The House of Twenty Thousand Books (32 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The front room had become a desperately sad room, smelling of sickness, of decay. ‘I have become, more or less a nurse, almost full time’, Chimen wrote sadly to his friend Brad Hill, on 15 May 1996. To me, he explained, apologising for a delay in sending me a letter, ‘The various functions I perform regularly, call on my time: doorman, semi-nurse, coffee and tea maker, handyman, washer up, “entertainer”, and letters are postponed’. As Mimi’s health deteriorated, as her extraordinary life collapsed into a drawn-out catastrophe, Chimen aged terribly. Three years earlier, on his birthday, he had written to me ‘So I am an old-man of seventy seven, though in mind I feel younger, but age does creep
on’. Now, the creep had become a gallop. When I visited Hillway now, he looked astonishingly small, his eyes red with chronic sorrow, his back more hunched than previously.

There was more sorrow to come. On 9 December 1996, Chimen and Mimi’s nephew, Raph Samuel, succumbed to cancer. Too ill to leave her home, Mimi stayed in the front room, while Chimen made the sorrowful journey up the road to Highgate Cemetery alone. A huge crowd of mourners had gathered to see Raph off, in the same cemetery where Marx was buried. Most of the broadsheet newspapers carried lengthy obituaries; it felt like a last hurrah for a dying breed of radicalism.

Four months later, in the last week of April 1997, Mimi entered the Royal Free Hospital for the last time. She had turned eighty only two months earlier. The place in which she had worked for so many years would be the place in which she died. Early in the morning of 25 April, with Chimen by her side, she finally gave up the fight for life. I had arrived at Heathrow a few minutes earlier, and taken one of the loneliest train journeys of my life to my parents’ home in Chiswick. As I walked in the door, my father phoned from the hospital to say it was all over.

Chimen had always carried a tiny appointment book, sometimes cloth-bound, sometimes leather, with a miniscule pencil latched to the spine, in which he recorded his future commitments. From his late seventies, these little books had begun to double up as diaries, as he tried to retain some control over the rhythms of his life by committing everything to the written word. When terrible things happened, the things that shred the fabric of existence, he noted them down in the appointment book after the fact. On the page for 25 April 1997, there are two cursory notes, penned in blue ink, the handwriting almost microscopic. ‘7.40am, Miri passed away’, reads the first. The second simply states ‘8.20am Sasha arrived from New York’. Two days later he noted ‘12.30pm funeral of Miri at the Jewish
Reform Cemetery Hoop Lane. Over 200 people attended. Service conducted by [Rabbi] Julia Neuberger. The speakers were Jack, Jenny, Sasha, Rob and Martin.’

Four and a half years later, on 11 September 2001, there is the following note in his appointment book: ‘2pm ring urgently Arthur Hertzberg’. Rabbi Hertzberg, one of Chimen’s closest friends, lived in New York. At 2pm in London, Chimen would have just found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center. The notes were sparse, barely emotional; the lack of expression, and the attempt to control the unbearable through committing its contours to paper, is almost heartbreaking. The memorialisation of events on the page seemed to give comfort to a man whose whole life had been devoted to the written word.

Chimen was now well over eighty years old, but intellectually he was as sharp as ever. Mimi’s long illness and death had forced him to confront his own mortality, but had not broken his love of ideas, his yearning to be a part of the great discussions in the great universities. After a period of mourning, he returned to travelling for pleasure – the summer after Mimi’s death my parents took him to Italy, from which he wrote long letters to me on the beauty of the churches and the violence of the history. Some time after that, he once more started attending overseas conferences; he finally travelled to Poland, to attend a conference on Jewish spirituality, and to visit Cracow and other former centres of Jewish culture. ‘The shops are full of goods’, he wrote in surprise, in a four-page essay that he never ultimately published. ‘The women are elegantly dressed. The restaurants and cafes are full of young people. There is liveliness in the streets. A feeling of freedom and happiness is felt in all the places we saw. A European atmosphere prevails’. Yet, at the same time, the journey deeply depressed him,
the legacy of the Holocaust more apparent in what was absent than in what was present. In the city of Lublin, which had once housed Talmudic colleges and been home to great religious sages, he noted that ‘there is not a street named after a Jew. As if they have never been there’. Poland, he wrote ‘today is a desert for Jews. Before the Second World War Poland had over three million Jews’.