The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  There is something clandestine in this description. Something slightly furtive. In my head, I see Chimen, racing off to a Party meeting, socialist pamphlets crammed under his arm, weighty Marxist tomes filling his battered leather briefcase. When he wrote articles for Communist Party publications, more often than not he used a pseudonym: C. Allen, or sometime simply A. Chimen. He must have suspected that the intelligence services were monitoring him (although, in fact, MI5 does not appear to have a Chimen Abramsky file in its archives); his friend Hymie Fagan, in his unpublished memoirs, recollected that from the time of the 1926 General Strike on, each senior Party figure would be tailed by a special forces officer, many of whom they came to recognise on the streets after a while. And, like all good Communists during these years, Chimen probably took steps to avoid compromising himself and his friends. I see him in a rumpled, untailored, dark suit and a dark tie with an overly large knot, adorning his small body, hat pulled down on his head. I see him taking the London underground, the stations and abandoned tunnels of which sheltered thousands of men and women when the blitzkrieg was at its height, and emerging in the bombed-out East End, picking his way through the rubble, making his way in the primordial dark of the blackout to the all-important Party meeting. It is not too much of a leap from this scene to another of my favourite images of Chimen: in the mid-1950s, he somehow acquired parts of the library of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor. It included six draft pages from Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value; a long handwritten letter, in English, which Marx wrote to one Dr Kauffmann in 1875; and two pages of notes for an article on Poland that Marx had penned in 1860. It was, in all likelihood, from that same Marx family collection that Chimen somehow acquired a stash of intimate Marx family letters: these included one that the political philosopher had written to his daughter and signed, mischievously, as ‘Dr Crankey’; and another that Marx had written about his wife’s declining health, which he had signed ‘Old Nick’. Having scouted around for a buyer for the papers, Chimen discovered that Mao’s government in China was interested. The story passed down in family lore is impossibly vague, but it involves Chimen waiting at the base of the Eifel Tower, in Paris, with bags of precious Marx documents. There, he exchanged them for a briefcase full of cash. Somehow, the image reeks of the Cold War, of upturned collars and shadows falling over cobblestoned streets.

  ***

  All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were socialist and communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked crumbling them simply by touching them. In this one set of shelves in this one corner of the bedroom were all the intellectual components of hundreds of years of socialist thought. One could learn, in these few cubic feet, the difference between anarchism and communism, between social democracy and Bolshevism, between advocates of a peasant-based revolution and believers in the historic destiny of the urban working class. One could access some of England’s finest radical pamphlets and some of Russia’s most vital revolutionary texts. One could learn about 1848, Europe’s year of revolt, about revolutions and counter-revolutions, about martyred trade unionists and utopian socialist dreamers.

  When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated on a number of articles about Marx from the early 1950s on – they had met through the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party – decided to write their book Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement: Years of the First International, the books and documents in Chimen and Mimi’s bedroom provided the nucleus for their research. It was, as Chimen had always intended it to be, a working library.

  The book took Chimen and Henry nearly a decade to research. Chimen found it hard to know when to stop researching and when to start writing. One or other of them would write whole sections and then Chimen would read it again and send a note to his collaborator telling him that it needed to be entirely rewritten. It could, occasionally, be frustrating for Henry. ‘Chim, you old lobus!’ one letter from Henry, dated 6 March 1963, began. ‘What about your promised draft…? I think we should celebrate the final completion of the work.’ The book was, eventually, published by Macmillan in 1965, and, perhaps surprisingly given the topic, was widely, and favourably reviewed, not just in the left-wing press, such as the Daily Worker, but also in a number of mainstream and even conservative journals in Britain and America. The Economist printed an essay on the book, in which Marx was referred to as undoubtedly the greatest intellectual figure of his age. The Times reviewed it. In America, the New York Times praised it. A year after it came out, my grandfather wrote a note to his publishers letting them know that the ‘leading Soviet historical journal, Voprosy Istorii K.P.S.S. has devoted a 6 ½ page article to our book, and though it is critical on quite a number of points it also admits that it is a very scholarly work’. Chimen, who had left the Communist Party eight years earlier, and who believed himself to be on a Soviet blacklist, was gratified by the attention. He ended on what I hope was an ironic note. ‘It is quite unprecedented, to my knowledge, that a Soviet historical journal has devoted so much space to a book that is not for sale in the Soviet Union’.

  Chimen had always wanted to write the definitive English-language biography of Karl Marx. As early as 1964, Henry and he had approached publishers with their idea. In September of that year, they had signed a contract to start work on the volume. Now, with the first book out of the way, slowly they began accumulating the materials they would need for this vast project. Chimen’s library was their starting point again; so too they used the British Library, the archives at London’s Marx House, the Social History Institute in Amsterdam, and an array of other libraries. But the biography did not happen. A few years into the project, Henry fell ill with cancer; and not long afterwards, in 1969, he died. Chimen was devastated. Throughout the funeral, he sobbed uncontrollably.

  Despite occasionally talking about continuing with the project alone, the biography gradually faded away. A large part of the book-writer in Chimen died with Henry. To their friends it seemed that Henry had been the stabilising influence in the partnership, the Engels to Chimen’s Marx, the man who could marshal a vast amount of information into something resembling a coherent narrative. Take Henry out of the equation, and there was nobody left to shape Chimen’s thoughts on Marx’s life into a readable story. An extraordinary compiler of facts, a historian-detective of the first rank, Chimen struggled, both in conversation and on the printed page, to humanise his subjects. While he understood every detail of Marx’s life, he could not write the biography of The Moor (as Marx was known to his friends) without Henry to help him; decades later, he would find it equally impossible to craft his own autobiography. Chimen continued to peruse his tomes on Marx, searching for someone else to share his passion for the life of this extraordinary character. He never quite found a replacement for Henry.

  ***

  In a corner of my grandparents’ bedroom, between the fabulous treasure trove of Marx volumes and another wall crammed from floor to ceiling with myriad other rare books, as well as a couple of hardback copies of his and Henry’s volume on Marx, and a set of Isaiah Berlin’s books generously dedicated to my grandfather, was a little cupboard. My grandmother stored her few dresses there. In it, too, was a shelf stocked with bottles of spirits, to be taken downstairs for special occasions, and a ceremonial gown that had been given to Chimen long ago by an Iraqi Communist friend. I believe that little cupboard is also where Chimen kept a heavy, gnarled, dark wooden walking stick, with a silver handle and tip, a family heirloom passed down from father to son from the eighteenth century. It had belonged to his father, and Chimen had inherited it on the Rabbi’s death in 1976. When he wanted to entertain one of the grandchildren, he would disappear upstairs and return a few moments later with the heavy cane. Then, his eyes filled with mirth, he would balance it carefully on the tip of the forefinger of his right hand, and carefully walk around the dining
room, his legs slightly bowed, feet turned out, a sudden Charlie Chaplin vulnerability to his appearance.

  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.