The House of Twenty Thousand Books (21 page)

It was probably in the front room at Hillway, shortly after the end of the war, that Chimen helped to write a ‘syllabus’ on the Jewish Question, for the Communist Party’s Jewish Committee. Question seven asked, ‘What is the Party Attitude to Zionism?’ The answer: ‘The influence and propaganda of Zionism is pernicious and harmful to the Jewish people and to general progress and must be combatted and countered’. It was probably also in this room that the Committee talked over their
fourteen-page
memorandum on how to oppose British rule in Palestine without endorsing Zionism. ‘Ever since the Balfour Declaration, Zionism has sought to be a lackey of Imperialism by forming a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’, they declared. ‘For more than a quarter of a century it has kept the Jews apart from the Arabs in Palestine.’ These were arguments that would have been largely familiar to Jewish political thinkers and activists in the Eastern Europe that both Chimen’s generation and that of his parents had been born into. Chimen and Yehezkel were on very different sides of this debate at that time, but by this point in his life Chimen did not argue about politics with his
father: instead, he fought out these disputes with his secular friends.

‘There were’, remembered Peter Waterman, ‘loud and noisy discussions, and arguments. Because Chimen wasn’t the only one who could get very annoyed at being opposed in an argument. My father [Alec] also could lose his temper. These were very highly politicised people’. When, as schoolboys, Peter, Raph and other friends poked jokes at the Communist Party, Chimen, prickly on this point, quickly put a stop to it. Communism, in the 1940s and 1950s, was not something to laugh about in Chimen’s presence, any more than the Torah was something to be mocked in Yehezkel’s.

All too often during these years, rigid political beliefs led to a willingness to defend the show trials, purges and other arbitrary brutalities of the Stalin regime. Mimi and Chimen feuded with those who had grown disillusioned with the Cause; at times Chimen was even known to throw people who critiqued the USSR too vociferously out of their home. The more I research this period, the more I come to suspect that the front room of the 1940s and early 1950s was not a particularly pleasant place for non-believers to visit. And I think I am glad that I was not born early enough to test this thesis out. Far better for me to remember the house as the tolerant and broadminded place it would be throughout my childhood.

In 1949, when the
Jewish Chronicle
published an editorial accusing Stalin’s Soviet Union of anti-Semitism, Chimen, outraged, typed out a response – or, since he could not type himself, he probably dictated it to Mimi. ‘You mention the attack on Zionism in
Pravda
[the Soviet Union’s pre-eminent newspaper] and you write “The distance from baiting Zionists to baiting Jews is short”. It seems you confuse criticism of Zionism with
anti-semitism
. The Soviet government since its establishment always had an anti-zionist attitude, but at the same time it was the first
Government in the World to introduce legislation making antisemitic propoganda [
sic
] a crime, a crime not only against Jews, but a very serious offence against the Soviet State as a whole.’ He continued: ‘It seems to me, Sir, that you are deliberately deceiving your readers by attributing antisemitic motives to the Soviet Government’. He fired off another letter, to his friend the journalist Ivor Montagu, urging Montagu, who had recently visited the USSR, to write an article himself ‘refuting the allegations against the Soviet Union’. And he wrote angrily about how ‘reactionaries in the U.S.A. were using allegations of Soviet anti-Semitism in their own propaganda campaigns’. That same month, Chimen and his comrades on the Party’s Jewish Affairs Committee decided to revive a defunct publication called
The Jewish Clarion
(which Chimen had edited on and off since December 1945, and which had ceased publication a few months earlier due to financial difficulties) in part to deal with the growing chorus of ‘slanders’ about the poor treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union.

And so, just as Stalin was unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish purges, marshalling the full force of the Soviet state against ‘cosmopolitan’ Jewish intellectuals, just as the Jewish Autonomous Region was being purged and the dream of a Soviet Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan was destroyed, the Party’s faithful in Britain, Chimen among them, were working to convince the world of the Soviet system’s humanistic impulses.

It would take several more years before Chimen was willing to confront the awful truth: that anti-Semitism was alive and well in the Soviet Union – not to mention the fact that the system as a whole was light years away from being any sort of free and democratic beacon. And it was then, in that swirl of disillusionment, that he began to embrace Zionism. If Russia was not the place of refuge, somewhere else had to be. There had to be one country that could serve as what the early Zionist
theoretician Ahad Ha’am, in the late nineteenth century, borrowing from a Biblical phrase, called
Eretz Israel
; or, as Chimen explained the idea in a 1976 lecture, a place where ‘the Jewish spirit’ could thrive, a spot on earth that could nurture ‘the moral, creative forces of the Jewish people that were and are suppressed brutally in the diaspora’.

If Communism could not deter cruel thoughts and terrible actions, other ideologies had to be found that could. Much of Chimen’s rethinking would have taken place while he pored over books from the shelves of this front room, and, afterwards, while he talked over his concerns with comrades over cups of tea in the same room. In later years, he would go on long, late-night walks around Oxford, with his friend Beryl Williams – then a young history tutor at the University of Sussex – and others, talking about how guilty he felt for having stayed in the Party for as long as he did. He told Beryl that he lost sleep over it. He denounced himself, in conversations with Eastern European intellectuals, many of whom were serving out their exiles at Sussex and a handful of other British universities – for having bought the Stalinist line that one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs. ‘He saw the Revolution as something that went wrong rather than something that shouldn’t have happened at all’, Williams concluded. ‘He became anti-Soviet, but he always remained a socialist, in a vague way’.

When I was a teenager, involved in the pacifist anti-nuclear movement and other left-wing activism in London, Chimen, still in full flight from his Communist past, still mortified by the nonsense that he had written as a young man, would lecture me on my youthful follies. It used to infuriate me. His fury, I thought, reflected a lack of passion, a calcification of his political
nerve-ends
. 
Today, as I sit at my computer, a middle-aged man trying to put together the pieces of my grandparents’ lives into a coherent narrative, I think I understand why he became so suspicious of what he saw as the naïve idealism of youth. Wanting to change the world for the better, caring passionately about the human condition, Chimen, Mimi and so many of those they loved and respected had spent years defending a brutal and totalitarian system. It was, I believe, Chimen’s most humbling realisation.

In an archive at the University of Sheffield, I sit and explore microfilms holding ten years’ worth of
The Jewish Clarion
. They contain articles by many of Chimen’s closest friends from the
post-war
period: Izador Pushkin; Alec Waterman; Hyman Levy; Andrew Rothstein; Sam Alexander; Lazar Zaidman; Jack Gaster. Under an array of names, Chimen wrote dozens of articles for this paper over the years. Sometimes he would appear under flimsy noms de plume: C. Chimen was the first, then A. Chimen. Occasionally, he would write as C.A. On rare occasions, mainly when he was publishing an innocuous historical essay or book review, he used his real name. For his most overtly propagandistic pieces, however, the son of Yehezkel Abramsky, exiled rabbinic scholar and head of the London Beth Din, went under the pen name C. Allen.

The summer I left secondary school, I needed to earn money to fund a rail trip around Europe. For some weeks, I worked at odd jobs – in a deli, cleaning tables at London Zoo, even scrubbing school toilets. Then Chimen took pity on me, and hired me to spend a few weeks with him trying to bring order to the chaos that was his upstairs study. We spent those weeks together, in the tiny room, burrowing through piles of papers, filing letters, chronologically ordering articles. Chimen, who never threw any written words away, found piles of his old Communist Party writings. Over my protestations, he made an exception to his rule: into a big, black rubbish bag went the papers, one after the other.
Once the bag was filled, Chimen double-knotted it, as if he were trying to seal away toxic waste. And then he put the bag in the bin outside the house that the dustmen emptied into their lorry each week. At the time, I was flabbergasted.
What vandalism! What a reckless disregard for the past!
Now, having read the articles, I understand his horror. The writings were ghastly. Claptrap. Massively propagandistic. There is simply no other way to put it. I think that, had I known Chimen when he was writing them, I would have found it hard to remain on friendly terms with him. I know that Chimen felt the same way. For him, C. Allen and A. Chimen and the others were young lunatics with whom he wanted nothing more to do.

In July 1952, a certain ‘C.A.’ wrote a review of a volume entitled
The Jews of Russia
, a work that explored the changing condition of Russian Jewry before and after the revolution. ‘Only the revolution of 1917 put an end to the persecution of Jews’, wrote the man whose father, two decades earlier, had narrowly avoided execution, had been sent to Siberia because of his religious work, and whose family had then been expelled from the Soviet Union. ‘The need to run away from the country stopped. Jews became equal in every sense of the word.’ In November 1952, summarizing the proceedings of the nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the thirty-six-year-old Chimen reverted to his deeper alias, C. Allen. After explaining to his readers that Western economies were being destroyed by American militarism, and that the senior Soviet politician Georgy Malenkov had detailed how the Soviet economic engine was
out-powering
that of the ‘forces of capitalism’, C. Allen concluded with an observation of his own: ‘The Soviet Communist Congress is a beacon of light for the peoples of the world. Its discussions and decisions will be studied by progressive people everywhere. It will render great assistance to the fight for peace and for socialism, to the inestimable benefit of the whole of mankind’.

It is C. Allen’s obituary of Joseph Stalin, published as a
full-page
spread on the inside back-page of the May 1953 edition that I most don’t want to read. I know it’s going to be awful; I know, from everything I have managed to reconstruct of Chimen’s world view when he was in his twenties and thirties that he was a
dyed-in
-the-wool Stalinist. What I don’t realise, going in, is just how phenomenally awful it really is, just how much he had bought into the cult of the personality. It leaves me gasping for breath, makes me want to run into a shower and scrub myself clean. This isn’t the sweet old man I loved so much; this isn’t the insightful humanist, so suspicious of even a whiff of totalitarianism and who so prided himself on his friendship with the great liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Titled ‘The Debt Jews Owe to Joseph Stalin’, and written five years after Stalin had embarked upon his massive campaign to eliminate Jewish intellectuals from public life in the Soviet Union, the obituary begins: ‘Progressive Jews everywhere grieve deeply over the death of Joseph Stalin, leader of progressive mankind, builder of Socialism and architect of Communism. To Stalin above all goes the credit for the great change in the position of Jews, from the violent oppression which they endured in Czarist times to the full equality as citizens which they enjoy in the Soviet Union… Stalin’s leadership was a tremendous contribution to the ending of exploitation of man by man, the root cause of anti-Semitism and racial discrimination’. C. Allen explained that, in an article written in 1912, Stalin had ‘analysed the position of the Jews, of whose life he showed outstanding knowledge’. Stalin created the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan. He allowed Yiddish culture to flourish.

The obituary outlines all of Stalin’s achievements through the late 1930s, and then details how he heroically commanded Soviet forces in their battle against Nazism from 1941 onward. Of the period from August 1939 to June 1941, the years of the infamous Nazi–Soviet Pact, there is literally no mention. C. Allen’s obituary
of Stalin concludes with a flurry of hyperbole, of the kind one still sees today when a Great Leader passes away in North Korea. ‘The world has lost one of the greatest geniuses in all history. But Stalin’s heritage lives on in the mighty Soviet Union marching toward Communism. Stalin is dead but his ideas and his work will live forever.’

I want to grab C. Allen by the throat and punch him. I want to shout at him for being a damn fool. I want to scream that he’s sullied my memory of my grandfather. But C. Allen is nowhere to be found.

C. A
LLEN HAS
taken off his disguise, washed the low-grade printer’s ink from his hands, and returned home to Mimi’s warmth. He has become Chimen Abramsky, bookseller, husband, father and historian once more. And he’s sitting at his simple wooden dining room table, his children telling him about their days at school, while Mimi gives all of them their dinner. At some point the doorbell will ring – he knows it will, it does so every night – and one or more of their friends will come through the entrance, barely breaking into their conversations and their spirited political debates long enough to say hello, heading down the hallway and into the dining room to join the meal. There will be enough food for them all: despite
post-war
rationing and lack of money, Mimi can always stretch her meagre provisions to feed her guests. There will always be tea and
biscuits
, perhaps some herring or cheap pound cake. There will be beer; maybe, if the money can be found, there will be wine, imported from Israel or Morocco.

In these years after the war and into the 1950s, the members of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party were among the most regular visitors to Hillway. Even after several hours at the New Scala restaurant in Soho, or at Garibaldi’s, a little Italian place off the Farringdon Road, the historians could be relied on still to be hungry; they had, after all, been expending their energy pondering great historical questions, exploring how societies down the millennia had evolved, and trying to understand how this all fit into their Marxist schema. Chimen was not a particularly active member of the Historians’ Group, and he rarely attended the restaurant gatherings: throughout his Communist years he remained rigidly kosher and reluctant, especially in London, where he might be seen by religious relatives or acquaintances, to eat in non-kosher restaurants. And, during these years, he frequently did not have two pennies to rub together, and, in the circumstances, even a cheap meal with his Party comrades would have seemed an unreasonable luxury. But, despite his financial straits, he was one of the twenty-two members who had scrimped and saved to come up with the five-shilling membership fee. After the committee meetings, Eric Hobsbawm, who was the group’s first treasurer, and who also presided over the inelegantly named ‘Polemics Committee’, and various others would decamp from Garibaldi’s, get on the Underground, and set off for Hillway to eat and talk into the night.

The dining room in those years, before the house was extended out into the back garden by several feet, was quite cramped, almost all the space taken up by a little table and dining
chairs as well as two or three armchairs. Mimi brought the trays of food around from the kitchen, into the hallway, and then through to the dining room. She had to sidle between the chairs, leaning over her guests to reach the table. Elbows jostled elbows. Used plates had to be rapidly cleared, not for etiquette’s sake but simply to make room for incoming food.

On the walls near the table were two prints by the Israeli artist Mordechai Ardon. Those at the other end of the room, away from the table, were shelved. Increasingly, as the collection grew, they housed books on Jewish history, many in Hebrew or Yiddish. Here were rare books on Jewish artists, included among them collections of high quality reproductions of sketches by Marc Chagall, ‘the central figure among Jewish artists’ in the period of the First World War, as Chimen wrote in the essay that accompanied a catalogue for an Israel Museum exhibition in Jerusalem,
Tradition and Revolution: The Jewish Renaissance in
Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928
. The artist, Chimen wrote, painted ‘a dream world of poetry and magic’. His imagery spoke to the experiences of the Jews of the shtetl, as well as to the heartache of a people torn between past and future, between the pull of modernity and the familiarity of the old ways. It was sometimes whimsical, but often deeply melancholy. Many of his paintings, wrote Chimen, were intended to convey Chagall’s feelings of horror ‘after the pogroms against the Jews in the Ukraine during the civil war.’

There was also a volume of coloured, numbered and signed lithographs, by the Russian painter Anatoli Kaplan, illustrating stories by Sholem Aleichem, including ‘Tevye der Milkhiker’, and ‘Mottel The Cantor’s Son’ – stories that formed the basis for the musical
Fiddler on the Roof
. There were collections of rare woodcuts, books of illustrated poems, and graphic art from the early Russian revolutionary period.

Around the crowded table and amid the clutter of books and
artwork, the seated guests during these years would have included Edward and Dorothy Thompson; the Oxford historian Christopher Hill, whose wife (also a historian), Bridget, for some time implausibly thought that Chimen was an Irishman, Seamus O’Bramski; Hobsbawm; and, of course, Raph Samuel. The youngest member of the Historians’ Group, Raph had joined the Young Communist League in 1942 or 1943, at the astonishingly precocious age of seven, and by the time he began attending Balliol College, Oxford in the early 1950s, was already a gifted polemicist and historian. Raph would bring with him his Balliol friends, as well as his girlfriend, who was Harold Laski’s granddaughter. So, too, would be seated some of Mimi’s female friends: Mimi liked to play her hand at matchmaking, though the eligible Hobsbawm did not take the bait.

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.