The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Unfamiliar as I was with the room’s nuances, however, I knew from a young age that it was a vital part of the temple of learning that Chimen had constructed. There was something reverential about the way he talked of this room and its contents – and, while the Marx books, even the rarest of them, were easy to pluck off of the bookshelves, the volumes in the upstairs front room were kept locked away on shelves in glass-fronted cabinets, the keys for the heavy doors zealously guarded at all times. Unlike the other rooms, which Chimen willingly showed off to interested visitors, this room was dramatically more private. Even fellow collectors of Judaica, even close friends such as Jack Lunzer and David Mazower, were only granted access occasionally, grudgingly. In this room, the shelves functioned more like a treasury vault and less like parts of an active library. On the rare occasions when Chimen opened the doors for me, a smell of musty, contained, geriatric paper would float out into the room and, liberated, make its way up my nostrils.

  ***

  When Jack and Jenny were children, this room housed a long-term lodger, a Scottish lady by the name of Georgie Finlayson, whose rent was a vital part of Mimi and Chimen’s precarious financial calculations. They had met her through the Communist Party, and, for many years she lived as a de facto member of the family, sharing their meals and even their summer holidays. Later, as the family fortunes began to stabilise, Georgie left, returning to Glasgow, from whence she had come, and Jack took over the bedroom. Without books covering every wall, it was a rather large space for him to call his own. He proceeded to clutter it up with schoolbooks; with Native American feathered head-dresses and other paraphernalia from the ‘I Spy Club’; with chess sets – he was, for many years, a fanatical and very talented player, part of a school team that made its way to the national finals one year; and eventually with a makeshift table tennis table. He set up a record player in that room, complete with large box speakers that he made from a kit, and started to build up his own collection – not of books, but of classical music and opera records. Jack’s collection of hundreds of vinyl discs were, in their own way, as timeless, as removed from contemporary popular cultural currents – this was, after all, the era of Elvis and Cliff Richard, of Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis – as the volumes that occupied Chimen’s shelves.

  Jack and his friends spent hours in that room, emerging periodically only to disappear again to play atop the rubble of the large bombsite opposite the William Ellis Grammar School that Jack attended, or to play tennis or cricket on Hampstead Heath. And then they would return to Hillway to be fed by Mimi. ‘The house had gravitational attractions’, was how Jack’s childhood friend Andrew Moss put it more than half a century later. ‘My entire life it’s been true. It was the house you went and hung out at’. When Jack left in 1961 to study physics at Trinity College, Cambridge – an event noted with happiness by Piero Sraffa, on the off-chance that it would lure Chimen and his suitcases of rare books to the college more often – Jenny gleefully took over the room; it was at least twice the size of the box room at the back of the house, which, as befitted the younger sibling, had previously been hers. Over her bed she hung a thin rectangular reproduction of a Turner landscape, its muted colours testament to the quiet prettiness of the English countryside. The picture hung there until Chimen’s death.

  It was only after Jenny, in her turn, moved out that the room began to take on its final incarnation as the heart of Chimen’s Judaica library. For, when his youngest child left home Chimen promptly colonised the additional space for his books and, now firmly middle-aged, what little hair he had left greying, took stock of his life. His mother, Raizl, died in Israel in January 1965, after a five year struggle with the rare blood disease aplastic anaemia. In a little logbook, Yehezkel had carefully chronicled the hundreds of blood transfusions she underwent during these years. She had, Chimen wrote to Mimi from Israel, faced her death stoically. After being rushed to hospital with a lung hemhorrage, Raizl had told her youngest son, Menachem, who had moved to Israel in the 1950s, ‘where to find her identity card for the certificate of death. Within forty minutes after the attack she died peacefully. Her funeral was on Saturday night’. Chimen was forty-eight years old at this time. He and his father, he reported to Mimi, had had a ‘good cry’ together when he arrived in Jerusalem. Raizl had been, Chimen told his great-nephew Ron Abramski many years later, ‘very aristocratic’. Because she was descended from generations of famous rabbis, ‘she felt somehow she is an aristocrat. And she was. But she was a tough lady, very clever, a good fighter, a good organiser. My mother knew a lot about literature, which she read voraciously. Read Tolstoy, Pushkin, Gorky, Chekhov. She read a lot of Russian and Yiddish, couldn’t write a Hebrew letter – though she could understand it’.

  With the members of the older generation dying off, Chimen was, I believe, as I think about his changing persona during these years, starting to think about mortality more, about his place in the great fabric of Jewish life down the millennia, about his own obituaries. How would people remember him? He did not want to be remembered simply as a disillusioned Communist Party propagandist, or even as the greatest private collector of socialist literature in the English-speaking world. As the focus of his interest shifted from socialism to Judaica, so the centre of his library moved from the bedroom, down the landing and into the upstairs front room.

  ***

  By the late 1960s, Chimen had completed his intellectual pivot. Where once he had been an obsessive collector of all things Communist, now he became almost equally obsessive about collecting Judaica. So much so that, in 1969, when he gave the opening lecture for London’s eighteenth Jewish Book Week, on the emergence of Jewish history as a separate academic discipline, he was introduced to his audience as ‘possibly the greatest Jewish bibliophile in the world’. The shift in emphasis was not purely caused by his changing political philosophy; the market for socialist books and memorabilia had taken off and he could no longer afford the few socialist items he did not already own. ‘I presume that you have seen that Sotheby sold Marx “Das Kapital” 1867 autographed to Ludlow, for two thousand four hundred pounds to El Dreff, the well known bookseller in New York’, Chimen reported to Sraffa on 26 June 1969. ‘A really staggering figure. Books of Marx and Engels are becoming literally extremely rare’. Two years later he gloomily reported to his friend that over the past years he had not been able to purchase any more rare socialist literature.

  But, if affordable socialist works were no longer coming onto the market with any frequency, the world of Judaica was ever more attractive – although by the 1970s, in no small part because of his own work with Sotheby’s, those collectibles, too, were starting to be out of Chimen’s price range. He had been instrumental in building up a market that was now, ironically, pricing him out of the small club of top-tier collectors.

  Chimen had begun building up this side of his collection in the 1940s, perhaps ten years after he had started buying political and philosophical texts, partly because he loved the books themselves, and partly for their resale value. Under the tutelage of Heinrich Eisemann, he had learned how to acquire Judaica, at bargain prices, from libraries which had been left to rot in the United Kingdom or looted by the Nazis on the Continent. Jack Lunzer, a businessman and close friend who, with Chimen as his right-hand man, later built up the astonishingly comprehensive Valmadonna Trust Library, recalled that after the war incunabula (books and pamphlets printed before 1501) could be bought literally for shillings.

  Of course, even in those penny-pinched days, other acquisitions were far more expensive. As an investment for the Shapiro, Valentine & Co book shop (which by now they owned), in 1948 Chimen and Mimi, along with several other investors, bought a medieval manuscript. It was a copy of commentaries written by the eleventh-century French-born and German-educated scholar Shlomo Yitzchaki, known to posterity as Rashi and widely acknowledged as the greatest Talmudic scholar in history. Hundreds of years before the advent of printing, Rashi and his students had written the
ir comments on individual passages of the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) in the margins of the manuscripts of the texts that they worked with, using the great store of rabbinic lore known as Midrash to interpret particular lines in the Tanakh. So, too, the scholar had penned a vast set of commentaries to accompany the Talmud. For generations afterwards, other scholars added in their own Tosafot, or comments on Rashi’s comments. And scribes painstakingly copied those texts by hand and circulated them among Jewish communities throughout Europe and the near East. Today, Rashi’s notes, along with the Tosafot, are included in all published editions of the Talmud.

  The manuscript that Chimen and Mimi purchased was, their fragmentary correspondence from the period suggests, worth a royal fortune: £10,000 in 1948, the equivalent of several hundred thousand pounds today. Exactly what that manuscript was, however – who copied the Rashi and when, whether its margins were annotated with secondary commentaries, where the manuscript was made and who owned it in past centuries, even whether it was Rashi’s Biblical or Talmudic commentaries – is another of those mysteries from my grandparents’ lives that I cannot unravel. Their correspondence about it dates back to those months in late 1948 when Chimen was travelling around America. Mimi’s letters, which he kept, leave out the technical details. Chimen’s, which almost certainly would have included them, were not saved. What does seem clear is that for a few months, at least, they owned a one-eleventh stake in something Rashi-related that was very precious. They were forced to sell it when one of their fellow investors needed to realise his investment; and the sale made a tidy profit, which they promptly ploughed back into buying more stock for the East End book shop. The purchase and subsequent sale of the Rashi manuscript seems to have represented a crucial leap forward in Chimen’s book-dealing career. He was now entering the big time.

  As his interests shifted, so, too, did his professional relationships. Chimen stayed in close touch with Eisemann, but by the 1960s, as Chimen’s Judaica library rapidly expanded, his mentor was old and increasingly frail. They met for lunch episodically and discussed manuscripts; but Eisemann was no longer the dominant partner in their dealings. Gradually, as his health faded, the old expert left the stage; Eisemann finally died in 1972, at the age of eighty-two. By then, Chimen had long since found others to share his passion for rare manuscripts. Chief among these was Jack Lunzer. Several years Chimen’s junior, he had been at school with Chimen’s younger brother Menachem for a while, after the Abramskys arrived in London as exiles from the Soviet Union. After the war he had occasionally wandered into Shapiro, Valentine & Co to buy books. Now, a generation later the Abramsky connection was re-established by a shared passion.

  Lunzer, a successful diamond merchant and an immensely cultured man, had the money to buy the most rare Renaissance Italian Hebrew manuscripts and books; Chimen had the understanding of the history out of which these works of art had emerged necessary to appreciate the importance of the collection that his friend was so focused on building up. Lunzer hired Chimen, after his retirement from University College, as a travelling consultant to the Valmadonna Trust Library. They made a perfect, albeit somewhat incongruous, book-collecting couple: Lunzer a large man with the air of a successful businessman, Chimen a diminutive figure utterly absorbed in his academic pursuits. Between the eighth century of the Christian calendar and the mid-sixteenth century, Chimen wrote, scribes writing in Hebrew had created a vast written culture, much of which had been destroyed during waves of expulsions and book-burning spasms. What was left, though, was enough to show the vibrancy of Jewish communal life during these centuries. He continued, ‘The Jews not only copied lovingly, and sometimes illuminated the Hebrew Bible, or books of it, especially the Torah (the Pentateuch), the holiest book, but they wrote and copied the large number of volumes of the Talmud – the principal embodiment of the Oral Law, and the second most sacred and important text, which guided, shaped and moulded Jewish life from birth to death. In addition they wrote treatises of commentaries on the Bible and Talmud; original works in philosophy, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, the natural sciences, grammars, lexicons, and excelled in remarkable poetry, both liturgical, lyrical and love songs. They composed homilies, wrote chronicles and polemical works, and created a vast branch of legal codes and Rabbinic Responsa. In a word they created a civilization of their own’. In an essay to accompany the catalogue for the sale of collector Michael Zagayski’s books and manuscripts in New York in 1970, Chimen described how ‘Jewish scholars and philosophers wrote treatises on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and the sciences. Philosophy was elevated to a royal throne. Poets composed deeply lyrical religious poetry as well as some of the greatest medieval love songs; Jewish mystics were engaged in fathoming the secrets of the universe, and seeking, sometimes desperately, a way to a universal and national salvation’. It was this civilisation that, in his upstairs front room, Chimen sought to resurrect.

  For thousands of years, Jewish communal life had been organised around the spoken and written word. Virtually every aspect of behaviour, both public and private, virtually every form of thought, every interaction – with kin, with country, with the earth, with the cosmos – was determined by the Holy Books, by an extraordinary body of commentaries and by rabbinic musings, and responses to those musings. Living in London, Chimen was at the epicentre of a different, much younger political culture, one which had built itself up around a set of common laws dating back to the thirteenth-century Magna Carta, and around a set of judicial writings dating back to Blackstone’s work in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Yet, surrounding him, in his own home, were hundreds of thousands of pages of Talmudic texts, of minutely argued belief systems, that had defined Jewish life since at least the Babylonian exile. Here were contained millennia of arguments about how to understand the word of God, how to interpret history using these precepts, how to respond to any philosophical or ethical dilemma.

  For Chimen, expertise in modern Jewish history meant having an intimate knowledge of at least five hundred years of history, from the time of the expulsion of the Jewish population from Spain under the Inquisition onwards. In fact, of course, he sometimes lectured on aspects of Jewish life dating back much further. Once, he gave a talk on the development of Hebrew biographical writing in the ninth century of the Common Era; elsewhere he made reference to the expulsion of the Jews from England in the thirteenth century. What fascinated him was the texture of communal life, the ways in which individuals intersected with their milieu, the mechanisms by which the wheels of history were turned. And, overwhelmingly, he was obsessed by the written evidence left by past centuries: books, Torah scrolls, manuscript fragments, letters, diaries, edicts, newspapers, poems and song.

  Until he was well into his eighties, and already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Chimen travelled with Jack Lunzer to visit the great Hebrew manuscript collections of Europe, sharing with Jack his excitement over the books and manuscripts that they saw. After one of their expeditions, to a collection housed in Parma, Chimen wrote, in spindly, almost-out-of-control handwriting, to his friend, ‘I could have spend [sic] there not two and a half days, but a few months. Again, my profoundest thanks for such an exceptional treat.’ Chimen wrote of examining the Pentateuch of Constantinople; Hebrew Bibles from Soncino, Brescia, Naples, Pesaro, Lisbon and other cities; books from as far apart as Cracow and Salonica, Tubingen and Mantua. And, he added, he had ‘listened to the divine voice of the ten commandments and “schma Israel”’, the most important of all Jewish prayers. Writing of an early Jewish printer, Avraham Garton, he noted, ‘I hailed him as the Jewish Gutenberg. And I saluted to my “ancient” master – Rashi – who enlightened millions of Jews with his exquisite clarity and exceptional brevity’. Where Lunzer could afford to buy such manuscripts, Chimen had, on the whole, to be satisfied with high quality facsimiles. Every so often, however, Lunzer would ceremoniously present an original manuscript to his friend as a token of his appreciation. Chimen would express great embar
rassment, but the manuscript would be secreted away nonetheless on the sagging old shelves that lined the walls of the upstairs front room of Hillway.

  ***

  Just as this room’s bookshelves were filling up with books and manuscripts printed and painted and penned hundreds of years earlier, in the early 1960s came the Jacobs Affair. When the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 split the British Communist Party, Chimen had been deeply engaged in the resulting debates. But when the Jacobs Affair fractured the Orthodox Jewish community in Britain, Chimen, despite his growing involvement with the study of Jewish history, did not become publicly involved in the theological dispute, and watched from the sidelines as the affair split British Jewry down the middle.

  Louis Jacobs was one of the country’s leading younger rabbis, and a scholar of note. At a time when both Judaism and Christianity were faced with the conflicting demands of tradition and modernity, Jacobs argued for modernity within the Orthodox tradition. He believed that Orthodox education should be fused with secular education and wanted young Jews in Britain to know about the religion of their forefathers while also culturally assimilating into the British mainstream. In an argument that had something in common with the contemporary debates in both the Catholic and Anglican churches, he urged his co-religionists to recognise the trends of modernity, and to embrace change rather than instinctively to resist it. His difficulties with the Orthodox traditionalists arose from his book, We Have Reason to Believe, published in 1957, in which he argued that the Pentateuch was not literally the word of God, as had been believed by the Orthodox for millienia; rather, he had written that it was divinely inspired, but also a human interpretation of God’s will – of how to live ethically and worship righteously. It was a similar conclusion to that reached by Maimonides eight hundred years earlier, and by Spinoza in the seventeenth century. Jacobs’s work, however, created a furore, as questioning the divine authorship of the Bible was anathema to an ultra-Orthodox rabbinate.