The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  In Volozhin, Yehezkel had studied the Brisker Method with the descendants of the famous Rabbi Hayim ben Yitshak, who himself had studied with the Vilna Gaon, one of the most influential Jewish scholars of the eighteenth century. Under the guidance of Hayim Soloveitchik, students in the late nineteenth century learned to analyse the context in which ideas were developed, as well as the literal meaning of the words themselves. So influential, so coldly logical, was Soloveitchik’s Brisker technique that it had revolutionised Talmudic scholarship. It let in new ideas – it had room for scientific theory, for medicine, for the ideas that were daily altering the lives of men and women around the world. In contrast to this sophisticated methodology, the students scorned what they termed pilpul, the parroting of obscure textual detail, the forcing of disparate quotations and phrases into agreement with each other, without a deeper understanding of the issues being discussed. By the 1970s, the debates about Marxist minutiae had taken on something of a pilpul quality – an obsessive reading, for hidden meaning, of tomes that no longer had the power to change the world. Chimen’s socialist library was starting to lose its totemic power. It was becoming dusty.

  When Chimen’s life ended in 2010, in a post-Marxist world, many of the volumes that he had so prized had been reduced to curiosity items. The inflated monetary value assigned to them at the height of Soviet power was now as hard to comprehend as the six figure prices accorded tulips in the flower markets of Amsterdam for a brief period in the seventeenth century. But, despite these shifting sands, in the decades prior to his death such was the reputation both of Chimen and of his House of Books that the salon remained a vital part of London’s intellectual scene.

  As more of his close friends and relatives started to die – Alec Waterman succumbed to a stroke in 1966; Henry Collins, in 1969, to prostate cancer; Robinson to pancreatic cancer in 1974; his brothers Moshe and Yaakov David in 1975 and 1977; Jacob Talmon in 1980; Piero Sraffa in 1983 – Chimen entered a new phase in life: as a grandfather. He would take breaks from his work and entertain the children who were, after a generation’s gap, again running riot through the rooms of Hillway. Visitors popping in unannounced could find him balancing Yehezkhel’s gnarled old cane, its lineage traceable back into the eighteenth century, on the tips of his fingers, and dancing around the dining room, to the amusement of his five grandchildren and the various other young cousins who were effortlessly absorbed into the house by Mimi and her mothering instincts. Or performing his other circus party trick: balancing stacks of plastic cups on his head and doing the Charlie Chaplin pigeon-toed walk. Given recognition and validation in the academic world, perhaps he felt able to relax just a little bit, to learn not to take himself quite so seriously.

  In between meals, he would clear space on either the kitchen or dining room table and take out the little wooden domino box. Unlike regular dominoes, small black rectangles with indented white dots, these were large wooden dominoes, the dots painted in a different colour for each number. For children, the colours made the game of Russian Dominoes easy to learn. There are many variants of dominoes; in this one your aim, as a player, was twofold: most immediately, to try to create a snake of dominoes, as well as side-arms coming off of the first double-numbered domino to be crossed, the ends of which collectively added up to a multiple of five. If they did, that number was added to your score. As the double-numbers were added into the equation, as the game unfolded, you could end up with numerous domino end-points, and scores that, on occasion, went into the thirties. Your second strategy was to get rid of all the dominoes in your possession. Once you were all out, you added up the numbers left in your opponent’s hand to the nearest five, and added that score to your own. The manipulation of the numbers was endlessly fascinating to Chimen the chess scholar. Usually we played to five hundred points, which could involve ten or twenty rounds. Sometimes we played up to a thousand. The hours would vanish as we played. On occasion, like a particularly long game of cricket, our matches would stretch across an entire weekend. Mimi would, eventually, order us to stop, so that she could use the table upon which we had ventured to trespass. When we were young, I later realised, Chimen would go easy, letting his grandchildren build up big scores, deliberately mis-strategising. As we got older, he tried harder. By the time I was a teenager, my grandfather and I would pit our wills against each other, endlessly playing this game conjured up out of the memory of the far-off decades of his own childhood.

  Around the dining room table, at huge family lunches and dinners, Chimen would ask a young child’s advice or comment on a matter of world politics, and would then say, in all earnestness, ‘I agree with every-zing you say’. He’d smile slightly, as if infinitely amused by the interaction; amused, but not in a condescending way – rather he was happy that here was a young person capable of intelligent comment on matters of import. ‘The ways of the world are mysterious, but everything works out in the end’, might have been the sentiment behind that hint of a smile.

  ***

  As they had done ever since they were first married, Mimi and Chimen continued to host enormous Seders – one on each of the first two nights of Passover. Some of their friends from the Communist days continued to come as guests. There were always a number of overseas visitors, and, of course, the core of the family: my parents and us three children; Jenny and Al and their kids; and a profusion of relatives from Mimi’s side of the family – Peter and Vavi and their children; Eve and her son Tom. Sara would arrive laden down with platters of food. Lily and Martin would appear with their children and grandchildren, as would Phyllis and her husband Max. Minna did not often come for Seders. And neither, by this time, did Raph.

  The dining room table with the addition of three or four fold-up wooden tables ranged in a long row off of it, would, somehow, seat nearly thirty people. There would be bottles of sickly sweet kosher Manischewitz wine positioned up and down the table – and, sometimes, far better wines conjured up by my wine-collecting uncle Al; piles of matzo, dishes stacked full of delicious haroses (a nut, apple and raisin concoction), bowls filled with hard boiled eggs, and dishes containing the ceremonial salt water, bitter herbs and a lamb shank.

  Chimen, as he had done for decades, would stand at the head of the table, dressed in his best suit, the unruly white hair that normally protruded wildly off the back of his bald pate tamed for the occasion, and would read through the entire Haggadah. He did so at breakneck speed, alternating between Hebrew and English so often that it became almost impossible to focus on which language he was speaking. Mimi continued to cook extraordinary amounts of food. There would always be appetisers of smoked salmon on crackers and an enormous pot of matzo-ball soup, followed by a massive roast turkey, roast potatoes and other vegetables: carrots, onions, mushrooms, perhaps some green beans. Into the mid-1990s, no effort was spared. ‘Our Seder was magnificent’, Chimen wrote to me in late April 1995. ‘The culinary side was done by Jenny, your Mum and Dad, under Mimi’s sharp eyes and major planning and designing. The dinner was supreme. The Haggadah part was well orchestrated. We finished after midnight’.

  While the reading progressed, my mother, Vavi and other guests would start talking – whispering among themselves, telling jokes, laughing at, or with, the children. Predictably, Chimen would unleash a volley of orders to be quiet; as predictably, he would be ignored. It was a game that everyone happily played along with. I am sure that, had he actually had to conduct an entire Seder before a quiescent, silent, respectful audience, he would have been bored out of his mind. For, while he took the ritual seriously, he enjoyed tweaking the traditions to meet the humours of his guests. In earlier years, that had meant Henry Collins singing the Yiddischa Toreador. Now it meant adding in songs such as Three Crows Sitting on a Wall, sung, to general acclaim, in an impossibly Scottish accent by Al and his children. Yet Chimen’s frustration was not all for show. Paradoxically, compared to the Communist days, now the participants (the younger ones anyway) knew far less about Jewish ritual life,
were less familiar with both Yiddish and Hebrew, and were less patient of the eight days of dietary restrictions around Passover. And, in reaction, Chimen did get genuinely annoyed. At times his requests for silence sounded like screams of anguish. He would stop the reading mid-sentence, and, looking up severely, would order people by name to shut up. Then, without a pause for breath, he would resume his recitation. After Mimi died in 1997, Chimen kept up the ritual for more than a decade, even as his voice began to fail him. Now, my parents, Jenny, and the cousins all came over to do the cooking. Now, if Chimen’s voice grew so hoarse that he could not continue, Vavi was ready to step in and read the Hebrew text. As he read now, a respectful silence fell: the effort it took him to get the pages of words out of his mouth was Herculean, like climbing a mountain, like running a marathon.

  The size of the Seder crowd dwindled. Chimen did not seem to mind. Fast going deaf, he was far more comfortable surrounded by a smaller group – which might have been one of the reasons he took such happiness in hosting his ‘ladies’ lunch club’ each weekend. They would arrive like clockwork: his nieces Eve and Julia, his widowed sisters-in-law Minna and, after Steve died, Sara; his widowed cousin Phyllis, a couple of old friends, including Alec Waterman’s widow, Ray, and Raph’s widow, the author Alison Light – Raph had died of cancer in late 1996 (a few months before Mimi’s death) at the age of only sixty-one, nine years after his and Alison’s wedding. Occasionally, my brother Kolya would be allowed in to this ladies’ club on sufferance. ‘Chimen was experimenting with cooking’, Alison remembered, with a smile, more than fifteen years later. ‘He’d make a very nice aubergine dip; there was a soup he’d make; and he would do lemon sole with butter. He’d do all the courses. That was the thing that was impressive’. Gently, my recently widowed grandfather (who had been taught to cook by Mimi in the last years of her life, when she realised that he would outlive her and would need a way to keep the salon going) played the role of ladies’ man to his gathering of widows. They would talk about politics, about old friends, about old quarrels. They would rehash the day’s news, gossip mildly, and, most importantly, tend to each other’s emotions. ‘He was looking after us’, Alison explained. ‘And looking after himself at the same time. We were all bereaved. There was quite a lot of talk about people who had died. It was a way of bonding because of that. You could talk about anything. An amazing amount of frankness. There’s a particular kind of warmth or sadness in an embrace. And I remember sharing that a lot at that time’.

  ***

  As a very old man, Chimen would sit on a simple wooden chair at his dining room table, a pile of books and papers next to him. The effort it took, by then, to move himself from one room to another meant that once he was settled in a spot he would often stay there for hours on end, largely cocooned within the world of silence experienced by the elderly deaf. His eyes, watery and red, behind ever-thicker lenses, were his lifeline; his one remaining, largely functional link to the external world. He would take a book, lean upon it, hunch forward slightly. His glasses would slide maybe a quarter of an inch down his nose; his left hand, fingers slightly splayed, would hold down the open pages. His right elbow would rest on the corner of the book, his right hand, fingers also splayed, would rest against his temple. In the biography of Yehezkel Abramsky, A King in His Beauty, there’s a photo of Yehezkel. His beard is so fine that’s it almost invisible, a vague shadow over his shirt and tie. In this photo, I see Chimen. It is the same pose, the same utter absorption in the Word. Both men were talmid khokhem, wise scholars.

  Front Room Revisited:

  Endings

  In vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, ‘White Nights’ (1848).

  IN THE LATE 1950s, Mimi’s mother, Bellafeigel Nirenstein, had often sat stony-faced and angry-looking in the front room of Hillway. Her health spiralling downward, she had had to move out of her own home and she spent the last few years of her life living with Mimi and Chimen. The solemnity of my great-grandmother’s features in photographs from those years is almost a metaphor for the front room itself. This was, I think, an austere chamber, a room lacking whimsy. Whereas the dining room, gorgeously lit by the sun coming in off of the garden and through the glass rear-wall, was frivolous enough for Chimen, in his old age, to dance around with plastic cups balanced atop his head, and whereas the kitchen was a place for endless gossip and informal chatter, the front room was in general a serious place. It became weighed down by its own contents: by its overstuffed armchairs and its books – volumes cascaded off of the shelves and onto the coffee table, the floor, onto every available surface and ultimately, in combination with a collection of heavy potted plants, blocked off access to the fireplace. From the early 1990s onwards, it served as a sickroom, first for Mimi and later for Chimen himself, its air poisoned by the smells of their medicines and ointments, by the odours of sickness and old age. Mirroring the physical decline of its owners, the basic infrastructure of the room (like the rest of the house) fell into greater disrepair. The built-in curved chest of drawers, which hugged the inside line of the windows overlooking the street, started to crack under the weight of generations of guests who used it as an extra seat. Its white paint started to fleck, as did the paint on the windowsills. The armchairs leaked stuffing. The lighting seemed to grow dimmer by the year as the lampshades grew dirtier. The couch-cum-bed that rested against the far wall seemed to sag a little more each year.

  I remember the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, during his sojourn at the London Symphony Orchestra, sitting on the window seat, his tall, thin body silhouetted against the window, singing songs and telling stories. In memory I see the conductor sharing the perch with a number of potted plants, their leaves drooping, under-watered but never quite dead.

  ***

  As a young man, Raph Samuel spent endless hours in the front room, chatting with friends and fellow historians. Or arguing with Chimen – whom he viewed both as a second father and as his intellectual mentor, and with whom he ended up fighting as only close relatives can. By the time I came on the scene, he was no longer calling Mimi and Chimen ‘Comrade’, but I have a peculiarly vivid recollection of him frequently bestowing that honorific on me. As a young woman, my aunt Jenny had loathed being reduced to ‘Comrade’ by her elder, adored cousin. But it struck me as a membership ticket to a club; it meant that he was taking me seriously. He would say it in a slightly nasal way, his circular glasses slipping down his nose, an ironic smile creeping up the corner of his mouth. I loved the frisson I felt as he sallied into the dining room or the living room – depending on the time of day – in his tan suede jacket, said ‘Hello, Comrade’ to me, and watched for his now-anti-Communist uncle to flinch.

  ***

  There was an almost unrelentingly high cultural tone to the front room. Even though the house was fashioned in the 1940s and 1950s as something of a bohemian salon, what that meant sartorially was that the jackets were rumpled and the shirts occasionally went un-ironed, that ties were optional rather than mandatory. As the broader culture adopted the more casual, frequently flamboyant, dress codes of the 1960s, the older habitués of Hillway never dressed more informally than in tweeds and corduroys.

  Freethinking in theory, in practice Mimi and Chimen were remarkably traditional in demeanour. When they wanted to take Jack and Jenny on a childhood outing in the 1950s, it would be to a cultural event such as a screening of the film version of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V; or to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the bard’s plays on stage. Decades later, Jack and Jenny recalled once going to Stratford to see Coriolanus and driving back in a pea-soup fog so dense that Mimi had to g
et out of the car to feel where the road was.

  When the family bought a television in the early 1960s, Jenny, seeking entertainment other than the classics, would watch Bonanza and other cowboy programmes. Chimen lambasted her for wasting her time on non-academic pursuits. ‘He couldn’t understand’, Jenny said, ‘how anything could be enjoyed that didn’t have a basis in absolute reality’. When, as a guitar-playing student in the late 1960s, Jenny decided to introduce the music of The Beatles to Chimen forcibly, by locking him into the front room and playing Sergeant Pepper at full volume, the result was not a success. Chimen, who was at the time busily trying to prepare a series of very learned, very earnest lectures that he was to give at Sussex University to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, listened, but was distinctly underwhelmed. Too old, too bruised by his earlier political experiences, the social revolutions of the 1960s and the changing enthusiasms of the young did not inspire Chimen with any renewed revolutionary fervour. As students took to the barricades in 1968, Chimen watched from the sidelines, or, at most, talked over events with some of the graduate students at UCL. This was not his revolt; it was not his utopia that was being stumbled towards. And its music and slogans and cultural priorities were not ones that he understood. When forced to confront modern popular culture, his nose wrinkled in disgust, and he looked as if he was being tormented by a particularly nasty odour. There was something treif, dirty, un-kosher about the rhythms and sounds and colours of this new world. One year, after a particularly gluttonous Christmas feast – my grandparents had, over the years, reluctantly made their peace with the fact that the younger generations, not brought up religiously, enjoyed the festivities and the gift-giving of Christmas – my brother decided to put on a video of the vomiting scene from the Monty Python film, The Meaning of Life. There we were, stuffed to the gills, watching a waiter sporting an absurdly faux French accent, asking an overstuffed and projectile-vomiting diner if he wanted ‘a wafer-thin mint’. The diner says he could not eat another thing; but the waiter presses and presses. Finally he concedes, eats the mint and explodes. It is a vile scene, so disgusting, so over-the-top, that it forces anxious laughter out of most viewers. Not Chimen. He looked at the scene; wrinkled his nose; and gave his verdict. ‘It has no aesthetic value whatsoever’, he proclaimed, and turned back to continue his conversation about more serious matters.