***
One after another, Chimen’s utopias were breaking down: forced to abandon Communism, he had put his faith in a socialist form of Zionism. Watching Israel swing politically to the right, he feared losing that anchor too. His Eretz Israel, he was starting to see, would never be realised in a political community. It was, truly, a utopia, a nowhere-land. From the 1960s onwards, he had sought solace for his political disillusionment in academia, the rituals of the university setting replacing political activism in his daily life, the culture of scholarship replacing the grand dreams of political transformation.
At a time when the world of English academia was still hidebound by tradition, he would hold graduate seminars in his book-lined office, ask the students to call him by his first name, and afterwards, in a startling breakdown of academic hierarchy, invite the most promising back to Hillway to meet historians such as Shmuel Ettinger, Hayim Ben-Sasson, James Joll, the classical historian Arnaldo Momigliano, and others, ‘all the great luminaries of Hebrew University, and the emergent Tel Aviv university’, recalled his one-time student and future colleague Ada Rapoport-Albert, who had come to London from Israel to study. At Hanukkah, Chimen would encourage his acolytes to come back to Hillway to drink red wine and sample Mimi’s deliciously greasy potato latkes. For Ada, who was adopted into Hillway almost as a member of the family, ‘the way students like me were accepted and integrated in the crowd was extremely unusual. It was an awe-inspiring cocktail you got hooked onto’. Hillway served as an incubator, fostering love of knowledge and backing up that knowledge with human warmth. Many of these young men and women from UCL were adopted into the ever-expanding Hillway tribe, and subsequently enjoyed glittering academic careers in major Jewish history departments around the world. Decades later, Ada herself would become head of the department that Chimen had dominated for so many years.
Hillway was always overflowing with people, with students and with friends and family from around the world. Elliott Medrich, the son of one of Mimi’s first cousins, arrived from America in the summer of 1966: ‘I went alone, had an unusual experience – one of my travelling mates, who happened to be a female, her place to stay fell through; I arrived at Hillway and had her in tow, and Miriam wouldn’t just find her a place to stay – she insisted she stay there – and we weren’t a couple by any means. But we stayed together in the front room for two weeks. There weren’t short stays. You were sucked into the life of the place. You thought of yourself as a member of the family. I thought of myself as totally belonging there’. For Elliott, the table was the central meeting point at Hillway: ‘The endless hours spent round the table had something for everyone. The orchestration, the conduct of time, making sure everyone was comfortable, well-fed, and participated in the life of the evening’.
***
The culinary arts of Mimi’s kitchen and dining room cast a long shadow. Even at the height of his academic career, Chimen remained uncomfortable using University College’s catering facilities. Or maybe, wisely, he just trusted Mimi’s culinary instincts more. Whatever the reason, on days when he was presiding over a conference or had a guest speaker, he would arrive in Bloomsbury early in the day, find a parking space, open the boot of his car (his vehicles were always well-worn, and frequently sported the dings collected during his creative driving ventures along London’s increasingly clogged streets) and start unloading platter after platter of Mimi’s home-cooked delicacies – doing his utmost to recreate the aura of the Hillway salon in the heavy wood-panelled nineteenth-century conference rooms of University College. On occasion, he took this to a ludicrous extreme. There was the time, for example, when the Prince Mikasa, a younger brother of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, and a man who had made a name for himself as a specialist in Aramaic, came to lecture. He was surrounded by bodyguards who had the physique of sumo wrestlers, colleagues recall. After the lecture was over, Chimen ceremoniously ushered the Emperor’s brother into the eating area and then proceeded to offer him Mimi’s fishcakes and sandwiches. The archives are silent as to the royal personage’s reaction.
Back at Hillway, Chimen would talk smilingly about High Table at St. Antony’s, or Senate faculty proceedings at University College – in his head still astonished that the ‘little man’, as he called himself, had made it to the big time. His three closest friends from Hebrew University, Jacob Talmon, Shmuel Ettinger, and Abby Robinson, had become renowned academics decades earlier –Talmon was described by the Dutch historian of ideas, Frank Ankersmit, as being among the twenty most important historians of the century; Ettinger, who had written his dissertation on the massacre of Ukrainian Jews in 1648, was widely hailed as Israel’s leading modern Jewish historian; and Robinson, one of the world’s most prominent mathematicians, ended his career as Sterling Professor of Mathematics at Yale. Now, at last, Chimen was gaining similar recognition. To Mimi and the family, he would lovingly recall his conversations with Isaiah Berlin at the mahogany dining tables in the Athenaeum; and on the occasions he received a letter from the chancellor of University College, Lord Annan, he would almost caress the paper as he revealed its contents to his dining room audience. That Annan, a peer of the realm, would communicate with the little man from Minsk, the ex-Communist without a formal degree, tickled Chimen pink.
What he would not, could not do, was to talk about his own books. For, while he edited several volumes and contributed essays to many others, on subjects ranging from Polish Jewry to Jews and chess, after the massive tome that he had written with Henry Collins on Karl Marx and the First International he never wrote another book himself. The biography of Marx that he had planned withered once Henry died. The memoirs that others prodded him to embark on never made it past a few rough scribbles. Several other projects, either proposed by him to publishers, or vice versa, in the latter decades of his life, somehow never made it beyond the drawing board. He was, observed his former student Steve Zipperstein, ‘blessed and cursed by his inheriting the fabled capacity to actually have a mental photograph of a page when he read it. Chimen could actually do that’. To Zipperstein, it appeared that that clutter of words in Chimen’s head had an almost paralysing impact. Like Funes the Memorious, the central character in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories, ‘he remembered everything. Chimen never forgot. And that was responsible for his writer’s block. He was a master without a masterpiece’. Eric Hobsbawm put it more prosaically: ‘He was enormously erudite and certainly not good at shaping it’.
***
As Chimen and Miriam aged, the dining room grew hotter. With Mimi in poor health, she would crank up the central heating, sometimes to over eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and, every few hours, she retreated to a couch against the dividing wall with the kitchen to snatch a few minutes of quiet time and rest. While she lay there, sometimes recuperating from falls which she seemed to suffer with increasing frequency and which left her legs swollen and horribly bruised, other times just exhausted from all her duties as a hostess, the conversation around her would continue. So crowded was the room – with chairs, with books, with people, with a large television and with the broken-down old piano – that the couch almost faded into the background.
Those few spaces of the walls in this room that were not covered with books were festooned with artwork and photos. Coming into the dining room from the hallway and looking out towards the garden, on the right hand wall were two large pictures: the first was an oil painting, by an artist named Sandra Pepys, on an elongated, rectangular canvas, showing a panorama of Jerusalem’s old city. It was a view similar to that which Chimen would have seen as a young student at Hebrew University, when looking down from the high slopes of Mount Scopus. The second, by Mordecai Ardon – a well-known artist and the father of Chimen and Mimi’s good friend Mike – was ink on paper, framed and glazed. It was titled Creation of the World, and portrayed the letters of the Hebrew alphabet extending outward from a core, spiralling away from the viewer. The effect, deliberately conjured up, was to present an image of
energy rushing away at warp speed from the origin point. Next to these two pictures was a framed antique map of the eastern Mediterranean. In the top left corner of the map was a lion, perched atop a tiny island, a tree with a snake coiled around its trunk to his left. It was, the note under the lion explained, ‘A Map, shewing Situation of Paradice and Country Inhabited by Patriarchs’. Under these paintings was a heavy wooden bureau, with a roll-up top and dozens of little pull-out drawers. Cluttered to the point of overflow, it served as Mimi’s desk, the place she sat to write cheques, and, on occasion, letters; and, simultaneously, it functioned as a sort of stationery storage site – for rolls of old Green Shield Stamps; for half-century-old receipts and fading letterhead paper from Shapiro, Valentine & Co, which had closed in 1969 once Chimen’s academic career gathered steam; all intermingled with yet more personal correspondence. It was one more hoarder’s corner within a hoarder’s house.
In the final years of Chimen’s life, a huge original poster from the Paris Commune – issued during the heady days of revolution, before the army regained control of Paris and containing the black and white text of one of the Commune decrees – given to him on his ninetieth birthday by my brother, Kolya, hung in an imposing black frame with red borders on the wall opposite, above where Mimi’s couch had formerly been placed. It was the one intrusion of radical political imagery remaining in a room that, otherwise, had banished such symbols of Chimen’s past passions. He would sit in a reclining armchair, a large, heavy, old-fashioned television and video player perched on a table in front of him, and he would crank the volume up to full to watch the news. If all worked well, he would catch what the newscaster was reporting. But if his hearing aid was malfunctioning, or if his ears were particularly clogged up, he would look around in discomfort, his eyes glancing over toward the Communard poster, seeking solace in visual stimulation to make up for the fact that he could no longer hear what was being said around him. He would sit there, exhausted, his eyes flickering between the poster and the loud but unheard television. Frequently, he would doze off in that chair, lying completely still, his quiet breathing the only indication that he was still alive.
He dreamed, perhaps, of ghosts.
The old upright piano, which, in earlier decades my sister Tanya and I had played at the behest of Mimi and her friends, gradually ceased to function as a musical instrument and became, instead, a photographic shrine, upon every horizontal surface of which rested photos of friends and relatives now dead, along with images of the living – photos of children, of grandchildren, and, eventually, of great-grandchildren: my own children, Sofia and Leo, and Tanya’s daughter Izzy. By the piano, too, in the last years of the salon, hung a watercolour painting by my cousin Maia and two pencil drawings that Tanya had sketched. One was of Chimen, the other of Mimi. Both seemed to be smiling slightly as they looked out on the crowded room below. To the left of the piano, adjacent to a shelf that contained the collection of Jewish encyclopaedias, there hung a matte ten-by-eight black and white photograph of four generations of Abramsky men: Yehezkel, Chimen, Jack, and me. It was taken in 1973 in Yehezkel’s small apartment in Jerusalem. In the background is a window, the white slats of its shutters letting in the sunlight. I was one year old, sitting on my father’s lap, a curly blond-haired toddler, smiling. My father, already balding, had let what hair he still had grow out; his beard was bushy, but in a 1960s rather than a religious sort of way. Chimen stood, hunched slightly, wearing a short-sleeved grey shirt, a yarmulke on his head, his right hand gripping his left wrist, his watch-wearing wrist. Yehezkel sat to the left of the frame, in a starched white shirt, looking stern, his long, white beard the focal point for the camera, the part of the image against which everything else was set. He was eighty-seven years old. It was the last time that my father saw him. It was the only time that I ever saw him.
On the other side of the piano was a wooden cabinet, the bottom of which served as storage for some of Mimi’s papers, the top part housing the few books that she claimed as her own in this mighty House of Books: some cookery books, some detective thrillers, a few popular histories. After she died, Chimen kept her books there, never attempting to empty the shelves, to fill them with his own volumes. There were more photos in front of the books, including one of me. I was thirteen years old, in my black school blazer, black trousers, white shirt, and my red and black striped tie; I was still pre-pubescent, my face cherubic, hairless, barely five feet tall. I was standing next to Denis Healey, one of the Labour Party’s leading politicians, a cabinet minister in the governments of the 1960s and 1970s, and a man who had fought to keep the party on an even keel as it tacked ever further to the left in the 1980s. He was, in the middle years of that decade, shadow foreign secretary – the opposition Labour Party’s leading spokesperson on foreign affairs. A large, grey-suited man, with extraordinary bushy eyebrows, he towered over me in the picture. We were on the terrace of the Houses of Parliament – an improbable visit arranged by Mimi’s friend Rose Uren, whose dental services the MP used. (Calling in favours from other clients, she also commandeered hard-to-come by tickets to the Royal Opera House, and, to my father’s absolute delight, Centre Court tickets to Wimbledon.) There were better photos of me, but I doubt there were any that made Chimen quite so happy. For, loathed by much of the left, Healey had become something of a political role-model to the ex-Communist as they both grew older; a man of moderate socialist convictions who was not afraid to stand up to the Soviet Union as well as to the ideologues inside his own political party.
Back in the dining room, and apparently at random, piles of books spiralled upwards from the carpeted floor. Sometimes heaps would materialise on the dining room table – a vanguard testing the waters, seeing how long it would take Mimi to swat them away. The table-top itself was entirely her territory. ‘Frankly’, recalled Elliott Medrich, ‘there was no such thing as you were done eating. Food was fuel. There was no question that she recognised this to be her first responsibility. The meals, as you well know, the next course was always in preparation. She always made sure that whoever you were you participated. Always made sure that you were heard from, that there was a real effort made to assure the conversation wouldn’t go on around you, that you became a part of it. The third thing she always did – whenever I would come, all the relatives at one point or another would be in the house’. It was somewhere between an obligation and a delight: a distant cousin would arrive from overseas, and the entire extended family was commanded to attend them at Hillway.
Chimen held court at the dining table, and, in between trundling in platters of food from the kitchen, Mimi would add in the occasional pithy remark, puncturing academic bubbles as she saw fit. ‘The dinner table’ noted Elliott, ‘was clearly a partnership between the two of them. They obviously honed this over many years – because it never changed. They’d figured out how to do this’. It was a double-act that kept their salon functioning even as the world of Marxist political ideas and the fascination with Marx’s texts, which had first drawn so many to Hillway and into late-night conversations with Chimen, came to seem increasingly irrelevant. At the height of the Cold War, the minutiae of Marxist and socialist literature had mattered in a very profound way. The people of Hillway, in the salon’s earlier incarnation, had not been debating esoterica: they were – or at least they believed they were – discussing the future, coming to an understanding of how the world was changing and of how society would be organised in the future. In such a world, Chimen’s library had totemic, talismanic powers. It was, to Marxists, a socialist Ark of the Covenant representing power, knowledge, the words of secular gods. No wonder scholars and politicians and revolutionaries from the world over flocked to Chimen’s House of Books.
By the 1970s, however, not only was Chimen’s infatuation with Communism a thing of the distant past; more generally, the world’s fascination with the Bolshevik vision was in serious decline. Watching progressives the world over move away from the ideas that he had been so p
assionate about, Chimen must have had an inkling of how Yehezkel had felt as he published one majestic volume after another of his religious commentaries in a world that, outside of the enclaves of Orthodoxy, had less and less time for scholarship such as his. ‘Progress is destroying the Jewish religion’, the itinerant Jewish novelist and journalist Joseph Roth wrote, sadly, as far back as 1926, in The Wandering Jews. ‘Fewer and fewer believers are holding out, and…the numbers of the faithful are dwindling.’ In his own circles, Yehezkel was a gaon, a Talmudic genius. Outside those circles, by the 1970s he was an old man from a vanished world. He had followers – tens of thousands of whom would attend his funeral in Jerusalem in 1976 – but they lived in a self-enclosed universe, sealed off from the broader, secular society around them.
The House of Twenty Thousand Books Page 28
