The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Mention anyone connected with anything to do with socialism or modern Jewish history (which, it being an ancient culture, meant anything from about the last five or six hundred years) and almost anything to do with the Age of Enlightenment, and Chimen could give you the equivalent of an encyclopaedia entry answer as to who they were and why they mattered. Steve Zipperstein – a protégé of Chimen’s, who went on to become Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Stanford – would come to Hillway after a long day of studying at the British Library, and would proceed to mention which Russian-language Jewish newspaper articles he had been reading. Every time, Chimen would recall the article and explain its contents in detail. Fascinated by this feat of memory, Zipperstein decided to test how deep the well went: he began to drop cryptic clues about what manuscripts he had been perusing, waiting to see how long it took Chimen to guess the documents. Invariably, it did not take long. Chimen was like the mythological students celebrated in yeshiva lore, who had become so adept at studying texts that one could stick a pin into a book and they would know, from seeing how far it had sunk in, what page the point was resting on and what text was on that page.

  In other words, he was like his father.

  ***

  Rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky, the son of a small-time timber merchant, Mordechai Zalman Abramsky and his wife Friedl, had reputedly been born and survived childhood as the result of a blessing bestowed on his parents – they had earlier lost several infants to childhood diseases – by a renowned rabbinic scholar and miracle-worker known as Der Moster Zadik (‘the Holy Man from Most’). As a result of this intervention, his God-fearing admirers later hypothesised, Yehezkel, optimistically nicknamed Alterke, or ‘the old one’ by his parents to cement further his chances of a long life, had memorised every book of the Hebrew Pentateuch by the time he was eight years old. When the family walked to the town of Most from the tiny village, or dorf, of Dashkovtski, in what is now Belarus – so small that it could not rustle up the ten men required to form a minyan (quorum) for religious services – to attend synagogue on the High Holy Days, Yehezkel would astound audiences by reciting from memory any Jewish religious text he was asked to perform. They would shout requests from the rooftops; he would oblige. He was a Mozart of Torah. Within a few years of these public performances, he had attended every top yeshiva in the region, doing a sort of grand tour of the Orthodox equivalent of the Ivy League, and in the process establishing for himself a reputation as a Talmudic wunderkind without peer in the Jewish communities of Byelorussia and Lithuania in the dying years of the nineteenth century and the opening ones of the new century.

  The young Yehezkel was so remarkable in his knowledge of the Babylonian Talmud, and all the great rabbinic codes of history, that Rabbi Chanoch Henekh Eygish suggested to his famous cousin, Rabbi Israel Jonathan Jerusalimsky, that he might make a suitable husband for Jerusalimsky’s daughter, Hendel Raizl. Jerusalimsky was rabbi of Ihomen, and a scion of a rabbinic dynasty dating back five hundred years (a dynasty so fabled among the religious Jews of the region that they referred to it as ‘the silk family’);.he invited the young scholar over to his house, quizzed him on complex questions about the Holy Books, and promptly offered his seventeen-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage. Over the next decade, Jerusalimsky would be instrumental in securing his son-in-law a series of increasingly prestigious rabbinic posts, as well as blessings from famous rabbis and Talmudic scholars, throughout the Byelorussian region. Rabbi Jerusalimsky’s daughter, now married to a prodigy, would, recalled Chimen, push her husband to realise his potential, to become as successful as her own ancestors. ‘Without her, my father would not have become so famous’, Chimen averred, in a filmed interview a few years before his death, the sunlight streaming into his dining room, a vase of red tulips perched on his dinner table, as he talked. ‘She made him famous. She pushed him’, he said, to use his extraordinary memory and understanding of the Talmud to maximum effect.

  Yehezkel’s preternatural memory was a trait that he would pass on to his third son, Chimen, who was named after a long-departed great-grandfather who had been born around the time that Napoleon’s armies were invading Russia. The mnemonic tricks that yeshiva students such as Yehezkel learned in order to master the Gemara (the part of the Talmud made up of rabbinical commentaries on the Mishnah, which was a compilation of the Oral Law transmitted down the centuries by early Judaism’s great sages), including a form of call-and-response method, in which tutors called out verse numbers and students then recited the verses back at them, and in which instant translations from Hebrew toYiddish and back to Hebrew were chanted, were shared with Chimen. Later, when he had his own children, Chimen would impress them by memorising huge lists of numbers and repeating them back to the children. He did it, he later explained, by replacing the numbers in his head with equivalent Bible verses. As each number was read aloud, he would immediately convert it to a Bible verse – and, since he knew the whole Bible inside out, that visual trick gave him the ammunition he needed for near-perfect recall. It might have been numbers that came out of his mouth, but it was the words of the Bible that triggered their release.

  In the rare instances when Chimen could not respond to a question off the top of his head, he knew exactly which of his tens of thousands of books contained the answer, what page the information was on, and where on his many double-stacked bookshelves the volume could be located. ‘I’m just a little man’, he would say, ‘but I know something about …’ and, a smile of pride growing as he talked, as he gauged his audience’s level of wonder, he would rattle off a stream of information about whatever the issue or event in question might be.

  When Chimen talked about Voltaire or Maimonides, about the self-proclaimed seventeenth-century Jewish messiah Sabbatai Zevi, or about Marx, one half-expected these historical giants to knock on the door and saunter down the hall and into the dining room to plunge into the discussion. There, in my fantasies, they would be joined by history’s chorus singers, second-rank thinkers such as Harold Laski or the German socialist Karl Kautsky, revolutionaries such as David Riazanov and Clara Zetkin. For Chimen, a man who had been born in pre-revolutionary Russia, whose childhood had encompassed civil war and famine, and whose formative adult years had involved world war and holocaust, theories and philosophies, words and books provided structure to his world; they staved off the chaos, the anarchy, the fearsomeness of daily existence.

  It did not happen often, but when he did not know something, my grandfather could bluster. Hence the time he assured my younger brother that butterflies turned into caterpillars; or the day he stopped England’s boxing superstar, Frank Bruno (who lived nearby), on the street to talk about boxing, a sport I doubt very much Chimen was acquainted with in any way, shape or form other than via newspaper headlines and photos. From then on, when the two men bumped into each other Bruno would affectionately call out to ‘the Prof’. Or the learned conversation that, as a very old man, he engaged in with my father’s cousin Peter about whether or not the English football star David Beckham ought to move to Los Angeles to play for the LA Galaxy. While Peter had been obsessed with football for his whole life, Chimen had almost certainly never once kicked a football, and, as certainly, had never ventured into a football stadium.

  From the time I was a very small child, I met people like Isaiah Berlin, or the great modern Jewish historian Salo Baron, the New York rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, or Chimen’s best friend, the Israeli historian Shmuel Ettinger, at the House of Books, and I was absorbed into their conversations. With hindsight, I realise this was a gift as great as any I would ever receive. I was treated like an adult, maybe allowed a few sips of wine for the experience, was expected to have opinions on the great issues of the day, was argued with, and consulted with, as if my views genuinely had importance. It taught me self-confidence, and it taught me the wonders of curiosity, of knowledge. With some of the most profound thinkers of the age, I would talk about – sometimes shout about – nuclear disarmament;
the 1984 miners’ strike in England, which utterly captured my attention the year I turned twelve; Israel; the Soviet Union; interpretations of the Second World War; the Holocaust; great museum exhibitions and theatrical productions.

  There, too, I would see my grandparents’ nephew, the social historian Raphael Samuel. He would often come to visit Mimi and Chimen, and, on occasion, to needle them. Raph had been a central figure behind the emergence of the New Left in England in the late 1950s. As like as not he had mapped out its formation with his Oxford chums while sitting at the dining room table in Hillway amid the wreckage of the Communist dream, as a way to breathe new life into a demoralised radical movement. And he remained a true and unrepentant radical until his death in 1996. While Chimen and Mimi had become increasingly sympathetic to Zionism, Raph continued to believe that Israel was a fundamentally flawed project, and that the Middle Eastern wars from 1967 onward were wars of occupation. The result, at my grandparents’ house, was often a form of spectacular intellectual and ideological fireworks, made all the more tense by the interjection of family emotion into the passion play. Raph and Chimen sometimes fought so heavily that they would not speak to each other for months afterwards.

  Children take the environments they are familiar with for normal. And so it was that for many, many years I simply assumed that all old people lived in book-houses, every wall lined with musty old tomes, containing the secrets of history, politics, philosophy, religion, art. I assumed that it was entirely normal to spend one’s time arguing the merits of various obscure socialist doctrines in between the matzo ball soup and the roast duck. I concluded – wrongly I subsequently learned – that most children had Spinoza and Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Hegel quoted to them as morality tales by their grandfathers. Nearing forty as I write this, I can still recall Chimen’s fabulous Eastern European accent, his wagging finger, his earnest expression, as he urged moderation on me, commanded me, ‘Meester Sasha’, to read Spinoza – the brilliant autodidact from Amsterdam who had been excommunicated by the Jewish community, who had spent much of his life under-appreciated, and who for decades had ground glass lenses to make a living – and to learn the fine arts of intellectual subtlety.

  ***

  ‘The attainment of true intellectual values, that is perfect intellectual ideas, is impossible except for a man whose moral character is properly trained and who possesses dignity and balance’, wrote the Spanish Jewish philosopher and ethicist Maimonides in 1190, in The Guide of the Perplexed. Only such a person would have a chance at true enlightenment, at understanding the great mysteries of life and of the moral code upon which society rested. God, for Maimonides, existed outside of time, unchanging, not a person, a physical presence, so much as a concept; but it was this unchanging essence that allowed the world to exist, that provided a wellspring for all the dynamism within it.

  For Chimen, Maimonides was the lodestar, one of the great philosophers out of whose ideas modernity could emerge. Substitute ‘forces of history’ for God, and one could start to understand Chimen’s approach to life. He believed that these big forces shaped everyday lives; and he believed that only through strenuous intellectual effort could one come to fathom the immensity of these forces. Where Talmudic scholars were preoccupied with interpreting God’s will in the aftermath of Creation, Chimen was obsessed with the interpretation of history’s will. He was a historian-cum-metaphysician, fascinated by Hegel’s idea of the dialectic of history, of clashing opposites bringing new worlds to life – the holy trinity of the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis; and by Marx’s delineation of the driving forces of history, great, impersonal, economic forces operating on human societies with something approaching inevitability.

  Chimen himself, as he was all too aware, had been born into the crucible of history: his family caught between warring armies on the Eastern Front during the First World War, the communities out of which they had emerged ravaged by pogroms. And their lives had been further upended by revolution and civil war. Indeed, for the first years of Chimen’s life, he knew nothing but the deprivation and terror of the frontline.

  In July 1920, when Chimen was nearly four years old, the town of Smalyavichy, in which his father Yehezkel was the rabbi, was besieged. It had changed hands several times during the civil war that had broken out following Lenin’s October Revolution and the Russian withdrawal from the First World War. This time, it was a triumphant Red Army that readied itself to push Polish nationalist soldiers, allied with the pro-Tsarist White Armies, out of the town and the broader region. As the Polish soldiers retreated, they set fire to large parts of the town, especially in the Jewish quarters, indulging in a last frenzied bout of pogrom-like brutality. Yehezkel, who had received international media attention during this period by standing up to anti-Semitic thugs who had tried to cut off his beard and those of other local rabbis, was not present as the flames rose skyward – he had, according to his biographer Aaron Sorsky, an appointment in the nearby city of Minsk. But his wife Raizl was at home, and so were his four young sons: Moshe, Yaakov David, Chimen, and an infant who died shortly afterwards. (A fifth son, Menachem, would be born four years later.) The flames caught hold of their house, and Raizl barely had time to grab her children, rush them out into the street, and run for safety before the fire began reducing their home to ash. Inside, Yehezkel’s books, as well as his large personal correspondence with the leading rabbis of Byelorussia and Lithuania, went up in smoke.

  Yehezkel was born in a tiny village in the forests outside the town of Most in 1886, and had been trained in the Musar Schools, a particularly rigid and austere form of religious training, which stressed breaking down the self and a continual battle against ‘the evil inclination’, be it the libido, pride or possessiveness. In his classic novel about this vanished world, The Yeshiva, Chaim Grade has one of his characters make the following statement: ‘I’ve also heard it said that a Musarnik occasionally goes out in the street in the summer wearing a fur coat, a scarf, and galoshes. Is this some kind of religious observance?’ The rabbinic scholar, Tsemakh Atlas, responds by saying: ‘They do this to train themselves to disregard other people’s opinions and to ignore ridicule’. So, the questioner continues, ‘What’s a Musarnik?’ Atlas, who has been schooled in many of the same yeshivas as was my great-grandfather, thinks about it for a while and eventually answers, ‘A Musarnik is a man who lives the way he thinks he should live’.

  In these yeshivas, wrote the Israeli historian Shaul Stampfer, in Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century, ‘most of these students came from small towns, and this was their first taste of city life. Relatively few of them came from large cities, since by the late nineteenth century talented young men from the affluent families in larger urban centers were usually more attracted to the local secular schools than to a distant yeshiva’. Indeed, Russian records from the year that Yehezkel was born do suggest that more Jewish students were enrolled in secular universities that year than in the yeshivas. The Musar schools – no-nonsense in their discipline, determined to build a cadre of ethically pure religious students who could protect the broader Jewish culture from what they saw as the ravages of secularism – were in many important ways a counter-movement against modernity. They were somewhat akin, in the zealotry of their moral beliefs, to the Born Again movement in American Protestantism in the late twentieth century: they were often run by people who had been tempted by secular texts and new-fangled scientific and philosophical notions, but who had then returned, with resurgent enthusiasm, to the religion and belief-systems of their forefathers.

  Groomed for greatness within this self-enclosed religious world in which he had been identified as a rising star, Yehezkel’s education had not stopped with Musar. He had also spent time in Lithuania, studying with the fabled scholar Chaim Soloveitchik, who had pioneered a technique known as the Brisker Method, which pushed students to understand and analyse Torah commentaries through the precise analysis of key terms in various rabbinic debates. The cha
llenging nature of Brisker teachings, the ability it gave its best students to understand their lives and ideas as part of a continuum of millennia of Jewish experience, must surely have helped men like Yehezkel to put life’s ups and downs into perspective.

  Soloveitchik’s famous Slobodka yeshiva had been closed, by order of the Russian authorities, in 1892. And so, instead of attending group lessons there, Yehezkel studied privately with Soloveitchik and his sons, taking in knowledge that previous generations of students had received from the shiurim, or discursive lectures, in the yeshiva’s large halls. From the Vilnian rabbi, Hayyim Ozer Grodzenski, he also absorbed lessons. While still a student at Slobodka, Yehezkel was initiated into the rabbinate by Rabbi Yehiel-Mihel Epstein, who, at nearly one hundred years old, had witnessed pogroms and upheavals from the French Revolutionary period through to the rise of the Russian bomb-throwers of the late nineteenth century. Barely eighteen years old, Yehezkel had already entered the elite tier of Eastern European rabbis. He moved on to Telz in Lithuania, which was the most competitive of the great yeshivas, with complex entrance exams on rabbinic writings, monthly follow-up examinations, and an emphasis on manners and deportment. There, he acquired the yeshiva equivalent of a graduate education, combined, in some small way, with the presentational touches of a finishing school: he learned how to conduct himself in public. Yehezkel spent two and a half years there. During the famines that accompanied the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and the pogroms that followed in its wake, he and his fellow students were reduced to living on bread and water.