The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  ***

  Chimen and Mimi bought the house on Hillway (which had been left empty since sometime in 1942, according to Post Office records from the period) for £2,000 in the spring of 1944, the mortgage held solely by Mimi, since Chimen was, in 1944, still a stateless non-national. It would have been the hallway shelves, made of low-grade varnished planks of pine, which were filled first. Their inhabitants at that time were books that he had scavenged from the shop, and from sellers in the bomb-battered East End. Many of them, in keeping with my grandparents’ politics at the time, were works of propaganda intended to extol the joys of Bolshevik Russia. They were volumes that accompanied Chimen and Mimi throughout the war. They would have occupied shelves in Mimi and Chimen’s first home, a small flat near Regent’s Park. The flat was too close to London Zoo for comfort: Mimi was terrified that a bomb would hit the zoo and demolish the cages, and that she would come home late one night and be chased down the street by a liberated lion. It was not an entirely irrational fear: the zoo was bombed several times, but at the outset of the war many of the zoo’s larger animals had been evacuated to facilities outside of the city; however, with authorities worried that the zoo’s poisonous snakes might escape among the already-edgy populace, the unlucky reptiles were killed. As the war intensified, many other strange sites were hit: two years into the conflict, the London Necropolis Railway Station at Waterloo, a Victorian terminus used to transport the bodies of the dead out of London to Brookwood Cemetery, was heavily damaged in a bombing raid. As their numbers multiplied, and multiplied again, no longer could the dead be sent to genteel resting spots in the Surrey countryside.

  During the eight months of the Blitz, according to the Bomb Sight online map of where the bombs fell in London, released to much fanfare in 2012, well over fifty large bombs fell on the streets surrounding the home on Hillway that Mimi and Chimen would ultimately buy. Expand the search parameters by just a few streets in each direction, and the number of bombs rises to several hundred. Bombs fell on Hampstead Heath, on Highgate Cemetery, on the Whittington Hospital, on at least one local school, and onto numerous homes and businesses. In the East End, around Shapiro, Valentine & Co, almost every street experienced at least one bomb strike; many were hit multiple times. Some streets were entirely obliterated; others were left standing in a patchwork quilt of destruction interspersed with improbable examples of architectural survival. As the wheel of chance spun and spun again, somehow the little book shop remained intact.

  The numbers of casualties were huge. Between September 1940 and May 1941, well over 20,000 Londoners were killed, 3,000 of them on 10 May alone. Four of them were Mimi’s cousins. London had become a charnel house. Somehow, Chimen and Mimi managed to preserve at least a veneer of normality: Mimi kept the accounts and made sure the shop could function; Chimen continued to collect his precious books even as the fires from the previous night’s bombing raids still burned. One day, a customer rushed into the shop to tell Chimen that the Beth Din, the ecclesiastical court of the United Synagogue, which had immense influence over the religious lives of Orthodox Jews in Britain, and over which Yehezkel had presided since 1934, when he had turned down an offer to become Chief Rabbi of Palestine, had been hit by a bomb. Chimen, terrified that his father had been killed, ran out of the shop towards the religious court. He arrived just in time to see Yehezkel, his gabardine coat caked with dust, stagger out of the rubble. As Chimen ran towards him, Yehezkel rushed off in the other direction, towards the home he shared with Raizl, to tell her that he had survived the attack.

  Six months into the Blitz, my grandparents made the decision to evacuate. Taking Chimen’s books with them, they decamped to Bedford, some fifty miles north of London, in February 1941, to distance themselves from the fury. Mimi was trying to get pregnant. Their son Jack (who would eventually become my father) was born in January 1942. They all lived at 194 Foster Hill Road, a large house that they shared with fourteen people, among whom were several of Mimi’s cousins. Chimen commuted into London by train six days a week to run the shop. He continued, amid the wreckage of war, to buy books.

  In some of these early additions to his collection, my grandfather signed his name ‘Shimen’, elsewhere he wrote ‘Shimon’, in others ‘S. Abramsky’, and in still others ‘C. Abramsky’. He was, it seemed, still experimenting with the best way to spell his Hebrew name using the English alphabet; later, in a 1967 letter to Isaiah Berlin, in which he gave his friend permission to address him by his first name after a ten year correspondence, he wrote that the non-phonetic construction of his name was due to the idiosyncratic spelling of Soviet authorities. When he began writing for the Communist Party, he added aliases to the mix and ‘C. Allen’ came into being. Perhaps, in the many ways in which he spelled his name (and in the variety of birth dates he gave out for himself, ranging from September 1916 through to March 1917) he was still trying to work out who he was, who he wanted to be.

  Finally, as the reach of the bombs spread and Bedford no longer seemed to offer a real sanctuary, Chimen and Mimi returned to London, and, despite the fact that V2 rockets were raining down on the capital city, bought their house on Hillway. It was, perhaps, their way of staking a claim to the future. When the attacks got too ferocious, Mimi would take my terrified father, then two years old, to a large bomb shelter dug under Hampstead Heath’s victory gardens. There, they would huddle with other refugees from the fiery world above, the explosions shaking their fragile lair. My father’s earliest memories are of that hideaway. Well into adulthood he would have nightmares about the bombs.

  Throughout these dark years, Chimen continued to work at Shapiro, Valentine & Co, and continued to build up his collection of Marxist literature. In the evenings, while the German bombers unloaded their deadly cargoes over London, he was a fire-spotter with the Metropolitan Borough of St. Pancras Fire Guard. He would stand on rooftops, scanning the blacked-out city below, looking for flames, and phoning in locations to the fire brigades. The next morning, he would see the full effect of those fires. One day, he wrote in the notes for his never-finished autobiography, ‘there was a shattering, violent explosion. We went out to have a look. London was on fire, burning from four sides. It was hellishly frightening’.

  I can see him in my mind’s eye, coming out of Aldgate East tube station the day after a bombing raid, and picking his way through the rubble, past the narrow old Huguenot houses, some still standing, others destroyed, as he made his way from Whitechapel High Street over to Commercial Street and then along Wentworth Street to his shop. He might, perhaps, in the strangeness of the rubble, have paused for a moment to orient himself; quite possibly, the soaring early eighteenth-century spire of Christ Church, Spitalfields, designed by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, helped to set his path. On a clear day, the calm blue sky would have brutally contrasted with the smouldering ruins, the noise of the East Enders attempting to get on with their lives contrasting with the silence of the dead. The ruins would have stunk of burning wires and rubber and all the other detritus of destroyed buildings.

  Chimen would have trudged among the ruins, aghast at the horrors unleashed on his adopted city, yet thinking about what that city would look like, and how it would be run, once the war ended. For, by the time he, Mimi, and their toddler son relocated back to London, it was clear that at some point soon the Nazis would be defeated. What was also increasingly clear was that Chimen, no longer viewed with suspicion as a newcomer, was now the effective head of his wife’s extended family. It was the book shop that he ran that would provide employment to relatives in need of work; and it was, increasingly, his and Mimi’s words that would count in family dramas and conflicts.

  ***

  For the first decade after the war ended, until she became too old and sick to live alone, Bellafeigel lived around the corner from Hillway. In the 1950s, when my father and aunt were children, she and her brothers would rent a house at the seaside each summer, and Mimi and Chimen would dutifully drive down with the ch
ildren for day trips. At first, they went to Southend-on-Sea in Essex and later on to Bournemouth, which was noted for its kosher hotels.

  Chimen had, to his considerable pride, learned to drive in 1952; his enthusiasm was only slightly dampened by the fact that he had had to spend several months after he passed his test dealing with mechanical problems in his old Morris (a car of pre-war vintage with a crank handle starter) and insurance claims for minor accidents. Mimi waited to learn to drive until 1956, not far short of her fortieth birthday. And so, in the early 1950s, when my grandparents and their two children would head to the coast, it was Chimen who was behind the wheel. Mimi loved to swim – in fact, she found the waters so pleasing that in early 1940, shortly after they had secretly pledged to marry each other, Mimi had sent her ‘Dear little Chimen’ a coquettish, passionate letter, urging him to find an excuse to leave the book shop for a couple of days and take a train to join her in Cardiff; she was, she told him, longing to show him the sea. As a token of her love, she had recently written an ‘autobiography’ to him, in which she detailed the previous loves of her life. Chimen, in his reply, wrote that, upon reflection, he preferred to share his own amorous stories orally rather than in writing.

  Unlike Mimi, Chimen did not love the sea. In fact, he had never learned to swim. At the beach he would sit in a deck chair, or on the ground, his legs splayed in front of him, as often as not wearing a full suit, with a handkerchief, its four corners knotted, atop his balding head, his eyes protected by dark glasses, reading Marxist history. As a concession to the summer, on a particularly hot day he would take off his jacket. British summers being generally on the tepid side, however, the jacket usually stayed on. In the late 1950s, after the Morris finally packed up, Mimi and Chimen bought a small, second-hand Hillman Minx. From then on, Chimen would drive from Hillway to Wentworth Street. His back was starting to play him up – at times he could only sleep by lying flat on the hard, wooden floor – and the car, which he would park behind Shapiro, Valentine & Co, made the lugging of books to and from the shop that much easier.

  Inside the claustrophobic, dark confines of 81 Wentworth Street, its dark street-front façade still looking the same as it had in the Edwardian period, Chimen would always wear either a velvet velour hat or a cloth cap. He did so not because his head was cold, but, I suspect, because he did not want his religious clients and the friends of his parents who used the shop to see that he was not wearing a yarmulke atop his head. He had stopped wearing a yarmulke as he went about his daily business years earlier, but he would still put one on when visiting his father. Even though he told his Party comrades that his parents were ‘reactionary’, he went out of his way to avoid offending them gratuitously. His parents knew that he was not a believer; but that did not mean that their friends had to know as well.

  When it came to people who wavered in their faith or who sought to assimilate into the secular culture, Yehezkel could be scathing in his criticism. In 1934, when Yehezkel was appointed Dayan, or senior judge, of the London Beth Din, the Jewish Chronicle had editorialised that Anglo-Jewry was being ‘hijacked’ by religious extremists from afar, by men who spoke little or no English, cared little or nothing about the broader culture and sought only to impose rigid rituals on their brethren. One commentator wrote that men like Yehezkel Abramsky were promoting an ‘alien dogma, custom and superstition which had never before been any part of Judaism except in dark corners deep inside the ghettoes of Eastern Europe’. The rabbi responded that ‘My aim is to strengthen Yiddishkeit both in the practice and knowledge of Judaism’. He was, noted the Oxford historian Miri Freud-Kandel in 2006, a polarising force in British Jewry.

  Much as the US Constitution is continuously held up to interpretation by succeeding generations of legal scholars as a way to decide everything from the legitimacy of gay marriage to the right to bear arms, so, for religious Jews, the Talmud sets a theoretical framework within which later texts – the Shulhan Arukh and other codes – can be read, to lay down the rules for contemporary modes of conduct. For the Orthodox of London, many of the practices of everyday life – from the rituals of birth, marriage and death, to the food that they ate – were filtered through the rulings of the Beth Din. And thus its leading interpreters of the Talmud, and the various commentaries on it written over the millennia, acquired tremendous influence. Yehezkel had, for his Orthodox followers, a similar status to that held by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes among aficionados of the Constitution in the United States. He had the power to make or break the country’s Chief Rabbi, his approval being a necessary pre-requisite for anyone wanting the job; his word could, and on occasion did, destroy the careers of young rabbis with whose interpretations of Torah he disagreed. In 1948, almost three years after the long-serving Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz had died, Yehezkel helped install Israel Brodie in the job, but only after Brodie had, writes Freud-Kandel, ‘unequivocally relinquished authority over religious matters to Dayan Abramsky’. Chief rabbis were convenient figureheads, but, as Freud-Kandel explains, it was Yehezkel Abramsky who would shape how the community interpreted religious law. He was, she concluded, an extraordinarily effective political manipulator, but all his machinations were to two ends only: to increase the religiosity of, and the hold of conservative religious authority figures over Britain’s Jewish population.

  So Chimen had good reasons to avoid his parents’ friends reporting back to Yehezkel that their third son was flaunting his atheism in public. He did not want his father’s private disapproval of Chimen and Mimi’s world view to be expressed in public. It was a double life that Chimen would keep up for decades. The Beth Din offices were three streets away from the shop, on Hanbury Street; and the Machzikei Hadath synagogue, where Yehezkel had been the rabbi before becoming head of the Beth Din, was even closer, on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street; when Yehezkel or one of his rabbinic friends visited the shop, Chimen would immediately be able to launch into a conversation about the Talmud. When his Communist Party friends, such as the local tailor Mick Mindel, dropped by, he was equally at his ease talking about Marx’s dialectic over a cup of tea.

  During the run-up to the great religious festivals, Shapiro, Valentine & Co bustled with shoppers looking to purchase Haggadot (books used at the Passover Seder), Jewish calendars, almanacs, prayer books, or the lemon-like etrog fruit and palm fronds to be used in the rituals of Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles). In the days leading up to Rosh-Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and to Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the whole extended family would be brought in to help cater to the rush of customers buying New Year’s cards and the religious equipment associated with the holidays. When the store closed at the end of a long day, Jenny, a young child at the time, would be entrusted with counting the money brought in since that morning.

  On Friday afternoon, the shop’s doors were shut and locked, and its customers disappeared into their homes to prepare for the Sabbath meal and then, on Saturday, to attend synagogue. On Sunday, however, those doors opened once more, with people drawn to the area not only by the goods on offer inside Shapiro, Valentine & Co and the other shops lining Wentworth Street, but also by the stalls of the Petticoat Lane street market, which ran along the centre of Wentworth Street, literally past the front door of the old book shop. On market days, well into the 1960s, the area became as noisy, as vibrant, as crowded, as the great London markets and fairs of an earlier era. In those years, now firmly middle-aged, Mimi would leave the book shop and head off with her bags into the maelstrom of Petticoat Lane, there to shop for her week’s supply of fruit and vegetables. She would make a point of asking where the produce was from, and if a stallholder was rash enough to mention South Africa, Mimi would simply stalk away; her refusal to put money into buying food grown in the Apartheid state probably earned her the undying enmity of the stall-keepers, but, in the years after her Communist faith was utterly destroyed, supporting the Boycott movement launched against Apartheid South Africa in 1959 made her feel t
hat she was still on the side of the (secular) angels.

  At lunchtime, Chimen would slip out to Ostwind’s, a nearby workers’ café-cum-Jewish deli on Wentworth Street just the other side of Commercial Street from the book shop, for a change of pace. All around the neighbourhood, on Wentworth Street itself, on Commercial Street, on Middlesex Street, on Toynbee Street (home to the nineteenth-century centre of social reform, Toynbee Hall) for decades after the war ended, were craters left by the high explosive bombs that had fallen on the area during the Blitz.

  One day, these streets would be rebuilt, and, like so much of the East End, its character would shift: the buildings would look different, the businesses that had made the district their home for generations would die off, the old immigrant groupings would be replaced by new ones. Walking through Chimen and Mimi’s old neighbourhood in 2013, I found that where Shapiro, Valentine & Co had stood, a four-storey brick block of flats, its upper-floor windows sporting small balconies with green-painted railings and colourful flowers in pots, had taken its place. Next door, Goide’s bakery had been replaced by a Turkish-Lebanese restaurant. The synagogue at which Yehezkel had been rabbi was now the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid mosque. And along the nearby side streets halal butchers had replaced kosher ones, and Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurants had opened in place of the old Jewish delis. Only a few scattered mementoes of the Jewish East End were left for the eye to see: the building façade on Brune Street announcing the presence of a soup kitchen ‘for the Jewish poor’; a small Star of David visible under the black paint on a gutter coming down from the steepled roof of what was now a Church of England school; a historic shop-front left with the lettering ‘S. Schwartz’. The scars of the war themselves had largely vanished, the holes in the fabric of the streets patched with boutique cafes, fashionable restaurants and expensive new residential dwellings.