The House of Twenty Thousand Books (9 page)

Somewhere in that cubbyhole, too, were kept the crumbling pages of a Second World War-era Yiddish journal,
Eyropë
, published in London, which Chimen had co-edited. His friend Helen Beer, an Oxford scholar who specialised in Yiddish, believed it was the only extant copy of the volume; all the others had been destroyed in the London Blitz. Or, at least, that was the story he told her. To his friend Dovid Katz, he confided, over a glass of whisky, that after he left the Communist Party and lost his sympathy for left-wing Yiddish culture, he had tried to destroy all remaining copies of the journal. Katz had looked at him and responded that, surely, he had kept one copy, that the one left behind would always be ‘an open question’, a link to a past he could never bring himself to bury fully. Chimen had not denied it. And, sure enough, as Beer discovered, he had indeed preserved just one copy in his collection, hidden away in the overstuffed cupboard in his bedroom.

Incongruously, on the inner wall of that same cupboard was a poster with a photo of their old friend, the famous mathematician Abby Robinson, and some of his mathematical formulae. Robinson and the historian Jacob Talmon (then still known by his original name, Jacob Fleischer) had both been friends of Chimen at the Hebrew University. They had moved to Paris, and had managed to flee France just ahead of the Nazi armies. They ended up in London, shortly after the May 1940 decision to intern all ‘enemy aliens’, and were promptly placed under lock and key at a school for the deaf and dumb which had been temporarily requisitioned as a refugee-processing centre.

Three days after Mimi and Chimen’s marriage in June 1940, the newlyweds received a letter, sent via Rabbi Abramsky, at the
Beth Din in Whitechapel, asking for help in getting Abby and Jacob released. They quickly made their way to the school, Mimi, characteristically, with a basket of food. Soon afterwards, the two young men were released; they spent the rest of the war in England and frequently visited Mimi and Chimen to share what little food there was and to talk about philosophy and politics. Continuing their great conversations from the Jerusalem days, Chimen, Abby and Jacob would launch into debates about the merits of Immanuel Kant’s ideas as opposed to Hegel’s. They would discuss the relevance of Maimonides’ theories to the modern world. They would dissect the Hebrew poems of Bialik and the German poems of Goethe. Sometimes, Chimen recalled in a conversation with Robinson’s biographer, as the bombs fell on London, they would talk right through the night. After all, he noted, during the Blitz each day of life seemed like a miracle, something so precious it ought not to be wasted on sleep. It was, in many ways, the same conclusion that Chimen’s father Yehezkel had reached in the labour camp to which he was confined, while slaving away in the frigid cold of a Siberian winter in 1930. He had, he told an audience later, gained a true understanding of Deuteronomy 28:66 in the camp: ‘And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee, and thou shalt fear day and night and shalt have none assurance of thy life’.

By this time, Talmon was already well on his way to breaking with the radical left, having become convinced that the revolutionary spirit which had descended down the generations since Rousseau had expounded his theory of the ‘general will’ had unleashed the horrors of what Talmon would come to term ‘totalitarian democracy’, and ‘political messianism’. With Chimen a devout Stalinist and Talmon a committed anti-communist, their through-the-night conversations would have been limned not just by the sense of urgency accompanying the Blitz but also by the urgency of friends in dispute, each convinced that the other was
on a fundamentally wrong course, each sure that the other had sold his political soul to the devil.

Robinson was long dead by the time I acquired my own memories of the bedroom – he had died of pancreatic cancer in 1974 – but his wife, Renee, was a regular visitor to the house. Her high pitched, Swiss-accented exclamations – eruptions of noise that seemed to unnerve my grandfather almost as much as they did us – about our appearances was a constant source of both amusement and annoyance to the grandchildren. Mimi had known Renee, as a beautiful, stylish, refugee from Vienna, in the late 1930s, from before she had met Chimen, and would get upset when we mocked Renee’s accent. In private, however, Chimen would show his amusement, chuckling gently before telling us to stop being
chochems
. In Hebrew,
chacham
means a ‘wise person’. In Yiddish, however, in a twist on the original phrase,
chochem
can also mean, when used sarcastically, a simpleton, a dunce, a sort of court jester. Chimen used it on his grandchildren with infinite affection.

But back to the bedroom. It was a dark, low-ceilinged room, measuring twelve feet by twelve feet, with little natural light and one low-wattage bulb dangling from that ceiling, surrounded by a cream-coloured paper ball lampshade. In the centre of all of this unfathomable clutter was the bed, a small, boxy, old mattress with a headboard that probably had not been moved off of its little spot against the wall since Mimi and Chimen had first bought the house, at a knockdown price, in 1944, during the dark years of the war. Chimen did not spend much time in the bed; he rarely slept more than four or five hours a night. Most mornings he was up by five o’clock, writing his letters, perusing his catalogues; most evenings he stayed awake past midnight. When you lay down on
that bed in the centre of the room, all that you could see were books and pieces of paper – and the tiny, sooty, window that let in just about enough of London’s inky night-light to make those books look scary.

This was Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom, though, if truth be told, by the time I came on the scene it did not really make sense to call it a bedroom. Years earlier, it might have been defined by its nocturnal occupants, by their marital relations, by their nightclothes and their wardrobes. It might even have exuded romance, back when my grandmother, as a young woman, still sported long, wavy brown hair, and a gentle smile that made her look, in some particularly fortunate sepia photos, like the film star Ingrid Bergman. By the 1970s, it was the Reserve Room of a great and infinitely mysterious library. It was there that the gems in Chimen’s collection were held. The bed in which my grandparents slept each night, wedged in the centre of this chaos, and the few items of clothing begrudgingly allowed space to hang amid the books were, clearly, interlopers.

For an adult, to be invited into Chimen’s bedroom signified not romantic interest, nor coy flirtation, but academic trust. You had to earn your way in, show knowledge of, or love for socialism and its lost worlds, or, at the very least, the esoteric universe of rare manuscript and book collecting. You had to appreciate the sensation of touching a book that Marx had owned and commented on; or a document on which Lenin had scribbled marginal notes; or a book that Trotsky had carried with him into exile. You had to have the capacity to comprehend the absurdly low probability of Marx’s membership card for the First International not only surviving over more than a hundred years but finding its way to Hillway. Or of paper scrip money, printed
by the nineteenth-century utopian socialist Robert Owen, ending up in this room. There was, recalled one friend, ‘a touch of the impresario’ to Chimen, ‘a magician’s delight in surprising you. He’d trot off to a room and return with something and enjoy your reaction’. A cousin recalled first being shown the room in 1978, about twenty years after he had first visited the house, and Chimen wistfully asking him where he thought these books would be in a hundred years. ‘He wasn’t so much talking about where the books would be physically. He was talking about where the ideas would be.’

But I, and Chimen and Mimi’s four other grandchildren, did not have to earn entry to this citadel. It was simply where we slept at Hillway when we were too young and scared to sleep alone. It smelled old and musty, and I was never quite sure whether that was the smell of the books or of my grandparents. Later on, I would sleep in the small room that was kitty-corner to their bedroom, a little room with a soft mattress bed, and a set of cabinets, still containing some of my aunt’s bric-a-brac from when she lived with her parents, bracketed to the wall over the far side of the bed. By the windows was a cupboard, in which were stacked mountains of catalogues and other research materials that Chimen would use when evaluating rare books and manuscripts for Sotheby’s, the world’s most prestigious auction house. For more than thirty years he was their behind-the-scenes expert on Hebraica. It was he who had catalogued the extraordinary manuscript and incunabula collection of David Sassoon, the sale of which, in a series of auctions in London and Zurich in the 1970s, essentially jump-started the modern global market in rare Hebrew materials. ‘Before Sassoon sale Hebrew books were in the doldrums. Few buyers; books sold very cheaply’, Chimen wrote in the notes he prepared for a lecture that he gave on the sale when he was eighty-four years old. ‘Remarkable change with first sale of Sassoon… The sale was a sensation’.

Not only did the Sassoon auction massively ratchet up the value of Hebrew manuscripts and early printed books, but it also secured Chimen’s career as a sought-after evaluator of such items. ‘You might be amused to learn that I have now added up the catalogues which I compiled, or wrote, since 1961’, he informed the young bibliographer Brad Hill, who had apprenticed himself to my grandfather, in a letter dated 8 June 1988, ‘and they are nearly fifty… And nearly all without my name (except for two)’.

Sandwiched between the cupboard and the bedroom door in this little spare room hung the two low-grade copies of Marc Chagall paintings. When I stayed there overnight as a teenager, I would wake up and look at those paintings in the early morning light. And then, at a leisurely pace, I would get out of bed, brush my teeth, shower in the impossibly weak stream of water from the hand-held nozzle in the bathroom that had not been updated since the Second World War, and head downstairs. Above the bend in the staircase hung the huge (but still one-third the size of the original), ghoulish, mass-produced black and white reproduction of Picasso’s
Guernica
, the mutilated, howling bodies and faces of the Spanish city’s experience with aerial bombardment standing as sombre testament to the horrors of the modern world. It was those horrors that had convinced my grandmother to cast her lot with the Communist Party.

I would hurry past the painting, down the moth-eaten, carpeted stairs, as fast as possible. At the bottom, I would execute a U-turn by swinging around the bannister’s angular knob, and head down the hallway toward the kitchen. There, I knew, my grandmother would be standing by the stove, a pan full of eggy pancakes waiting for me, a cup of hot tea ready to be gulped
down, a pot of warmed honey, for dripping on the pancakes, on the table near my seat.

‘Hello, love’, she would say. ‘I made you some breakfast.’

Thirty-five years after I had been stranded in my grandparents’ strange bedroom by fog, I lay in another room, thousands of miles away, dreaming about the House of Books. The first anniversary of Chimen’s death was approaching, and I couldn’t stop thinking about his terrible final months. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was on holiday with my family, and that Chimen was with us. He was very old, as frail as the most antiquated of his books, but he was intellectually vigorous. We were talking about his books.

Suddenly, I realised that we had buried him a year earlier. I couldn’t understand it. I took my mum aside to ask her for an explanation, and she started to tell me, in a low whisper, how everyone had thought he was dying, and so they planned the funeral, and then somehow he had lived. (In reality Chimen had, twice in his last year, beaten the odds and survived sicknesses the hospital doctors judged to be fatal.) My conversation with my mother was interrupted. But, later, I managed to take my dad aside and ask him the same question. ‘It’s alright’, he answered. ‘We were convinced that he was dying, so we arranged the funeral, and we couldn’t disinvite everybody, so we held it anyway. We hid Chimen away in the attic and held the funeral’. ‘But the coffin I mourned at?’ I asked in disbelief. ‘Empty.’

And then I had an utterly devastating realisation. ‘But the books are all gone. The shelves are empty. Chimen’s living like a ghost in a house with no books.’ The idea of it was intolerable, the sheer agony my grandfather must be suffering in the empty house unendurable.

I woke up screaming.

E
VEN YEARS AFTER
most of the central characters from Hillway had died, I still regularly dreamed about them.

Hillway is part of a small community just off of Hampstead Heath, known as the Holly Lodge Estate. The estate had originally been owned by a Victorian banking family, and when it had subsequently been sold off and developed as housing the streets had remained in private ownership, largely outside of the purview of the local council. That a large number of Communists chose to buy property in this private little enclave was something of an irony. On a day-to-day basis, however, by the time I was a child the only visible signs that it remained an ‘estate’ were the
never-closed
gate at the bottom of the hill, through which one turned onto the street from Swain’s Lane, and the propensity of the traffic wardens to issue tickets to any car whose owner had the temerity to park on the street without either a residents’ sticker or a guest
permit. Every so often, someone from the estate board of management would send Chimen a sniffy letter, addressed curtly to ‘Abramsky’, alerting him to the fact that he was grievously under-paying the ‘voluntary’ dues levelled on residents each year. As they were voluntary, however, Chimen did not feel compelled to part with more cash.

On one of the streets just off the estate is the overgrown cemetery in which Karl Marx was buried, as were the theorist of electro-magnetism Michael Faraday and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. Playing on the name of the retail chain, wags would regularly joke about the proximity of Marx and Spencer in their final resting place. Several times during my childhood, Chimen took me up the hill to that cemetery, there to ponder the massive monument atop Marx’s corporeal remains, commissioned by the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1955. He never told me whether he had played a role in the monument’s genesis, but given that he was still an active Party member at the time it is certainly possible. On another street, higher up, above the Heath, is the Spaniards Inn, an ancient pub in which, so legend had it, Dick Turpin, the eighteenth-century highwayman, had drunk his fill.

From the top of Hillway, all London, right the way down to the Thames, could be seen. Emerging from the huge bomb shelters under Hampstead Heath during the war, from that hill my grandparents would have witnessed the vast conflagrations that demolished so much of London. When the V1 flying bombs and the V2 rockets fell randomly over the city from June 1944 to the end of the war, they would have seen their own new neighbourhood pocked by debris-filled lots where once houses, shops and businesses had stood. A direct hit by a V2 could level an entire block. Londoners attempted to hide from the carnage below ground: the nearby underground stations of Hampstead, Highgate and Belsize Park, all deep below street level, were used
as shelters by many thousands of bomb-dazed inhabitants. (The future American talk show host, Jerry Springer, was born in Highgate Station during one bombing raid, in 1944.) Usually the underground stations provided a safe haven; on occasion, though, a direct hit resulted in terrible loss of life. On 14 October 1940, for example, a huge bomb penetrated the earth above Balham Station in south London, exploding just above two platforms used by shelterers. Sixty-six people died as a result of the explosion, some killed by the blast itself, some apparently drowned by water released from burst pipes and others suffocated by gas from damaged gas pipelines.

When I passed my driving test at the age of seventeen, I drove to Hillway so many times that the route became permanently etched into my memory. And even though my grandparents’ house was only three doors up from the foot of the hill, I almost always made a detour to the top to take in the view. It was spectacular. As I descended Hillway, the vistas changed. The dome of Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, St. Paul’s cathedral – just north of the sprawling riverfront private school that I attended from the age of eleven to eighteen, which was opposite the abandoned power station that was to become the Tate Modern gallery – could be seen from one spot, the British Telecom tower from another. From right at the top, as I spun my parents’ car around the little roundabout and headed back down, I could glimpse the river itself; later on, when the London Eye ferris wheel was built to celebrate the millennium, that, too, entered the picture. It was like a moving diorama of all that was best in London architecture (along with a lot that was not), viewable in miniature, as the car slowly rolled down Hillway, back towards Swains Lane and the bottom of the hill. My grandparents’ house was just around the corner from a little supermarket, a couple of cafes, Cavour’s delicatessen, and a small hardware store, all on Swain’s Lane, and a few steps away from a little mechanic’s garage
that occupied one of the spaces left empty by a bomb blast during the war.

Mimi and Chimen seemed to know half the residents of these streets. Several members of the family lived within walking distance: Jenny, her husband Al, and their children Rob and Maia; Mimi’s cousin Phyllis Hillel, who moved into the area when she was widowed in the 1980s; her son Peter, his wife Vavi, and their children Emma and Nick; and Sara’s daughter Julia, who lived in the house that had, decades earlier, been owned and lived in by Mimi’s mother. Then there was Fred Barber, an elegant, exceptionally bald, old doctor who had fled Prague after the Munich Agreement in effect handed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. Almost daily – until he was well into his nineties and debilitated by old age – he would walk over to Hillway for a cup of tea and a chat, always perfectly attired in suit and tie, his few thin wisps of white hair trailing off the back of an otherwise denuded, liver-spotted and shiny pate. For some reason, while Mimi always called him ‘Fred’, Chimen never called him anything but ‘Barber’ or ‘Doctor Barber’. There was an elderly academic and former Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union, Krishnarao Shelvankar, and his very proper wife, Mary. No matter what the weather, he always wore sandals – as a result of which, while I cannot at all these years’ remove conjure up an image of his face, I can, quite clearly, see his toes. They were long, the nails slightly browned. Mary Shelvankar, without fail, encouraged me to play the piano and, sipping tea in the kitchen with Mimi, complimented my half-hearted efforts – Beethoven sonatas, Chopin études, some Gershwin, a bit of Scott Joplin – when I did. Listening to the pair of them talk about my musical abilities, one would have thought I was destined to win the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. In reality, I was lucky if I could play three or four bars without hitting a clunker. For half the year, an Israeli couple, Mike and Ora Ardon, long-time friends of Mimi and Chimen, lived a one-minute walk from
Hillway. Old ex-Communist Party comrades, as well as academic colleagues including the noted anthropologist Mary Douglas, dotted the Holly Lodge Estate or visited from nearby. An easy car or bus ride away lived a host of other regular visitors: Mimi’s sister Sara, and her husband Steve Corrin; their daughter Eve – Julia’s sister – and her son Tom; Chimen’s cousin Golda Zimmerman; Mimi’s cousins Lily and Martin Mitchell (Lily was the younger sister of Phyllis; their father and several siblings had been killed on the very first night of the London Blitz), and numerous others.

Each relative who entered the house, especially the children, merited their own particular greeting from Chimen: there was ‘Meester Rob’; for a while, as he went through a period of teenage indecisiveness, my brother Kolya became ‘Meester Maybe’; my sister Tanya and cousin Maia were Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee – though today, neither can agree on which was which.

The person I most associate with the doorway at Hillway, with the ritual of entry, was not, however, a relative. Instead, she was my grandmother’s best friend, a dentist named Rose Uren. At least once a day at Hillway, I would hear a growling, roaring sound coming nearer from the street. That would be my cue; I would run to open the door, and there, standing outside was Rose, her moped driven all the way up the plant-lined pathway to the little concrete-covered patch by the three steps that led up to the red front door. Rose herself would be standing before me, her helmet still on, as often as not with bags of smoked salmon, black bread and other essentials that Mimi had asked her to buy on her way in. She looked like something out of a 1950s B movie. ‘A-lloooh Sasha’, she would say, in an extraordinarily thick French accent. And then, in mock surprise, ‘No-buddie told me you vuhd be here! I vuhdn’t ’ave come eef I’d known’. Then she’d look past
me at my grandmother, standing over the stove in the kitchen. ‘Mee-mee! Vye didn’t you tell me ’ee’d be ’ere?!’ And, before I could escape, she would grab me and, her breath smelling of strong cheese, would plunk a kiss on each cheek. It was an awful smell – and I loved it.

Rose had fled over the Pyrenees into Spain when France fell to the Nazis; she had been interned by Franco’s forces; and then somehow had made her way back to France to join the Resistance. After the war, she had moved to England. There was not a religious bone in Rose’s body; but in some ways she was as
old-world
as one could get, a perfect shtetl bargainer, always hunting for the best deal, always willing to catapult insults at merchants she felt were not dealing with her fairly. Perhaps that was why Mimi would send her out food shopping for Hillway. ‘Gangs of women crowd around the peasants who have brought their farm produce for sale, jostling each other in the attempt to get first choice’, Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog wrote of Eastern European Jewish markets, in their 1952 book on the mores of the shtetl,
Life Is With People
. ‘Bargaining is raised to a fine art. The acquisition of a Sabbath fish may take on all the suspense of a pitched battle, with onlookers cheering and participants thoroughly enjoying the mutual barrage of insults and exhortations’. That Rose was shopping at the Cash-‘N’-Carry rather than in a shtetl market did not negate her enthusiasm for such theatrics.

I adored Rose. She was as over-the-top – as
ungeputschke
was the Yiddish phrase – as anyone I knew. An ex-Communist, she had firmly joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie, regularly attending the opera at Covent Garden, and counting among her dental clients some of the country’s leading politicians. Even better, she was a tennis fanatic, and enjoyed nothing more than sitting down with me and talking about Wimbledon or the French Open. Like me, she loved John McEnroe and loathed Ivan Lendl. And when
she loathed someone, curses flew out of her mouth that could make the blood run cold. It was Rose who polished my teeth twice a year and, her mouth positively jangling with her own silver fillings, berated me for not brushing for longer each day. It was Rose who worked hardest to get me to stop biting my nails and picking my nose when I was a small boy. And it was Rose who, a decade later, put in the most hours teaching me to drive.

For Rose, whose own granddaughter lived thousands of miles away, Mimi and Chimen’s five grandchildren served as local substitutes. At times, she could be remarkably territorial. When my cousin Rob brought home a girlfriend from college, Rose rang my aunt and uncle’s doorbell with her customary double-ring. Entering the house, she shouted out ‘Let me see zee gurrrl who has stolen my Rob from me!’ She was carrying opera binoculars with her for better viewing. When my cousin’s somewhat surprised friend showed her face, Rose grabbed her and, with faux-solemnity, took out a dentist’s magnifying glass: ‘Leh-t me see your tee-th!’

Over the years, I met thousands of people at Hillway, and, in my imagination decades later, I situate different people in different rooms. Some people, like my grandmother’s gossipy Liverpudlian friend Rachel, who always arrived with thick pancake makeup on her cheeks; or her cousin Phyllis – a wonderful cockney character who, for the main part of her meals, ate nothing more adventurous than bread or potatoes, but who routinely made and brought over the best apple strudel I have ever tasted – I imagine as denizens of the kitchen. Perched on uncomfortable wooden chairs, they sat there with Mimi, drinking cup after cup of tea, and exchanging titbits of community news and family tidings. As they got older, they all grew deafer, and, year by year, the volume of these
conversations grew louder. Others have established themselves in my daydreams as dining room acquaintances. For some reason, however, many of my fondest memories are of hallway people. Of course, they were not really hallway people; like all the others who visited, they simply walked through the book-lined entrance hall on the way to the rest of the house, but my recollections of them are of their entrance, their announcement that they were present, and the way in which they were greeted.

I think of my great aunt Sara and her husband Steve Corrin as hallway people. They spent decades collecting children’s stories from all over the world and editing them into a wonderful series of volumes titled
Stories for Five Year Olds, Stories for Six Year
Olds
and so on. Every time she came to the house, Sara, who, like her older sister Mimi, believed that all social situations demanded the bringing of food, was laden down with cakes and other goodies that she had cooked in her dimly lit house before coming over to Hillway. Steve always came equipped with new jokes, pithy comments – almost aphorisms – on world affairs, and news clippings neatly folded and carefully secreted away in one or another of his brown tweed or grey sports jacket pockets, which he would ceremoniously pull out of his pockets to share with me or with Chimen almost before he had stepped through the door. Tubercular in his youth, Steve remained rake-thin for the rest of his life, his presence a bundle of nervous energy, his sharp eyes watching and interpreting everything and everyone around him. They came frequently, but, when Steve was with Sara, often only for a few minutes. Steve seemed to tire easily. He would head into the dining room to perch on the edge of an armchair while quickly, nervously, nipping at a small brandy. Once his jokes had been told and his news clippings shared, he frequently sank into a morose silence, his darting eyes silently doing most of his communicating. They would leave a few minutes later.