The House of Twenty Thousand Books (7 page)

Both the
Mishnah
and the
Tosefta
minutely document how Jews should behave: how they should pray, bathe, eat, when they ought to have sexual relations, how they should rest on the Sabbath and so on. Compilations of
halakhah
, or religious laws, they were worked out over centuries of discourse by the great sages; the rabbis represented in this text are referred to as
Tana’im
. But the
Tosefta
is a longer, more involved body of work, filled with explanatory notes and comments, its aphorisms and sayings unedited, its attributions of legal rulings to individual rabbis more complete. It includes material by
Tana’im
that was not included in the
Mishnah
. Much of the time, according to religious scholars, its passages agree with those of the
Mishnah
. Sometimes, however, they contradict them. The
Tosefta
is an extraordinarily complex work, its origins clouded in uncertainty, its overlap and difference with the
Mishnah
providing a wealth of material on the
development of early Jewish religious law in different population centres and under a variety of political conditions.

As he slaved away in Siberia, Yehezkel worked mentally on his interpretation of this body of law, calling on his prodigious memory of religious texts to conjure up images of the passages that he would critique. Over the months, he memorised thousands of lines of his commentary, scribbling them down when he had a chance, late at night or early in the morning, on whatever paper he could find. Usually, it was the translucent cigarette papers that the convict-labourers could occasionally lay their hands on. Once he had written these additions to his growing commentary, he would carefully hide the papers among his personal effects.

After months of international pressure from Jewish organisations in the United States and western Europe, Yehezkel was finally released in 1931, and he arrived back at his Moscow apartment on the eve of Yom Kippur. He greeted his family and then, putting all thoughts of celebration to one side, he immediately began his fast. The family, Chimen recalled
three-quarters
of a century later, avoided going to synagogue that evening, fearing that if they showed themselves in public his father would once again be arrested. Yehezkel spent the next day teaching his sons the commentaries exploring the significance of the Day of Atonement. Compromise, apparently, was not in his vocabulary.

Given a month to leave the Soviet Union, but with his passport confiscated by the Soviet authorities, Yehezkel travelled to the west, to Riga, Vilna and Berlin, and arrived in London at the end of 1931. He became a refugee. Raizl and their two youngest sons, Chimen and Menachem, were allowed to follow him out of the country shortly afterwards; but his two oldest sons, Moshe and Yaakov David were kept behind in the Soviet Union as hostages against the possibility of the rabbi speaking out too vocally against his erstwhile country. In London, Yehezkel and
Raizl fasted twice weekly as an offering for their children’s freedom, and rallied an international movement to secure their sons’ release. With Europe sliding ever closer to war, Britain’s foreign minister, Anthony Eden, who had taken an interest in Yehezkel Abramsky’s fate since the international campaign to save the great rabbi’s life after his arrest, found time to craft a personal appeal to the Soviets to release the Abramsky boys – Yaakov David, at the time, was in internal exile in Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, where he had married and had a son; Moshe was in Moscow. The appeal worked, and in late 1936 Moshe was allowed to leave to join the rest of his family in London. Yaakov David and his family followed a month later, spending a few months in London, where Yaakov apparently quarrelled with Yehezkel and Raizl about his lack of religious belief, before moving on to Palestine. Twelve years later, his son Jonathan, Yehezkel and Raizl’s eldest grandson, was shot dead on a Jerusalem street by a Palestinian sniper during the Arab uprising that followed Israel’s declaration of independence.

Yehezkel’s imprisonment and subsequent exile did not, however, make Chimen embrace his religion. To the contrary; in rebellion against his father and the unquestioning, ultra-Orthodox religious world that Rabbi Abramsky represented, Chimen started imbibing Bolshevik ideas in Russia while working as an apprentice to an artisanal suitcase-maker to support his mother and his brothers during these dark years. He had, at the age of fourteen, begun attending Communist clubs frequented by well-known figures in Moscow’s Yiddish cultural scene. By the time he was sixteen – a lonely exile living in London’s Jewish East End, in a flat at 1a St Mark Street, Aldgate, which was owned by an immigrant boot maker named Nathan Mitzelmacher; and with
two older brothers stuck in the Soviet Union still – to whom Yehezkel sent money each week so that they would not starve – he was writing in Hebrew to his cousin Shimon Berlin, whose family lived in Palestine, declaring that he was a Marxist. ‘I live here alone, lonely, unable to associate with such people’, he reported to his cousin in describing his surroundings. ‘I read “a lot” in these three languages: Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and a little English’, he wrote, his words precisely penned, each word identically spaced one from the next. ‘I read especially historical and political-economy books, written from a Marxist point of view, because I consider myself a Marxist.’

As a young man, Chimen wanted, desperately, to stand up and be counted in his own right. Myopic, stunted in height,
flat-footed
, averse to physical exercise and sports, he knew that he was never destined to be a hero on the battlefield. But he wanted to make up for it in the arena of ideas. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, while he still kept kosher and, for the sake of family peace, observed the daily rituals of an Orthodox existence, inside his own mind he had rejected the religious strictures that governed every aspect of his parents’ lives. Instead he found intellectual stimulation in the great political and philosophical tracts of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras: he had started befriending secular, left-wing intellectuals; and, increasingly, despite the horror stories that his father had told him about the prisons and labour camps of the Soviet Union, he had come to see that country as representing a new, beneficent force in human history.

Like so many of Europe’s young intellectuals during the 1930s, he looked to Communism as a counterpoint to Fascism and also to the values and political systems that had led the continent’s great nations to throw themselves into the slaughter of the Great War. ‘Being people of quite unusual sensitivity’, Crossman wrote of these young intellectuals in his hugely perceptive study
The God That Failed
, ‘they made most abnormal
communists, just as the literary Catholic is a most abnormal Catholic. They had a heightened perception of the spirit of the age, and felt more acutely than others both its frustrations and its hopes. Their conversion therefore expressed, in an acute and sometimes in a hysterical form, feelings which were dimly shared by the inarticulate millions who felt that Russia was on the side of the workers’. This was, for millions of young men and women, growing up amid the wreckage of an old world shattered by world war, a quest for absolute meaning. It was an existential search for moral purpose in a post-God world, a hunt for new ways of organising human society in the wake of a Great War in which millions had died; and, increasingly in the 1920s, in the face of the oncoming onslaught of Fascism. It was a search that brought in its wake one of the twentieth century’s greatest paradoxes: how could so many people, believing so passionately in the language of universalism, so quick to latch onto the language of justice in their arguments, make such appalling political choices regarding whom they trusted and what political institutions they supported? How could so many utopians end up supporting Stalin’s intolerant and bloodthirsty project?

At least in part, the answer must remain somewhat metaphysical. It was the
zeitgeist,
the atmosphere of the times, the immediacy of history – a time when history was seen as a living, breathing, pulsating entity, a thing that was pressing in on individuals caught within its vice from all sides. It was part of a search for certainty, unfathomable with hindsight, but, at the time, all too easy to fall into. In America, many filmmakers and artists joined the ranks of the Communist Party. In Britain, the Party struck deep roots in London, Glasgow and other urban centres. For the novelist Arthur Koestler, embracing Marxism allowed him to think that, ‘the whole universe falls into a pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke… Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving
mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse’.

Did Chimen sympathise with the tormentors of his father? Highly doubtful. But did he come to think that his father was misguided, that his father’s trial represented an aberration rather than the norm, or that the urgency of opposing a rising Fascist wave by aligning oneself with revolutionary workers’ politics outweighed all other arguments? Certainly by the late 1930s it seemed that way. Stalin had notoriously argued that one could not make an omelette without breaking eggs – that a new world could not be created without some remnants of the old being hurt, even killed – and the young Chimen, to his later bitter shame, entirely accepted the violent implications of this logic. Where Yehezkel, according to his biographer Aaron Sorsky, wrote of a Soviet Union that was ‘a land of blood that eats its inhabitants’, Chimen wrote that it was a place where anti-Semitism had been ended and where the workers were freer than anywhere else on earth.

It was a world view that, by the late 1930s, Miriam Nirenstein well understood. Educated in the primary schools that catered to the children of immigrants in the crowded, poor neighbourhoods of London’s East End, and then at Clapton County High School for Girls in Laura Place in Hackney, my grandmother and her sisters Minna and Sara had grown up kosher, traditional, yet clearly separated from the ways of their ancestors. They spoke an English influenced by the cockney of the East End, interspersed with Yiddish phrases, went out with boys of their own choosing, and, while they attended synagogue, their hearts were no longer in the age-old rites.

Unconvinced by the religious enthusiasms of their parents, who were shtetl immigrants from an old, vanished Tsarist Russian
Empire, first Minna, then Sara and Miriam turned to Marxism for their rituals, their catechisms. Those who remained religious in the face of the challenges and traumas of the modern world were, they felt, ‘reactionary’. By 1937, all three sisters were card-carrying members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Like so many of their friends, their reasoning was simple. They were young Jewish East Enders, horrified by Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts marching through their community in imitation of the thuggish brownshirts of early Nazi Germany, appalled by the dithering responses to fascism engaged in by the mediocre English and French leaders of the interwar years, tormented by the images that they saw in cinema newsreels of the Civil War in Spain. They believed that the Communists offered an alternative vision and so, as did many of their contemporaries, they threw themselves into Communist organising.

Given the way Yehezkel had been treated in Soviet Russia, his third son’s conversion to the religion of Bolshevism must have been a bitter blow. Certainly in biographical notes and essays on Yehezkel published in religious journals and encyclopaedias, Chimen is described as one straying, having chosen to walk away from the light. Chimen and – after they had met during the early months of the Second World War – Mimi, by contrast, cocksure in their assumption that the future lay with a Soviet-style Communism must, I think, have reasoned somewhat as follows: ‘Yes, Rabbi Abramsky is a good man, but he’s entirely wrong about religion. And if he’s wrong about religion, in all likelihood he’s politically compromised, too. Yes, he’s a good man, a loving father, a caring father-in-law, but maybe the Soviet system had its reasons for arresting him; maybe, without even realising it, he
was
endangering the workers’ state. The human progress that Marxist
revolution represents is too important to be derailed by sentimental stories and personal sympathies’. When he came to write his biography for the Communist Party, on 28 March 1950, Chimen, at the time a fervent Soviet apologist, explained that ‘my parents are very reactionary. For a short time my father was imprisoned in Russia’. The way it was structured, the first sentence seemed intended to justify the content of the second: ‘he was imprisoned because he was reactionary’. Later in that same paragraph, he continued that he had been educated at home ‘owing to my father’s reactionary views’. Chimen had, he wrote, begun to ‘rebel’ against his parents’ conservatism in 1934, when he had started to attend the Marx House Library and had begun to spend time with Communist students at the London School of Economics. In other internal Communist Party documents, Chimen went further; his conversion to Marxism, he averred in one handwritten testimonial, had begun in Moscow, during his father’s Siberian imprisonment, when, seeking relief from the claustrophobic environs of the family’s apartment, he ‘became a regular visitor to the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest, and the Jewish Communist Club’. There, he recalled, the ‘famous Communist Yiddish writer’, Beryl Dishansky, had befriended him. ‘Unfortunately’, the text continues, ‘I left the Soviet Union soon after, but both these places made a great impression on me and were my steps on the road to Marxism. The seeds sown in Moscow began to bear fruit in England. I began to read Marxist literature in earnest… In 1933–34, I became a member at Marx House… By then, I was completely “left” in my outlook’.

Not for the first time in my research, as I read this letter I am stunned. There is nothing in it of the gentleness that I knew in the older, grandfatherly Chimen. Nothing in it of the grief that he later felt when thinking back on Yehezkel’s experiences in Siberia. I understand why Chimen, later in his life, tried to destroy all traces of this most dogmatic individual, why he attempted to destroy all
copies of these documents, why he refused to discuss how, at the time, he had viewed his father’s imprisonment. When I read it again, I realise that this six-page missive is written in someone else’s hand, with Chimen’s signature formulaically added at the bottom. It is twice as long as the biography that Chimen did, indeed, write for the Party archives, and contains little that was not in the original – but is that much more jargonistic, that much more in the tone of a Party apparatchnik. I am sure that Chimen believed in its content; but, it is, at least, mildly comforting to know the words might not have all been his. Of course, when I look at the handwriting more carefully, I realise, to my shock, that it is my grandmother’s.