The House of Twenty Thousand Books (23 page)

Levy, a professor of mathematics at Imperial College, London, was thrown out of the Party for having had the temerity to write that anti-Semitism was a problem in the Soviet Union. ‘I feel I must take my stand on the question of covering up anti-Semitism’, he wrote to Chimen, on small letterhead paper from Imperial College’s Huxley Building, in 1958. ‘I owe it to all those Jews who over many years have been assured that in the Soviet Union these relics of Czarism have passed’. To true believers in the utopian, post-nationalistic qualities of the USSR, such sentiments were, quite literally, treasonous. Levy’s outrage had been growing for several years already. In fact, five years earlier, on 16 April 1953, Levy had written to Chimen criticising his unquestioning acceptance that the Jewish doctors accused of trying to poison Stalin must, by virtue of the fact that they had been put on trial, be guilty. ‘You suggested’, he admonished Chimen, ‘that I ought not to suggest the possibility of the Moscow Doctors not being guilty, but should know that if the Soviet decides to go ahead the case must be complete’. Since their disagreement over the Doctors’ Plot, Stalin had died, the case had been dropped and the new Soviet leadership had made it clear that there had never been any real evidence against the doctors in the first place. ‘Do you think it is now possible to say that that attitude on your part was mechanistic?’ Levy asked, gently chiding his friend. ‘I don’t mind being made to look a fool if it is absolutely essential – but I think it could sometimes be avoided by a little discretionary criticism. What do you think?’

Now, with Levy expelled from the Party, Chimen’s eyes had been opened, and, like Levy, he could no longer stay quiet. The Party would not publish Levy’s book,
Jews and the National
Question
(which, behind the scenes, Chimen had helped to write) so Chimen decided to use a small publishing house which he operated out of his home, to produce the volume. He had established the Hillway Publishing Company several years earlier, to translate and publish the dissident Hungarian philosopher George Lukács’s
Studies in European Realism
. For Lukács’s book, he had hired a freelance journalist named Edith Bone to translate the work into English; Bone had been accused by the early
post-war
Hungarian Communist leadership of spying and was held in solitary confinement for seven years before her release in 1956. By contrast, Chimen worked to make sure that Levy’s book was translated out of English and into a number of other languages. Parts of it were subsequently reprinted, in French, by Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine
Les Temps modernes
, alongside a lengthy, and very personal, attack on Levy and Chimen by Palme Dutt. As with his publication of Lukács, who, for a time, was one of Europe’s most influential intellectuals, so with Levy’s volume: the timing was right. The book was republished, to considerable attention, in New York, Milan and Israel. Perhaps to remind himself of its importance, Chimen kept a little notebook, no bigger than his annual diaries, in which he meticulously recorded sales of Levy’s book.

Previously Chimen had believed in reform from within the Party, in the idea of progress through a strongly Marxist organisation. Now he increasingly felt that the political institution itself was a menace, that revolution was destined to become something nasty, something almost cannibalistic. A few years later, as his estrangement from Communism deepened, he wrote a note to Isaiah Berlin bemoaning ‘the tragedy of us intellectuals. We are the ineffective forces in society: the Lenins, Titos, Maos, Castros triumph, and we poor liberals are cast aside’.

Riven
by a fit of fratricidal fury, he kills off C. Allen and all his other aliases. He becomes, again, simply Chimen Abramsky.

The salon temporarily collapsed in on itself. Old friends who remained in the Party wanted nothing to do with people they regarded as renegades. New friends had not yet replaced the crowds who left. In Chimen’s letters from this period one senses an uncomfortable silence settling in on Hillway. As the Communist salon that was Hillway’s first incarnation, its first republic if you will, imploded, Raph Samuel, who insisted on addressing anyone and everyone in his social circle as ‘Comrade’, at twenty-three years old set up his own gathering spot, the Partisan Café, on Carlisle Street in Soho, as a more bohemian, albeit commercial, alternative to Hillway. ‘Raph could talk the hind legs off a donkey’, Eric Hobsbawm said, and could convince people to invest time and money in the most speculative of projects. Hobsbawm was persuaded to put up some money and ended up with the title of café ‘director’. He was not the only one to provide financial backing for Raph’s venture. ‘Shoes!’ Martin Mitchell remembered more than half a century later. ‘Without the shoes it would have been much more difficult to find a millionaire benefactor. It happened like this. We get an urgent call early one morning from [his wife] Lily’s cousin Raphael, or Ralph [
sic
] as he later called himself. “Lily, can you help me? My shoes are falling apart. My toes are showing. I need a decent pair of shoes. I’m seeing Howard Samuel this morning. I’m hoping to get money from him for the lease. I want to look presentable. I don’t want him to see my toes sticking out. Please help”. “Of course”, said Lil. “Wear Martin’s shoes”. And he did. And he raised a tidy sum from the left-leaning property millionaire. Money was also obtained from a meeting in a Parliament committee room.’

‘It was a wonderful place; everybody went there at the time’, Hobsbawm acknowledged, as he recalled his foray into venture capitalism. ‘The idea was basically they were going to get this house; it was going to be the HQ of revolutionary debate and action’. Upstairs would be the
New Left Review
; downstairs would be coffee and conversation. In an era when the notion of a political meeting-house-cum-coffee bar was so exotic that the BBC sent a camera crew to interview Raph about his aspirations, the Partisan became a gathering place for penniless intellectuals, who would come to debate, to play chess, to read the newspaper…and to drink one cup of rather mediocre coffee, sparingly sipped over the course of a day. Architecturally, it tended to what Hobsbawm recalled as ‘brutal modernism’, a cavernous, minimally decorated room, chairs dotted haphazardly around the floor. Thinking they were being clever, the directors hired, Martin recalled, a self-proclaimed burglar to run their security; after all, who better than a thief to make sure the locks could not be picked or the windows jimmied? True enough, the windows were not forced open, but fairly soon after the man was hired food started going missing from the kitchen.

Not surprisingly, the venture soon went bankrupt, closing its doors in 1962. ‘It wasn’t short of people going there. It was short of having more income than expenditure. When we complained and said this is not a financial proposition, they waved it away until it went bust’, remembered Hobsbawm, as we talked at his home in north London a couple of months before his death. Many of the Partisan’s denizens, who had migrated from the comforts of Hillway to the bohemia of Soho, now returned to spend their evenings in Mimi’s dining room. Order, I like to think, was restored. There, they still talked about Marx, but now, as the salon slowly reinvented itself, without the uncritical attitude to the political systems that claimed to operate in his name that had previously reigned at Hillway.

Working full-time, and with two young children to take care of, and quite possibly also having to cope with Chimen’s post-Communist blues, Mimi nevertheless maintained her kitchen and dining room as something akin to a full-service restaurant for roving intellectuals, family members, friends and friends-
of-friends
, from around the world. Now, however, the conversation broadened, the cast of characters became more eclectic. Now, hints of nostalgia began to intrude on some of the conversations – a touch of regret at worlds lost, bitterness at dreams betrayed.

Keeping the salon going was a ‘monumental effort’, remembered my Californian cousin Alice, who started visiting Hillway in the late 1960s, a decade into its reincarnation. ‘And yet she appeared to take pleasure in the things that she did for people. Dinner had to start with soup. Chimen wanted soup. And it ended with tea, lemon tea or English tea. Chimen would ask “and now, I have a very important question. Who wants tea or coffee?” Dinner would start with just a few people and by the end of the evening there’d be twelve, and Mimi would have caught all of them up with the courses of the dinner. It was the endlessly expandable table.’

‘The house was always full of people’, my aunt Jenny recollected long afterwards, of a period that must, at times, have seemed more like a political education camp than a recognisable childhood. ‘From all over the world, all different kinds of experiences. And all the time, every evening, there was political discourse and debate going on around the table. Being the little person, no one ever paid attention to me. I remember saying, “It’s Marx, Marx, Marx, all the time! Why do we always have to talk about Marx?”’ Some nights, the dinner guests and Chimen and Mimi would descend into violent verbal arguments – over interpretations of Marx’s writings, over responses to events in the
Soviet Union. Not infrequently, someone would push their chair back and theatrically storm out of the house. In reaction to this, Jenny made a point of deliberately not remembering any of the political theory that she was subjected to around the dining table. Worse still, when she was given a general knowledge quiz at her high school in the late 1950s, and was asked to name the author of
Mein Kampf
, she confidently asserted ‘Karl Marx’. Chimen, when he heard about this, was thunderstruck. I can imagine his eyes getting large, his jaw clenching. What I cannot quite see is whether he then smiles and lets his daughter’s faux pas go with a mild rebuke, or launches instead into a long political lecture. I want to think the former; in all likelihood, however, it would have been the latter.

Years later, as he reminisced about his life, Chimen would casually mention how so-and-so, who used to come for dinner had been shot dead in an Iraqi prison, or disappeared in a terrible dungeon somewhere. One of his close friends, the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who had helped Chimen scour the world for rare socialist texts during the 1950s and 1960s, and who frequently visited Hillway with his wife, had moved into extreme left-wing political activism; he was killed by a bomb in 1972, during the years of political turmoil in Italy. It was never definitively concluded whether he was killed by his own hand while trying to plant a bomb intended to sabotage high voltage power lines outside of Milan or whether he had been assassinated. Schloyme Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, whom Chimen had met during the war and whose presence had been a rallying cry for Jewish Communists in London (he was, Chimen later wrote, the ‘outstanding Soviet Jew of the second world war’) – did not escape. On 19 January 1948, he was assassinated, at the behest of an increasingly paranoid and anti-Semitic Stalin, on the streets of Minsk, run over and killed by a truck in a way that could be passed off as an accident. Shortly
afterwards, fifteen leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested: these were famous cultural figures within Soviet Jewry and the group had been formed on Stalin’s orders, a year after Hitler sent his troops east into the Soviet Union, to help rally international support, especially in the United States and Britain, for the USSR. In a secret trial held in July 1952, they were all sentenced to death. It was all a far cry from Chimen’s correspondence with Harold Laski, shortly after the end of the Second World War, in which they celebrated the fact that anti-Semitism had been laid to rest once and for all in the Soviet Union.

Belatedly, Chimen had come to realise what the Russian revolutionary memoirist Victor Serge had recognised years earlier. Living in Moscow as Stalin’s murderous rule got under way, Serge chronicled the way in which the revolution cannibalised its own, how one after another of the Soviet Union’s top politicians, intellectuals, generals and economic managers was arrested, disappeared, murdered. How any criticism could lead to death. How any pretence could be used to liquidate a faction or a group of friends. How millions could be condemned to death by famine as a side-product of Stalin’s collectivisation plans. Of the show trials that characterised this period he wrote that ‘It was raving madness… The Politbureau knew the truth perfectly well. The trials served one purpose only: to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad’. Later on, Serge averred that ‘totalitarianism has no more dangerous enemy than the spirit of criticism, which it bends every effort to exterminate’.

Yet, despite the radical change of heart that Chimen underwent in his political views, he nonetheless remained utterly fascinated by Karl Marx’s life and legacy, and was immersed, through all these years of turmoil, with Henry Collins in writing their book on Marx. No longer a follower of political parties claiming to act in Marx’s name, Chimen continued to believe that
Marx’s understanding of history, and his account of the ways in which societies change over time, was unrivalled. At the same time, in full retreat from the totalitarian vision of the Soviet Union, Chimen looked elsewhere for an intellectual and political home. He found the latter in liberalism and the former, increasingly, in the manuscripts and texts of Jewish history and religious writings.

W
E NEED NOW
to go upstairs again, under
Guernica
, back up the moth-eaten carpeted steps. And, at the top of the staircase, instead of turning left toward my grandparents’ bedroom, we shall turn right, go down the hallway a jog, and then, opposite the tiny and foetid lavatory, enter the large, cluttered bedroom off to the left. It is time to pay a visit to the crown jewels.

Growing up, I knew less about this room than others in the house. Its books were peopled by writers whose languages I did not speak or read, whose worlds and world views were but faint shadows to me. But not to Chimen: on his curriculum vitae he wrote, under Languages, ‘(other than Classical, Medieval and Modern Hebrew & English): Fully competent in Russian, Yiddish and German. Fluent reading of most of the other Slavonic languages and of French’. All of those, and more, could be found
on the shelves of this room. He once showed a Bulgarian text to the bibliographer Brad Hill, and, Hill remembered fondly, ‘He made a point of telling me he could read it – which he could, of course. It was in Cyrillic’. I slept in that room sometimes, on an old bed with a sagging mattress, but its resident authors seldom spoke to me. Chimen talked only sparingly to me about the books on these shelves, though I do remember him once, after a great build-up, finally taking down a first edition Spinoza to show me. Unlike the Marx volumes, which he would let me touch, the philosopher I had to look at from a safe distance – and then only briefly.

Unfamiliar as I was with the room’s nuances, however, I knew from a young age that it was a vital part of the temple of learning that Chimen had constructed. There was something reverential about the way he talked of this room and its contents – and, while the Marx books, even the rarest of them, were easy to pluck off of the bookshelves, the volumes in the upstairs front room were kept locked away on shelves in glass-fronted cabinets, the keys for the heavy doors zealously guarded at all times. Unlike the other rooms, which Chimen willingly showed off to interested visitors, this room was dramatically more private. Even fellow collectors of Judaica, even close friends such as Jack Lunzer and David Mazower, were only granted access occasionally, grudgingly. In this room, the shelves functioned more like a treasury vault and less like parts of an active library. On the rare occasions when Chimen opened the doors for me, a smell of musty, contained, geriatric paper would float out into the room and, liberated, make its way up my nostrils.

When Jack and Jenny were children, this room housed a
long-term
lodger, a Scottish lady by the name of Georgie Finlayson,
whose rent was a vital part of Mimi and Chimen’s precarious financial calculations. They had met her through the Communist Party, and, for many years she lived as a de facto member of the family, sharing their meals and even their summer holidays. Later, as the family fortunes began to stabilise, Georgie left, returning to Glasgow, from whence she had come, and Jack took over the bedroom. Without books covering every wall, it was a rather large space for him to call his own. He proceeded to clutter it up with schoolbooks; with Native American feathered head-dresses and other paraphernalia from the ‘I Spy Club’; with chess sets – he was, for many years, a fanatical and very talented player, part of a school team that made its way to the national finals one year; and eventually with a makeshift table tennis table. He set up a record player in that room, complete with large box speakers that he made from a kit, and started to build up his own collection – not of books, but of classical music and opera records. Jack’s collection of hundreds of vinyl discs were, in their own way, as timeless, as removed from contemporary popular cultural currents – this was, after all, the era of Elvis and Cliff Richard, of Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis – as the volumes that occupied Chimen’s shelves.

Jack and his friends spent hours in that room, emerging periodically only to disappear again to play atop the rubble of the large bombsite opposite the William Ellis Grammar School that Jack attended, or to play tennis or cricket on Hampstead Heath. And then they would return to Hillway to be fed by Mimi. ‘The house had gravitational attractions’, was how Jack’s childhood friend Andrew Moss put it more than half a century later. ‘My entire life it’s been true. It was the house you went and hung out at’. When Jack left in 1961 to study physics at Trinity College, Cambridge – an event noted with happiness by Piero Sraffa, on the off-chance that it would lure Chimen and his suitcases of rare books to the college more often – Jenny gleefully took over the
room; it was at least twice the size of the box room at the back of the house, which, as befitted the younger sibling, had previously been hers. Over her bed she hung a thin rectangular reproduction of a Turner landscape, its muted colours testament to the quiet prettiness of the English countryside. The picture hung there until Chimen’s death.

It was only after Jenny, in her turn, moved out that the room began to take on its final incarnation as the heart of Chimen’s Judaica library. For, when his youngest child left home Chimen promptly colonised the additional space for his books and, now firmly middle-aged, what little hair he had left greying, took stock of his life. His mother, Raizl, died in Israel in January 1965, after a five year struggle with the rare blood disease aplastic anaemia. In a little logbook, Yehezkel had carefully chronicled the hundreds of blood transfusions she underwent during these years. She had, Chimen wrote to Mimi from Israel, faced her death stoically. After being rushed to hospital with a lung hemhorrage, Raizl had told her youngest son, Menachem, who had moved to Israel in the 1950s, ‘where to find her identity card for the certificate of death. Within forty minutes after the attack she died peacefully. Her funeral was on Saturday night’. Chimen was
forty-eight
years old at this time. He and his father, he reported to Mimi, had had a ‘good cry’ together when he arrived in Jerusalem. Raizl had been, Chimen told his great-nephew Ron Abramski many years later, ‘very aristocratic’. Because she was descended from generations of famous rabbis, ‘she felt somehow she is an aristocrat. And she
was
. But she was a tough lady, very clever, a good fighter, a good organiser. My mother knew a lot about literature, which she read voraciously. Read Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov. She read a lot of Russian and Yiddish, couldn’t write a Hebrew letter – though she could understand it’.

With the members of the older generation dying off, Chimen was, I believe, as I think about his changing persona during these
years, starting to think about mortality more, about his place in the great fabric of Jewish life down the millennia, about his own obituaries. How would people remember him? He did not want to be remembered simply as a disillusioned Communist Party propagandist, or even as the greatest private collector of socialist literature in the English-speaking world. As the focus of his interest shifted from socialism to Judaica, so the centre of his library moved from the bedroom, down the landing and into the upstairs front room.

By the late 1960s, Chimen had completed his intellectual pivot. Where once he had been an obsessive collector of all things Communist, now he became almost equally obsessive about collecting Judaica. So much so that, in 1969, when he gave the opening lecture for London’s eighteenth Jewish Book Week, on the emergence of Jewish history as a separate academic discipline, he was introduced to his audience as ‘possibly the greatest Jewish bibliophile in the world’. The shift in emphasis was not purely caused by his changing political philosophy; the market for socialist books and memorabilia had taken off and he could no longer afford the few socialist items he did not already own. ‘I presume that you have seen that Sotheby sold Marx “Das Kapital” 1867 autographed to Ludlow, for two thousand four hundred pounds to El Dreff, the well known bookseller in New York’, Chimen reported to Sraffa on 26 June 1969. ‘A really staggering figure. Books of Marx and Engels are becoming literally extremely rare’. Two years later he gloomily reported to his friend that over the past years he had not been able to purchase any more rare socialist literature.

But, if affordable socialist works were no longer coming onto the market with any frequency, the world of Judaica was ever more
attractive – although by the 1970s, in no small part because of his own work with Sotheby’s, those collectibles, too, were starting to be out of Chimen’s price range. He had been instrumental in building up a market that was now, ironically, pricing him out of the small club of top-tier collectors.

Chimen had begun building up this side of his collection in the 1940s, perhaps ten years after he had started buying political and philosophical texts, partly because he loved the books themselves, and partly for their resale value. Under the tutelage of Heinrich Eisemann, he had learned how to acquire Judaica, at bargain prices, from libraries which had been left to rot in the United Kingdom or looted by the Nazis on the Continent. Jack Lunzer, a businessman and close friend who, with Chimen as his right-hand man, later built up the astonishingly comprehensive Valmadonna Trust Library, recalled that after the war incunabula (books and pamphlets printed before 1501) could be bought literally for shillings.

Of course, even in those penny-pinched days, other acquisitions were far more expensive. As an investment for the Shapiro, Valentine & Co book shop (which by now they owned), in 1948 Chimen and Mimi, along with several other investors, bought a medieval manuscript. It was a copy of commentaries written by the eleventh-century French-born and
German-educated
scholar Shlomo Yitzchaki, known to posterity as Rashi and widely acknowledged as the greatest Talmudic scholar in history. Hundreds of years before the advent of printing, Rashi and his students had written their comments on individual passages of the Hebrew Bible (or
Tanakh
) in the margins of the manuscripts of the texts that they worked with, using the great store of rabbinic lore known as
Midrash
to interpret particular lines in the
Tanakh
. So, too, the scholar had penned a vast set of commentaries to accompany the Talmud. For generations afterwards, other scholars added in their own
Tosafot
, or
comments on Rashi’s comments. And scribes painstakingly copied those texts by hand and circulated them among Jewish communities throughout Europe and the near East. Today, Rashi’s notes, along with the
Tosafot
, are included in all published editions of the Talmud.

The manuscript that Chimen and Mimi purchased was, their fragmentary correspondence from the period suggests, worth a royal fortune: £10,000 in 1948, the equivalent of several hundred thousand pounds today. Exactly what that manuscript was, however – who copied the Rashi and when, whether its margins were annotated with secondary commentaries, where the manuscript was made and who owned it in past centuries, even whether it was Rashi’s Biblical or Talmudic commentaries – is another of those mysteries from my grandparents’ lives that I cannot unravel. Their correspondence about it dates back to those months in late 1948 when Chimen was travelling around America. Mimi’s letters, which he kept, leave out the technical details. Chimen’s, which almost certainly would have included them, were not saved. What does seem clear is that for a few months, at least, they owned a one-eleventh stake in something Rashi-related that was very precious. They were forced to sell it when one of their fellow investors needed to realise his investment; and the sale made a tidy profit, which they promptly ploughed back into buying more stock for the East End book shop. The purchase and subsequent sale of the Rashi manuscript seems to have represented a crucial leap forward in Chimen’s book-dealing career. He was now entering the big time.

As his interests shifted, so, too, did his professional relationships. Chimen stayed in close touch with Eisemann, but by the 1960s, as Chimen’s Judaica library rapidly expanded, his mentor was old and increasingly frail. They met for lunch episodically and discussed manuscripts; but Eisemann was no longer the dominant partner in their dealings. Gradually, as his
health faded, the old expert left the stage; Eisemann finally died in 1972, at the age of eighty-two. By then, Chimen had long since found others to share his passion for rare manuscripts. Chief among these was Jack Lunzer. Several years Chimen’s junior, he had been at school with Chimen’s younger brother Menachem for a while, after the Abramskys arrived in London as exiles from the Soviet Union. After the war he had occasionally wandered into Shapiro, Valentine & Co to buy books. Now, a generation later the Abramsky connection was re-established by a shared passion.

Lunzer, a successful diamond merchant and an immensely cultured man, had the money to buy the most rare Renaissance Italian Hebrew manuscripts and books; Chimen had the understanding of the history out of which these works of art had emerged necessary to appreciate the importance of the collection that his friend was so focused on building up. Lunzer hired Chimen, after his retirement from University College, as a travelling consultant to the Valmadonna Trust Library. They made a perfect, albeit somewhat incongruous, book-collecting couple: Lunzer a large man with the air of a successful businessman, Chimen a diminutive figure utterly absorbed in his academic pursuits. Between the eighth century of the Christian calendar and the mid-sixteenth century, Chimen wrote, scribes writing in Hebrew had created a vast written culture, much of which had been destroyed during waves of expulsions and book-burning spasms. What was left, though, was enough to show the vibrancy of Jewish communal life during these centuries. He continued, ‘The Jews not only copied lovingly, and sometimes illuminated the Hebrew Bible, or books of it, especially the
Torah
(the Pentateuch), the holiest book, but they wrote and copied the large number of volumes of the
Talmud
– the principal embodiment of the Oral Law, and the second most sacred and important text, which guided, shaped and moulded Jewish life from birth to 
death. In addition they wrote treatises of commentaries on the Bible and Talmud; original works in philosophy, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, the natural sciences, grammars, lexicons, and excelled in remarkable poetry, both liturgical, lyrical and love songs. They composed homilies, wrote chronicles and polemical works, and created a vast branch of legal codes and Rabbinic Responsa. In a word they created a civilization of their own’. In an essay to accompany the catalogue for the sale of collector Michael Zagayski’s books and manuscripts in New York in 1970, Chimen described how ‘Jewish scholars and philosophers wrote treatises on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and the sciences. Philosophy was elevated to a royal throne. Poets composed deeply lyrical religious poetry as well as some of the greatest medieval love songs; Jewish mystics were engaged in fathoming the secrets of the universe, and seeking, sometimes desperately, a way to a universal and national salvation’. It was this civilisation that, in his upstairs front room, Chimen sought to resurrect.