The House of Twenty Thousand Books (17 page)

There was something Musar to this deliberate, austere neglect of appearance; the planks on the floor were as haphazard, as barely functional, as were the uneven old wooden fence posts that surrounded the three storey brick building that housed the Novaradok yeshiva that Yehezkel had entered to such acclaim at twelve years old in 1898. Ironically, there was also something deeply British Communist to the ramshackle appearance. In the 1980s, Raph Samuel published a series of articles in the
New Left Review
, reprinted after his death as a book entitled
The Lost World of British Communism
, in which he grappled with the Communist Party mindset and aesthetic that he had grown up within in the years straddling the Second World War. The homes
of Party members were, he noted, ‘by contemporary standards drab, visually impoverished, but redeemed by very well-stocked bookshelves, the spiritual heart of the living space’. Convinced they were fighting for ‘the way, the truth, and the life’, the Communists of Raph’s youth had little time for mundane, bourgeois chores such as tidying up their houses, upgrading the plumbing, or mowing their garden lawns.

On the other side of the room from the fireplace the wall was lined from floor to ceiling with two layers of books. On these shelves were Chimen’s sociology texts: volumes by Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, by American sociologists and cultural critics like C. Wright Mills, Irving Howe and Daniel Bell. Here was explained the rise of mass man’s mentality, as well as the growing reactions against that mentality in the bohemias of the western world. Like Charlie Chaplin, in
Modern Times
, one of his favourite films, Chimen was both a creature of modernity and a man utterly repelled by the mechanisation of modern life. In this room were gathered many of the great cultural critics of the twentieth-century human condition, as well as their earlier antecedents, including Rousseau’s writings on the origins of political society and the ideal of the noble savage, and the works of the nineteenth-century romantic philosophers who clustered around Friedrich Nietzsche.

Halfway up that wall, opposite the fireplace, on a little shelf barely six inches high were the Everyman political classics, my favourite collection in the house. In that collection, were many of the great political thinkers of the past two and half millennia, from Plato and Aristotle to Roger Bacon, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, from the utopian Thomas More to the theorist of the unification of Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini. Included, somewhat surprisingly, in that collection was Marco Polo; he was not a great political thinker, but he
was
an adventurer – and his travels had, I am sure, intrigued my globetrotting grandfather. There was
something Lilliputian about these books, yet in their conceit there was also something wonderfully egalitarian. They were cheaply produced hardbacks, each with its own distinctively coloured cover with a texture somewhat akin to canvas, many of them dating to the Great Depression years when high quality paper was in short supply; they were books designed to be carried in sports jacket pockets, to be taken out easily and read on the London Underground while standing jammed up against the other commuters in the rush hour. They were books produced for every man, at a moment when it was quietly assumed that people in England of all classes and all walks of life were interested in intellectually bettering themselves. Each volume carried the motto ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side’.

Joseph Dent had begun publishing the Everyman’s Library in London in 1906. By the mid-1930s, when Chimen started buying the books as a teenager, and annotating their margins with densely scribbled comments in Hebrew, and, later, in English, much of the Western political, philosophical, scientific and literary cannon had been made available, at low cost, as a part of the series. There were by then 937 volumes in the catalogue; Chimen owned about fifty of them. It was through these books that Chimen’s political ideas matured. When he read Rousseau’s
Social Contract
he underlined the sentence, ‘The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked’. In Plato’s
Republic
, which he read in Jerusalem in 1937, he marked a passage on tyranny, which ‘plunders by fraud and force alike the goods of others, sacred and holy things, private and public possessions, and never pettily but always on a grand scale… Men revile injustice, not because they fear to do it, but because they fear to suffer it’. And in his copy of Aristotle’s
Politics
, bought when he was in his
early twenties, Chimen bookmarked several passages with newspaper fragments, and then underlined, in pencil, lines on those pages. ‘Everywhere inequality is a cause of revolution’, the Greek philosopher had written in one of the passages that Chimen marked; ‘And always it is the desire of equality which rises in rebellion’. In another of the underlined sections was the observation that ‘democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy’. When, three-quarters of a century later, Chimen’s Everyman collection passed into my hands, the fragments were still there, brown and crumbly with age, the senile brown of the newspaper’s delicate pages leached into the leaves of the book itself.

Aristotle had not, however, only been concerned with politics. He was a man of extraordinary intellectual versatility: a mathematician, a natural scientist, an ethicist, and a moral philosopher. Among his most important contributions to the world of ideas, he had engaged in a deep philosophical investigation into First Causes – seeking an origin point for the universe, and, if the universe was indeed created by God, an origin point for that divine entity. He concluded that there had to be an Unmoved Mover, a non-corporeal being who had always existed, whose thought processes themselves made the physical universe possible, made human thought possible, made possible time itself. Since God had always existed, so the universe and time itself had always existed. Aristotle’s God thought, therefore everything else was and always had been. For Aristotle, the building blocks of the world had to have always existed.

Fifteen hundred years later, the great twelfth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher Maimonides amended Aristotle’s ideas about first causes. He accepted that God had always existed, or rather, had never not existed. But, unlike Aristotle, he argued that the physical world itself had a finite starting point; and that, prior to the universe coming into being, time itself could not exist, that
time and matter were intimately intertwined. According to Maimonides, God exists outside time. Then, somehow, God stirs and the dimensions of space emerge. Then, and only then, time begins. It was an extraordinary intuitive leap, a hint, perhaps, at the world of relativity that Einstein would eventually reveal. But Maimonides’ project extended further. It was to reconcile the idea of creation, a single starting point for all living things, governed by a moral code, as outlined in the Hebrew Bible, with the philospher’s notion of an eternal world. If the world conjured into being by God will always exist, its structures determined not by man’s actions and choices but by a God whose motives cannot be fathomed, what room did that leave for morality, for freedom of will, for concepts of good and evil?

What interested the philosopher was how the Jewish ethical principles guiding everyday life could be reconciled with notions of eternity; how the littleness of mankind’s needs and desires could fit into the vastness of the cosmos; how a God that had always existed and would always exist could interact with the hopes and fears of individuals as small and temporary as humans. Here, he made another intuitive leap. It was, he concluded, precisely man’s ability to think rationally about these grand questions that gave him a spiritual presence – and it was that, rather than his corporeal body, that made him an image of God. Even if God did not, in reality, care about individual humans, in humans’ thoughts about God and in the dream that he did intervene in daily lives was rooted the chance of transcendence, the possibility of becoming something more than a brute animal, the code to morality. For Maimonides, religion thus became strangely pragmatic. Admittedly, the stories of miracles and angels might be little more than fairy tales – or, at best, God’s calling cards, reminders which He sent out episodically to let people know He was still present in the world; but by believing that the skein of everyday life could be torn by divine intervention,
mankind kept alive the possibility of change. And because of the possibility of change, there was an incentive to behave morally – to behave in ways likely to trigger extraordinary events. It was a way of rendering history bearable, of holding out the opportunity of transformation.

From his student days, Chimen found Maimonides’ concepts strangely reassuring. But where the medieval scholar – an
Arabic-speaking
Jew living under Muslim rule in the land that is now Spain – allowed miracles to be seen as reminders of a greater organising principle behind the vagaries of everyday life, for the young Chimen it was revolutions that served that role. It was those spectacular breaks with the ordinary, those occasional violent convulsions that destroyed the rhythms of the generations, which pointed to the underlying patterns, the deep structures of history. In place of Maimonides’ timeless God, Chimen substituted Marx’s dialectic, the rules of history which ultimately explained movement from one epoch to the next. In place of Maimonides’ ethics, Chimen substituted the Marxist idea of class consciousness.

Behind the Everyman volumes were still more books: these were cheap paperback political texts, worth little monetarily, but cumulatively providing an understanding of the day-to-day political debates of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

Roaming this world of ideas, especially on the fireplace side of this room, one was increasingly struck by a sense of time warp. This was a story ‘rent out of Eastern Europe and landed in London’, the American historian Steve Zipperstein marvelled, when he visited the house from Oxford, and, later, from his position at Stanford University, in California. It was, he felt, in many ways a Russian saga from the nineteenth century that was
playing itself out decades later in English suburbia, a scene, say, from Bialik’s poem about Talmudic scholarship,
HaMatmid
.

In this room, the different sides of Chimen’s intellectual personality most visibly warred for influence: the religious scholar versus the Marxist; the polymath interested in art, philosophy, sociology, in all the great ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment versus the ideological dogmatist; the Zionist against the socialist internationalist. It was in this cluttered space that the massed ghosts of the pogroms and then of the Holocaust and of the shattered Jewish communities of Eastern Europe most assertively overlooked everything he did and believed. It was here that ancient Jewish teachings met the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. It was here that a specifically Jewish take on modernity could be encountered, one that engaged with liberalism, anarchism, socialism and nationalism. There were books on the rise of Zionism, on the quest for a Jewish homeland not just in Palestine, but also via the Soviet attempt to create a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking state in the Siberian region of Birobidzhan, and on abortive plans to carve out part of Uganda for displaced Jewish refugees; there were other books on proposals to earmark large swathes of American territory for a Jewish homeland.

It was, in sum, the room where the greatest debates within Eastern European Jewry, during the decades in which Chimen’s grandparents, parents, and he himself had come of age, were on display.

Corralled into the Pale of Settlement, Russian Jews had for hundreds of years largely lived their lives outside of the ebbs and flows of temporal history. The students in great institutions such as the Volozhin yeshiva – which was shuttered by Tsarist decree
in February 1892, but which continued to exert a powerful pull on the imagination of young scholars for many decades – learned Talmud; they learned about
responsa
to Halakhic questions engaged in by more than one hundred generations of rabbis and pre-rabbinic scholars over thousands of years. But they did not specialise in secular history. Theirs was a universe, as is that of the Amish today, at least partially insulated from temporal events, at least partially constructed around timeless codes that could withstand the tumult unleashed by modernity. It was a world that Russian anthropologists and imperial ethnographers were starting to study for its folklore, for glimpses into ancient pasts and into behaviour patterns that had stood the test of time for many centuries.

Now, with the Haskalah, a bridge to modernity was being built, which would pave the way for a secular Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and for young Jews to enter the full ferment of Russian politics as Tsarism came under increasing attack; it would also create new institutions of authority (political organisations, cultural clubs, publishing houses, newspapers) that could compete with the rabbinate for the loyalty of Russia’s millions of Jews. The Russian-born novelist Yosef Haim Brenner, an early convert to the return-to-Israel cause, and one of the first to adapt modern Hebrew to the requirements of fiction writing, described ‘half-intelligentsia’, young Jews, schooled in Orthodoxy and yeshiva methods, who had rebelled against the strictures of religion and set out on an autodidactic quest for knowledge, imbibing anything and everything written in an attempt to find more satisfying answers to the existential questions than those they found in the Talmud.

For the Jews in the Pale of Settlement of the decades around the turn of the century, life carried the perpetual risk of instant, violent death – or, at the very least, of the overturning of all things familiar. In 1881, a series of pogroms had been unleashed,
probably with government backing, in the wake of Tsar Alexander II’s assassination in St. Petersburg by bomb-throwing members of the anarchist People’s Will party. In the next three years, more than two hundred pogroms occurred in the Russian Empire, some in small villages, but others in large cities such as Warsaw, Odessa and Kiev. If they were to scapegoat Jews as dangerous revolutionaries, the new men of power under Tsar Alexander III believed, they could achieve two goals: they could distract the attention of Russian peasants and workers from their all-too-real grievances; and, at the same time, they could denounce radical, often violent, political movements as somehow being a Jewish conspiracy against the state. In turn, revolutionary Russians during these years came to believe that, far from being spontaneous outbreaks of violence, pogroms were carefully orchestrated, designed to consolidate the power of Russia’s autocratic rulers and to intimidate reformers and revolutionaries into silence. In neither instance did the strategy really succeed – the Tsarist system would totter from crisis to crisis for the remaining few decades of its life – but the price paid in blood and fear was, for the Jews of the Pale, vast.