A year later, the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (who was at that time involved in a long correspondence with the Russian author Boris Pasternak, encouraging him to fight Soviet attempts to ban Russian-language editions of his novel Doctor Zhivago, and, who in 1957, had begun selling an Italian edition of the masterpiece) wrote, crestfallen, to Chimen that they were living through ‘a very difficult moment for all sincere socialist [sic] and communist [sic], for all those who trust fully to apply the great lesson of Marx and Engels’. Intolerance and dogmatism, Feltrinelli continued, were ‘seriously tempering the progress of human society’.
***
Somehow, inexplicably, for two more years after the invasion of Hungary and after Krushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes, Chimen remained a Party member. He struggled to take off the blinkers that had been so much a part of his daily existence for so many years. He was, I am sure, petrified about what the world would look like once they were removed; as scared as a blind man, who has finally learned to navigate his sightless world – even, like King Lear’s blinded friend Gloucester, to marvel at the interior sight of the eyeless – being told that, with surgery, he might see again. ‘People so much wanted to believe in this idealistic future’, explained Pauline Harrison. ‘It was a search for meaning. A religion that believed in people rather than an external being. A sort of religion, but not totally blind’.
Gradually, though, the pressure became too much. Mimi no longer wanted anything to do with the Party. Good friends like John Saville had been hounded for their refusal to toe the party line. Others, like Pauline’s husband Royden, a historian at Sheffield University, had simply decided that remaining in the Party demanded too many intellectual contortions. ‘You owed it an enormous loyalty’, Pauline remembered. ‘On the other hand, it was an enormous relief – to give up something you were defending even though you no longer believed in it’. In 1958, Chimen left the Party. He had finally come to believe that the liberal world of ideas to which he had already started to temperamentally tie his fortunes was ill-equipped to stand up to the tyrannical impulses of revolutionary leaders.
The events of 1956 had corroded Chimen’s sympathy for the Soviet Union; yet the invasion of Hungary did not trigger his immediate exit from the Party. Rather, the trigger was the discovery that everything he had believed about the Soviet Union as a place where anti-Semitism no longer existed was wrong. And, by extension, it was the psychologically devastating conclusion that, if he was wrong about how the Soviets were treating the Jews, he was probably also wrong about many of his other assumptions about life in the USSR. It was the work of his good friend, Hyman Levy, and his treatment by the Party, that finally brought Chimen to this realisation.
Levy, a professor of mathematics at Imperial College, London, was thrown out of the Party for having had the temerity to write that anti-Semitism was a problem in the Soviet Union. ‘I feel I must take my stand on the question of covering up anti-Semitism’, he wrote to Chimen, on small letterhead paper from Imperial College’s Huxley Building, in 1958. ‘I owe it to all those Jews who over many years have been assured that in the Soviet Union these relics of Czarism have passed’. To true believers in the utopian, post-nationalistic qualities of the USSR, such sentiments were, quite literally, treasonous. Levy’s outrage had been growing for several years already. In fact, five years earlier, on 16 April 1953, Levy had written to Chimen criticising his unquestioning acceptance that the Jewish doctors accused of trying to poison Stalin must, by virtue of the fact that they had been put on trial, be guilty. ‘You suggested’, he admonished Chimen, ‘that I ought not to suggest the possibility of the Moscow Doctors not being guilty, but should know that if the Soviet decides to go ahead the case must be complete’. Since their disagreement over the Doctors’ Plot, Stalin had died, the case had been dropped and the new Soviet leadership had made it clear that there had never been any real evidence against the doctors in the first place. ‘Do you think it is now possible to say that that attitude on your part was mechanistic?’ Levy asked, gently chiding his friend. ‘I don’t mind being made to look a fool if it is absolutely essential – but I think it could sometimes be avoided by a little discretionary criticism. What do you think?’
Now, with Levy expelled from the Party, Chimen’s eyes had been opened, and, like Levy, he could no longer stay quiet. The Party would not publish Levy’s book, Jews and the National Question (which, behind the scenes, Chimen had helped to write) so Chimen decided to use a small publishing house which he operated out of his home, to produce the volume. He had established the Hillway Publishing Company several years earlier, to translate and publish the dissident Hungarian philosopher George Lukács’s Studies in European Realism. For Lukács’s book, he had hired a freelance journalist named Edith Bone to translate the work into English; Bone had been accused by the early post-war Hungarian Communist leadership of spying and was held in solitary confinement for seven years before her release in 1956. By contrast, Chimen worked to make sure that Levy’s book was translated out of English and into a number of other languages. Parts of it were subsequently reprinted, in French, by Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps modernes, alongside a lengthy, and very personal, attack on Levy and Chimen by Palme Dutt. As with his publication of Lukács, who, for a time, was one of Europe’s most influential intellectuals, so with Levy’s volume: the timing was right. The book was republished, to considerable attention, in New York, Milan and Israel. Perhaps to remind himself of its importance, Chimen kept a little notebook, no bigger than his annual diaries, in which he meticulously recorded sales of Levy’s book.
Previously Chimen had believed in reform from within the Party, in the idea of progress through a strongly Marxist organisation. Now he increasingly felt that the political institution itself was a menace, that revolution was destined to become something nasty, something almost cannibalistic. A few years later, as his estrangement from Communism deepened, he wrote a note to Isaiah Berlin bemoaning ‘the tragedy of us intellectuals. We are the ineffective forces in society: the Lenins, Titos, Maos, Castros triumph, and we poor liberals are cast aside’.
***
Riven by a fit of fratricidal fury, he kills off C. Allen and all his other aliases. He becomes, again, simply Chimen Abramsky.
***
The salon temporarily collapsed in on itself. Old friends who remained in the Party wanted nothing to do with people they regarded as renegades. New friends had not yet replaced the crowds who left. In Chimen’s letters from this period one senses an uncomfortable silence settling in on Hillway. As the Communist salon that was Hillway’s first incarnation, its first republic if you will, imploded, Raph Samuel, who insisted on addressing anyone and everyone in his social circle as ‘Comrade’, at twenty-three years old set up his own gathering spot, the Partisan Café, on Carlisle Street in Soho, as a more bohemian, albeit commercial, alternative to Hillway. ‘Raph could talk the hind legs off a donkey’, Eric Hobsbawm said, and could convince people to invest time and money in the most speculative of projects. Hobsbawm was persuaded to put up some money and ended up with the title of café ‘director’. He was not the only one to provide financial backing for Raph’s venture. ‘Shoes!’ Martin Mitchell remembered more than half a century later. ‘Without the shoes it would have been much more difficult to find a millionaire benefactor. It happened like this. We get an urgent call early one morning from [his wife] Lily’s cousin Raphael, or Ralph [sic] as he later called himself. “Lily, can you help me? My shoes are falling apart. My toes are showing. I need a decent pair of shoes. I’m seeing Howard Samuel this morning. I’m hoping to get money from him for the lease. I want to look presentable. I don’t want him to see my toes sticking out. Please help”. “Of course”, said Lil. “Wear Martin’s shoes”. And he did. And he raised a tidy sum from the left-leaning property millionaire. Money was also obtained from a meeting in a Parliament committee room.’
‘It was a wonderful place; everybody went there at th
e time’, Hobsbawm acknowledged, as he recalled his foray into venture capitalism. ‘The idea was basically they were going to get this house; it was going to be the HQ of revolutionary debate and action’. Upstairs would be the New Left Review; downstairs would be coffee and conversation. In an era when the notion of a political meeting-house-cum-coffee bar was so exotic that the BBC sent a camera crew to interview Raph about his aspirations, the Partisan became a gathering place for penniless intellectuals, who would come to debate, to play chess, to read the newspaper…and to drink one cup of rather mediocre coffee, sparingly sipped over the course of a day. Architecturally, it tended to what Hobsbawm recalled as ‘brutal modernism’, a cavernous, minimally decorated room, chairs dotted haphazardly around the floor. Thinking they were being clever, the directors hired, Martin recalled, a self-proclaimed burglar to run their security; after all, who better than a thief to make sure the locks could not be picked or the windows jimmied? True enough, the windows were not forced open, but fairly soon after the man was hired food started going missing from the kitchen.
Not surprisingly, the venture soon went bankrupt, closing its doors in 1962. ‘It wasn’t short of people going there. It was short of having more income than expenditure. When we complained and said this is not a financial proposition, they waved it away until it went bust’, remembered Hobsbawm, as we talked at his home in north London a couple of months before his death. Many of the Partisan’s denizens, who had migrated from the comforts of Hillway to the bohemia of Soho, now returned to spend their evenings in Mimi’s dining room. Order, I like to think, was restored. There, they still talked about Marx, but now, as the salon slowly reinvented itself, without the uncritical attitude to the political systems that claimed to operate in his name that had previously reigned at Hillway.
***
Working full-time, and with two young children to take care of, and quite possibly also having to cope with Chimen’s post-Communist blues, Mimi nevertheless maintained her kitchen and dining room as something akin to a full-service restaurant for roving intellectuals, family members, friends and friends-of-friends, from around the world. Now, however, the conversation broadened, the cast of characters became more eclectic. Now, hints of nostalgia began to intrude on some of the conversations – a touch of regret at worlds lost, bitterness at dreams betrayed.
Keeping the salon going was a ‘monumental effort’, remembered my Californian cousin Alice, who started visiting Hillway in the late 1960s, a decade into its reincarnation. ‘And yet she appeared to take pleasure in the things that she did for people. Dinner had to start with soup. Chimen wanted soup. And it ended with tea, lemon tea or English tea. Chimen would ask “and now, I have a very important question. Who wants tea or coffee?” Dinner would start with just a few people and by the end of the evening there’d be twelve, and Mimi would have caught all of them up with the courses of the dinner. It was the endlessly expandable table.’
‘The house was always full of people’, my aunt Jenny recollected long afterwards, of a period that must, at times, have seemed more like a political education camp than a recognisable childhood. ‘From all over the world, all different kinds of experiences. And all the time, every evening, there was political discourse and debate going on around the table. Being the little person, no one ever paid attention to me. I remember saying, “It’s Marx, Marx, Marx, all the time! Why do we always have to talk about Marx?”’ Some nights, the dinner guests and Chimen and Mimi would descend into violent verbal arguments – over interpretations of Marx’s writings, over responses to events in the Soviet Union. Not infrequently, someone would push their chair back and theatrically storm out of the house. In reaction to this, Jenny made a point of deliberately not remembering any of the political theory that she was subjected to around the dining table. Worse still, when she was given a general knowledge quiz at her high school in the late 1950s, and was asked to name the author of Mein Kampf, she confidently asserted ‘Karl Marx’. Chimen, when he heard about this, was thunderstruck. I can imagine his eyes getting large, his jaw clenching. What I cannot quite see is whether he then smiles and lets his daughter’s faux pas go with a mild rebuke, or launches instead into a long political lecture. I want to think the former; in all likelihood, however, it would have been the latter.
Years later, as he reminisced about his life, Chimen would casually mention how so-and-so, who used to come for dinner had been shot dead in an Iraqi prison, or disappeared in a terrible dungeon somewhere. One of his close friends, the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who had helped Chimen scour the world for rare socialist texts during the 1950s and 1960s, and who frequently visited Hillway with his wife, had moved into extreme left-wing political activism; he was killed by a bomb in 1972, during the years of political turmoil in Italy. It was never definitively concluded whether he was killed by his own hand while trying to plant a bomb intended to sabotage high voltage power lines outside of Milan or whether he had been assassinated. Schloyme Mikhoels, the director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre, whom Chimen had met during the war and whose presence had been a rallying cry for Jewish Communists in London (he was, Chimen later wrote, the ‘outstanding Soviet Jew of the second world war’) – did not escape. On 19 January 1948, he was assassinated, at the behest of an increasingly paranoid and anti-Semitic Stalin, on the streets of Minsk, run over and killed by a truck in a way that could be passed off as an accident. Shortly afterwards, fifteen leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested: these were famous cultural figures within Soviet Jewry and the group had been formed on Stalin’s orders, a year after Hitler sent his troops east into the Soviet Union, to help rally international support, especially in the United States and Britain, for the USSR. In a secret trial held in July 1952, they were all sentenced to death. It was all a far cry from Chimen’s correspondence with Harold Laski, shortly after the end of the Second World War, in which they celebrated the fact that anti-Semitism had been laid to rest once and for all in the Soviet Union.
Belatedly, Chimen had come to realise what the Russian revolutionary memoirist Victor Serge had recognised years earlier. Living in Moscow as Stalin’s murderous rule got under way, Serge chronicled the way in which the revolution cannibalised its own, how one after another of the Soviet Union’s top politicians, intellectuals, generals and economic managers was arrested, disappeared, murdered. How any criticism could lead to death. How any pretence could be used to liquidate a faction or a group of friends. How millions could be condemned to death by famine as a side-product of Stalin’s collectivisation plans. Of the show trials that characterised this period he wrote that ‘It was raving madness… The Politbureau knew the truth perfectly well. The trials served one purpose only: to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad’. Later on, Serge averred that ‘totalitarianism has no more dangerous enemy than the spirit of criticism, which it bends every effort to exterminate’.
Yet, despite the radical change of heart that Chimen underwent in his political views, he nonetheless remained utterly fascinated by Karl Marx’s life and legacy, and was immersed, through all these years of turmoil, with Henry Collins in writing their book on Marx. No longer a follower of political parties claiming to act in Marx’s name, Chimen continued to believe that Marx’s understanding of history, and his account of the ways in which societies change over time, was unrivalled. At the same time, in full retreat from the totalitarian vision of the Soviet Union, Chimen looked elsewhere for an intellectual and political home. He found the latter in liberalism and the former, increasingly, in the manuscripts and texts of Jewish history and religious writings.
Upstairs Front Room:
Roots
I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
Albert Einstein, New York Times, 25 April 1929.
WE NEED NOW to go upstairs again, under Guernica, back up the moth-eaten carpeted steps. And, at th
e top of the staircase, instead of turning left toward my grandparents’ bedroom, we shall turn right, go down the hallway a jog, and then, opposite the tiny and foetid lavatory, enter the large, cluttered bedroom off to the left. It is time to pay a visit to the crown jewels.
Growing up, I knew less about this room than others in the house. Its books were peopled by writers whose languages I did not speak or read, whose worlds and world views were but faint shadows to me. But not to Chimen: on his curriculum vitae he wrote, under Languages, ‘(other than Classical, Medieval and Modern Hebrew & English): Fully competent in Russian, Yiddish and German. Fluent reading of most of the other Slavonic languages and of French’. All of those, and more, could be found on the shelves of this room. He once showed a Bulgarian text to the bibliographer Brad Hill, and, Hill remembered fondly, ‘He made a point of telling me he could read it – which he could, of course. It was in Cyrillic’. I slept in that room sometimes, on an old bed with a sagging mattress, but its resident authors seldom spoke to me. Chimen talked only sparingly to me about the books on these shelves, though I do remember him once, after a great build-up, finally taking down a first edition Spinoza to show me. Unlike the Marx volumes, which he would let me touch, the philosopher I had to look at from a safe distance – and then only briefly.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 22
