations of social rank’. Levin, in particular, they wrote, was renowned for ‘her intelligence, wit, depth of understanding and gift for friendship’.

It was in the kitchen, at the end of the hallway, that the true melting pot nature of Hillway unfolded. Sleepy-eyed guests who had bedded down on sofas, spare beds, even chairs when the house was particularly busy, would wander into the kitchen in the morning, only to find other temporary residents or passers-by who had not been there the night before. My cousin Elliott recalled, when he was over from America for a short stay at Hillway, once meeting the playwright Harold Pinter in the kitchen over breakfast. My father and aunt did not think that was likely – to their knowledge Mimi and Chimen did not know Pinter. Yet nor was it entirely implausible. 5 Hillway was, after all, one of London’s crossroads. Frequently it seemed more like a traveller’s hostel than a mid-sized suburban home, replete with the stale air that accompanies too many people confined in too small a space, and the babble of many different tongues.

It was, at times, overwhelming. You could come into the house, tell Mimi that you had just had a five-course meal at a restaurant, and within minutes she would be placing bowls of soup and plates of steaming chicken or duck or lamb in front of you. Often, she would get all her ‘children’ confused: ‘Have some more chicken, Raph’, she would urge me. Then, realising her mistake, she would try to make amends. ‘Kolya, Rob, I mean Sasha!’ and she would laugh. ‘Oye yoy yoy!’ Chimen would exclaim in mock horror, ‘Mir-ri, it’s our oldest grandson. It’s Meester Sasha’. When I was younger, it frustrated me. As I grew up, however, I realised that the confusion grew not out of carelessness but an excess of love. She knew who we all were; but she cared so much for each of us that we occasionally blended in her mind into one great mass of people for whom she bore responsibility for feeding.

Whenever I stayed the night at Hillway, I could be sure that in the morning I would be greeted by the sight and the aromas of Mimi cooking potato pancakes for me or quickly putting together a heaping plate of her regular pancakes, always covered with lemon juice and sugar, and rolled tight into a cigar-shape. It was from the kitchen – extended into the back garden by a few feet when I was a young child, so as to provide more room for Mimi’s cooking – that the grandchildren would go into the still-spacious grassy expanse on Guy Fawkes night, when our fathers would set off all the fireworks that we had bought with money raised by the old custom of asking for a ‘penny for the Guy’; Mimi would venture through the glass sliding doors to the garden, plates of kosher mini-hot dogs in her hands, to feed her guests as the explosions rocked the night sky.

It was while my brother and I were eating plates of Mimi’s pancakes in the kitchen one morning in the early 1990s, when she was already very old and very ill, that Chimen got a call from Sotheby’s suggesting he come in to see a copy of Stalin’s death
mask that had mysteriously been deposited at the auction house the night before. In high excitement, Chimen told us to hurry up and finish our pancakes; and then the three of us dashed off to Sotheby’s. There was the mask, a ghastly portrait of the dictator in his final pose before eternity. There was something hideous about it, something vastly awful about touching the mask that had lain on the inert face of a man responsible for the deaths of millions. For Chimen, now in endless flight from the politics of his younger and middle years, it must have been particularly macabre.

Mimi’s urge to hospitality seemed, occasionally, to border on the pathological. She simply could not endure the thought of an empty, quiet house. Nor, as someone who had grown up as a sickly child in the impoverished, war-torn East End, and who had reared her own children during the grim years of another world war and food rationing that continued long after hostilities had ceased, could she countenance her guests not eating: after all, it was not until 1954, when my father was twelve years old, that the rationing of meat and other foodstuffs finally ended. The consumption of sweets and chocolate had also been severely restricted for many years (the ration was as low as two ounces per person per week in 1942) as had the usage of butter, sugar, eggs and most other staple foods. For a couple of years after the war, with wheat crops hit by appalling weather, even bread, that most basic part of the British diet, had been rationed. So it was not surprising that, when Chimen left Britain for the first time in nine years, in 1948, on a mission to buy and sell books in an America untroubled by rationing and food shortages, Mimi’s daily letters to him were full of descriptions of the food parcels he should send home.