The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Despite the part that the kitchen played in Chimen’s routines, I had the impression that, barring his duties at the kitchen sinks – one for meat dishes, the other for milk – after the guests had left, he was allowed into this room mostly on sufferance. In tacit recognition of this fact, it was the one part of the house, with the exception of the bathrooms, that Chimen did not invade with his armies of books. Written materials in the kitchen were generally limited to the Times and the local Ham & High newspaper. On occasion, the Jewish Chronicle and the New York Review of Books would also find their way onto the table-top. But that was about the extent of Chimen’s printed-word incursions into Mimi’s fortress. If he did not like the conversation, if he was bored by the gossip that Mimi and her friends shared, if the presence of non-academics, chatting over a cup of tea with Mimi, frustrated him – and she was as likely to brew up some tea, over which to engage in conversation, for her elderly cleaning lady, Josie, a Caribbean immigrant who must have worked at Hillway until she was into her eighties, as she was for close friends such as the tiny-but-feisty Ray Waterman, or her childhood school friend, and, more recently, neighbour Wynn Moss – well, Chimen knew where the doors were.

  ***

  This was the casual room, the ‘drop-in-for-a-nice-cuppa-tea’ room, far more Mimi’s than Chimen’s – and she fought to keep it that way. It was the one room in the house in which Mimi felt that she could command some privacy and for that reason it was, I would guess, in her kitchen that Mimi sat down, in early 1965, to write two secret letters to Isaiah Berlin, desperately seeking his help in securing Chimen the job at Oxford that he so craved. And it was in all probability at her kitchen table that she read his dispiriting reply: however brilliant Chimen was, Berlin wrote, it was highly unlikely that he would be able to get a job to meet his talents, because he had no formal qualifications.

  Mimi’s own career had flourished: when her children were still very young she had trained as a social worker at Walthamstow Polytechnic; then, between 1956 and 1959 she studied psychiatric social work at the London School of Economics. She took a job at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Maida Vale before moving to the Royal Free Hospital. By the time I was born, she had become head of that hospital’s Psychiatric Social Work Department.

  In addition to being Mimi’s culinary fiefdom, the kitchen at Hillway was also an extension of her professional world: she would hold impromptu therapy sessions there; always on the phone, stirring a soup with one hand, holding the telephone with the other. Often she was talking to psychiatric patients; she felt no compunction about giving out her home number to patients who were sometimes paranoid or schizophrenic. She had been hit or pushed a couple of times by those whom she was trying to help, but none of it seemed to scare her. For Mimi, who believed deeply in the universal principles underlying the National Health Service, this was all in a day’s work, knocks that one took without complaining. All her life, from her youthful Communist years to her post-Communist old age, Mimi craved community: if she could not find it in politics or religion, she would recreate it in her own home and in her work. And it would be as expansive and as generous as anything in the wider world beyond. It was this need to belong to a community that made Mimi and Chimen so furious with the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when I was growing up. Thatcher had famously said that there was no such thing as society. It was a world view that contradicted their most cherished beliefs, and one that left them, at times, practically sputtering with rage.

  ***

  From as far back as I can remember, Mimi’s freezer was always stocked to bursting: with white fish fillets; packages of lox; chocolate KitKat bars, kept deliciously crispy by the cold; dubious inventions such as milk lollipops and wrap-around cardboard containers of orange juice concentrate; lamb chops; and enormous ducks. To the right of the freezer was a fridge, just as full. It housed fruit, vegetables, great jars of herrings, more lox, whatever meats were scheduled to be cooked that day and endless little treats: boxes of chocolates, sickly sweet chocolate oranges, cakes, strudels, and any other goodies visitors had brought to Mimi as offerings.

  On the other side of the freezer was a chrome bread bin. It always contained challah and dark, heavy, pre-sliced Russian brown bread; often it had pumpernickel and rye breads as well. On that bread, one would be expected to either slather marmite, or pour on sticky honey from out of a pint-sized glass jar, or heap piles of lox or briny herring. For Chimen, in particular, herring and brown bread was a taste of childhood. Next to the bread bin were boxes of cereal, many different brands to appease the various tastes of Mimi’s grandchildren. Under the bread bin were two drawers. One was filled with cutlery to be used for meat dishes. The other contained a duplicate set, fashioned slightly differently, to be employed in the eating of dairy dishes. In cupboards above the oven and over the washing machine and dryer were similar duplicate sets of plates and bowls. Crammed into spare spaces in these cupboards was more food: tins filled with biscuits, packages of crunchy and sweet sponge fingers, and boxes of chocolates brought by guests. In more cupboards nearer floor level were the pots and pans, carefully separated out by usage so as to not be polluted by the wrong kinds of food.

  It was in the kitchen – more than in any other room of the house – that tradition refused to die.

  ***

  That Mimi and Chimen kept a rigidly kosher home, in which they routinely fed militantly non-religious diners, bespoke the larger issues of the contradictions between the personal and the political, between their cultural Jewish identity and their rejection of religion. Yes, they believed, as Marx had written in the Communist Manifesto, that religion was the opiate of the masses; yes, they believed that religious rituals were, generally, hocus-pocus. Further, the one time in his life that Chimen admitted to having been drunk, he had had to be carried out of a cousin’s wedding ceremony in what was then Palestine while serenading his audience with The Internationale. The poem, composed by a Paris Communard in 1871 and set to a rousing tune by Pierre De Geyter, had become the Communist anthem – indeed, until 1944 it was the anthem of the Soviet Union. The lyrics, translated into many languages, all denounced the brutality of capitalism and promised the creation of a new and fairer world in its stead. In the English version, the singers called on the struggling masses to

  Arise, ye workers from your slumber

  Arise, ye prisoners of want

  For reason in revolt now thunders

  And at last ends the age of cant!

  At the end of each of the three stanzas, the chorus encouraged the listeners:

  So comrades, come rally

  And the last fight let us face:

  The Internationale

  Unites the human race.

  Mimi would joyously tell the story of Chimen’s drunken escapade, and he would sit sheepishly, an impish grin on his face as he listened in mock-horror. He was like Étienne Lantier, the socialist central character in Emile Zola’s novel Germinal, riveted ‘by a great beam of sunlight’, for whom ‘justice came down from heaven like a dazzling fairy vision. Since God was no more, it was the turn of justice to bestow happiness upon mankind and usher in the kingdom of equality and brotherhood. As happens in dreams, there grew up a new society in a single day and, shining like a mirage, a great city, in which each citizen lived by his own appointed task and shared in the joys of all’. Zola added, with a suitable pinch of cynicism, ‘And the dream grew ever grander, ever more beautiful, ever more enchanting, as it soared higher and higher into the impossible’.

  But, if my young grandparents wanted to sweep the past away and create a new world, set on new foundations, at the same time they also believed deeply in family, and in the obligations that generations owed to each other. And for the daughter of religious immigrants who had fled the Tsarist pogroms, and for the son of Rabbi Abramsky, one-time prisoner of conscience in the Soviet Union and now the head dayan of the London Beth Din, and thus automatically one of the most senior rabbinic figure
s in Europe, that meant keeping the kitchen strictly kosher. Moreover, in their heart of hearts – the inner sanctum beyond the reach of ideology – I suspect that they never quite believed their own dogmas when it came to religion.

  Quite possibly Chimen felt like one of the characters in the collection of stories about the Russian Revolution, and its aftermath, titled Benya Krik, The Gangster, by the Soviet Jewish writer Isaac Babel, which he kept in his office at University College. ‘“Gedali”, I said, “today is Friday and it’s already evening. Where can you get a Jewish cookie, a Jewish glass of tea and in the glass of tea a little taste of that God who has been asked to step down?” “Nowhere”, Gedali answered me, hanging the padlock on his little tavern box, “nowhere”’. In the name of ideology, Chimen and Mimi had retired their God; but, for the rest of their lives, He hovered in the background, tempting them to resurrect Him in the rituals and habits of their daily existence. Sigmund Freud had once written of a community of Jewish Unglaubensgenossen, roughly translated as ‘fellow unbelievers’. Among the members of such a synagogue, wrote the historian David Biale, would be counted Freud himself, Spinoza, and the nineteenth-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who had converted to Christianity not on principle but to gain an ‘entrance card’ to European society. Had such a synagogue actually existed, Chimen and Mimi would probably have been loyal members.

  Although Mimi and Chimen seemed comfortable with the compromises they made between the demands of adherence to tradition and to ritual, and their personal religious and political beliefs, the compromises stretched thin with the younger generation. As his son Jack planned his wedding with Lenore, to be held in the early autumn of 1966, Chimen began what would become a series of unhappy arguments with Lenore about the role of religion in daily life. She had been brought up an atheist and she was violently opposed to the idea of being married in a synagogue in a traditional ceremony. Chimen announced that he would rather see Jack and Lenore cohabit than to suffer the indignity of them being married in a civil ceremony. When Lenore, a stylish young woman from California, with the sensibilities of the 1960s generation, chose a chic, imperial purple, sleeveless wedding-dress, my grandfather declared that the religious members of the family would be appalled at seeing so much female flesh on display. On both fronts, after weeks of haggling, they reached an awkward – but workable – agreement. They would hold an abbreviated wedding ceremony conducted by a member of the Beth Din, and would then hold two receptions; the whole event would take place in the back garden at Hillway. First, the family members witnessed the marriage ceremony (Lenore in long sleeves) conducted by a rabbi, under the Jewish wedding canopy known as a chuppah; then the religious guests arrived for a short reception. And finally, when they left, Lenore was free to pull off the detachable sleeves to her dress, and the secular guests came to celebrate the same event. It made no sense – except to Chimen, who must have recalled the stories that his parents had told him of their own wedding, in the summer of 1909, when the entire population of the shtetl of Ihomen came out to see the daughter of Rabbi Jerusalimsky, the granddaughter of the famous Rabbi Willowski, marry the up-and-coming religious scholar known to his students as the Moster Zadik, and 400 cheder students with lit torches paraded by as Yehezkel and Raizl were walked up to the chuppah. Chimen and Mimi, by contrast, had been married in Silberstein’s, a Jewish restaurant in the East End of London, in a tiny, quick ceremony conducted by Yehezkel and seven of his colleagues, witnessed by Mimi’s brother-in-law Samuel Barnett, and a civilian registrar for marriages, on 20 June 1940 – days after Nazi forces had entered Paris, and just before the French government surrendered to Hitler – thirty-one years to the day after Yehezkel and Raizl’s wedding. Now, in 1966, eight years out of the Communist Party and desperate to do things right by his parents, Chimen was going to make sure that Jack was married properly. If that meant holding two wedding receptions, one to meet the religious requirements, one to meet his new daughter-in-law’s detestation of all things religious, then he would make sure that Hillway hosted two wedding parties.

  Chimen’s sensitivity to the opinion of the religious Jewish community persisted: on a later occasion, when my parents were being driven somewhere in north London that involved a route through the religious Jewish areas of Golders Green, Chimen begged them to lie down on the floor of the car so that friends of the family would not see them flagrantly violating the Sabbath prohibition on the use of machinery. They refused.

  Six years after the wedding rigmarole, another pretence was concocted: when I was born, my parents had me circumcised in a medical setting rather than by a mohel in the religious ceremony known as a bris. This time, Mimi was as horrified as Chimen. And so, eight days after my birth – the day that my extremities were supposed to have been modified by the mohel – Mimi and Chimen hid out in their home, pretending to their religious relatives that they were at my bris. Thirteen years later, they manufactured a party for me at their house, thus allowing them to tell themselves that I was, to all intents and purposes, bar mitzvahed. It suited me fine – many of my friends had recently been bar mitzvahed, and I liked the idea of a special celebration, complete with fine gifts, in my teenage honour.

  When my Aunt Jenny married an atheist of Christian background, Chimen never told his nonagenarian father Yehezkel the news. Nor, when Jenny became pregnant with my cousin Rob, did Chimen inform him. He knew that the old rabbi would not have been able to reconcile himself to such a state of affairs. It was bad enough that Jack had married a Jewish atheist, unfamiliar with the daily rituals of Jewish life. It was a whole circle of hell worse that Jenny was now married to a non-Jewish atheist. Nor did he tell his other Orthodox relatives. Jenny’s mother-in-law placed a birth notice in the Telegraph when my cousin Rob was born, the February after Yehezkel’s death in September 1976; Chimen and Mimi’s phone immediately started ringing. Some of his relatives were astounded and furious that he had hidden Jenny’s wedding from them; others, as he had feared, were distraught that she had married out of the faith.

  And yet, Chimen considered himself to be an über-rationalist, a man enlightened by a political vision. It was that side of his personality that allowed him, in time, to come to love both my mother and my uncle dearly. Despite their lack of knowledge about the Jewish traditions that had so shaped his life, he knew they were good people. And he knew they made his children happy.

  ***

  Eight years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, laying out his theory of evolution, Karl Marx unveiled the first volume of his grand economic treatise, Das Kapital. He would spend much of the remaining sixteen years of his life expanding the theories laid out in this volume – although it was not until after his death that his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, collated his notes and published them as volumes two and three of Das Kapital.Marx felt, Engels explained, at his funeral in 1883, that he was the Darwin of the social world, having unlocked the scientific secrets explaining how societies and economies evolved and transformed over time, why some were successful and others withered. For many years, scholars of Marxism believed that Karl Marx had written to Darwin offering to dedicate volume one of Das Kapital to him. More recently, however, these specialists have come to realise that it was actually Edward Aveling, the common-law husband of Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, who, at a slightly later period, had offered to dedicate one of his tracts to Darwin. In the end, the founder of modern evolutionary theory politely declined Aveling’s offer.

  Documents from, and about, the correspondence were, not surprisingly, amongst Chimen’s collection. It was not, apparently, that Darwin particularly objected to the Communist economic theory, or to the analysis of how modern market economies had evolved, which Marx so carefully laid out, and for which vision Aveling had become a leading advocate by the 1880s; rather, Darwin feared being associated with so notorious a group of atheists. After his work on evolution, he was, he knew, in quite enough trouble already with his devoutly Christian wife.
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  So it was in Mimi’s kitchen. Her religious family members and in-laws already were suspicious of Chimen’s and her political leanings (although Chimen never exactly came out and told his father that he was an atheist Communist). The last thing the older generation wanted was to see bacon in the fridge or milky and meaty cutlery all mixed up together at Hillway. It would be, both Chimen and Mimi feared, a bridge too far. And thus, while Mimi occasionally ate pork at restaurants, and while Chimen might sometimes buy lobsters when the family was on holiday on the south coast of England or (later) in Italy, in their home – and in London itself – my grandparents kept up kosher appearances.

  As a result, the kitchen had two sinks, one for kitchen utensils and cutlery that had been used for the preparation of meat dishes, the other for those used with dairy products. Not that anything was ever properly cleaned in that kitchen; everything had a layer of grease on it, and the oven hob always seemed to have the burned remnants of earlier meals sticking obstinately to its surface. After all, Chimen was in charge of washing up; and, despite the fastidiousness with which he put on his apron before setting into his task, he never really managed to put his heart into the chore. There was also a dishwasher, in later years, to be used exclusively for meaty cutlery and plates – or was it milky? When I was a child, my mother could never keep them straight, and, as a result, when she tried to wash the dishes after a family gathering, Chimen would almost literally chase her out of the kitchen. I have a hunch, looking back on it, that this state of affairs suited her perfectly.