The House of Twenty Thousand Books

Advance praise for
The House of TwentyThousand Books

‘The sheer richness of this marvellous book – in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec – amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family – in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi – about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London’s left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal.’

Simon Winchester

‘I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was finetempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection.’

Jonathan Keates

‘Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history – familial, political, Jewish, and literary – into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books.’

Samuel Freedman

‘
The House of Twenty Thousand Books
is a grandson’s elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents’ house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions – Jewish and Marxist – that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson’s unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector’s passions, all on display in
The House of Twenty Thousand Books
.’

Michael Ignatieff

T
HERE IS NO SOUND
on earth like that of a quiet man, a dignified man, exploding in primal grief. Nothing compares to it – not fingernails scraping on a blackboard, not the whirr of a dental drill through enamel. Nothing. It is the howl of absolute horror, a keening black hole of noise that sucks in everything else. It pulls you into the abyss – extraordinary, out-of-character, it brooks no dissent. This, the sound announces, is about forever.

That is the noise I heard as I cradled the phone to my left ear in March 2010. I was at home, in Sacramento, California, perched desolate on a sofa in the TV room, my wife and children in another room. Six thousand miles away, my father was sitting next to his father’s body at his north London home at 5 Hillway, in Highgate. A few minutes earlier, my grandfather, Chimen Abramsky, had finally died. Of what? Old age? He was ninety-three years old. Complications from Parkinson’s disease? He had been deteriorating
for years, a frail, deaf old man, a widower increasingly locked,
stony-faced
, into a broken, frozen body. Or the aftermath of a horrifying series of late-life illnesses and infections, each of which in and of itself ought to have killed him? In the end, the cause didn’t really matter. What mattered was that the last of my grandparents had died, a man who had been my teacher, mentor and guru, as well as my ‘Nye’ – the name I coined for him when I was a toddler, because he always wore a tie and I couldn’t pronounce that word. My wonderful, at times playful, granddad – the old man who would dance around his dining room with a great stack of colourful plastic cups, each one fitting neatly into the next, balanced atop his head to entertain me when I was a young child – was gone. The man who had surrounded himself with tens of thousands of wondrously rare books, bought over the better part of a century, had disappeared, everything that made him him replaced with the waxen, impersonal stillness of death.

As I started to weep, the sobs shaking me as if I were a rag doll, part of me floated up above the scene and, looking down, wondered why I was so shocked. After all, I had had plenty of time to practise my grief: Chimen’s decline had been slow, his final months painful and humiliating, every phone call to my parents or siblings begun with an update on his tenuous hold on life. He had become, during those last few years, a coda to his own story.

In the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes had famously concluded ‘I think, therefore I am’. For much of Chimen’s life, as he methodically constructed his House of Books, the reverse had held: he was, and therefore he thought – had he not thought, read, analysed the world around him, and the history from whence that world grew, he would have been a lost soul. He was, after all, never very good at twiddling his
thumbs. But now, in his nineties, with his body wrecked by Parkinson’s, with his hearing gone, unable to leave his house to go on the walks that he used to love, he became a prisoner; his mind locked in his failing body, that body cloistered away in his House of Books. Bit by bit, the world closed in on him; eventually, he could no longer make it up the stairs. His world was reduced to the small, book-filled rooms of his home’s ground floor. The house that had once served as one of left-wing London’s great salons, which still contained one of England’s most important private libraries, now became utterly claustrophobic. The home that had sparkled with intellectual life when I visited it as a child became a little frightening, decrepit, a place I took my own children to out of obligation rather than joy. Animated conversation was replaced by the long silences of deaf old age; the bustle of a crowded kitchen and a gaggle of diners and overnight guests gave away to the stillness of Parkinson’s.

Now, the Cartesian equation righted itself: seeking to maintain a hold on life, on sanity, Chimen became even more obsessed with the world of books that he had created for himself. Like a man who pinches himself to make sure he still has feeling, Chimen read to reassure himself that he was still alive. He thought, therefore he was. For years, as he declined, his ability to think sustained him; he clung to his extraordinary intellectual facilities, to his
near-photographic
powers of recall: when a social worker, attempting to ascertain his mental acuity, asked him if he knew who the Prime Minister was, Chimen responded witheringly that he could list every Prime Minister from the past two hundred years. But, at the very end, even his memory abandoned him. Physically broken, he finally became confused.

I had been grieving over Chimen’s dissolution for months, years even, the partial grief for the living that drips out at unexpected times and in unwanted places. But, as I listened now to my father keening in the book-filled living room in my
grandfather’s house near Hampstead Heath, the room my grandfather had eventually had to sleep in after he could no longer climb the stairs to his bedroom, something snapped. The ghastly permanence, the irrevocability, of the iron door that separated death from life, sliced me up, left me in pieces.

A day later, I was in London, helping the family to prepare for my grandfather’s funeral. We roamed around Chimen’s house, starting the grim process of sorting out a lifetime’s accumulation of papers, completing financial documents, and all the other standard activity that accompanies death, filling up the hours in the days leading to the funeral. Solace came from Chimen’s library, an extraordinary collection made up of somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand volumes. Even leaving aside the quality, the rarity of these books, many of them hundreds of years old, their sheer physical presence was overwhelming: if each book weighed, on average, a pound – a fair estimate, given that many were slim little volumes just a few ounces in weight, while others were huge tomes easily weighing ten pounds – then at a conservative guess the house contained upwards of ten tons of books, the weight of at least five large cars. There were, in addition, several tons of manuscripts, letters, and newspapers stacked around the house. I would stop in front of one bookshelf or another, take out an old book, smell it, feel it, look for its publication date, reacquaint myself with it as an old friend; I would talk about it with my younger brother, Kolya, who of all of the five grandchildren knew the most about Chimen’s collection.

During those sad hours, I looked for particular books that we had been introduced to in happier years; or particular authors whose importance Chimen had hammered into our heads, apprenticing us into his world of ideas. And I remembered
conversations from decades earlier, the conversations that in so many ways had formed the canvas on which my intellectual persona was drawn. I could not stop pacing about his house, trying to imagine a world without my grandfather. Every time I descended the staircase, I was confronted by the grotesquerie of Picasso’s
Guernica
, the iconic image of the horrors of aerial bombardment from the Spanish Civil War and a copy of which had hung above these stairs for my whole life. One of my earliest memories was waving my grandmother Mimi and Chimen off for a Spanish holiday in the late 1970s; they had waited forty years to visit Spain, refusing to go until General Franco, on whose behalf the Nazi bombers had attacked Guernica in 1937, was dead. Every time I reached the bottom of the stairs and headed back down the hall, I saw, hanging in a rare bookless space on the wall, the series of black and white photos of my grandparents that my cousin Rob had taken for a school project years earlier.

One evening, my oldest friend, Ben, came to visit me and try to cheer me up. He reminded me of the many times I had taken him to play at Chimen and Mimi’s.
How lucky you were,
he said.
Most kids regard their grandparents as burdens, as old-timers to be endured, maybe even respected and loved in an abstract sort of way, but certainly not to be emulated or considered a part of one’s daily life. You,
he told me,
your grandfather was your hero.

It was true. Chimen Abramsky was, in so many ways, larger than life. The atheist third son of a famous rabbi, Yehezkel Abramsky – who, in 1956 won the first Israel Prize for rabbinic literature – and the grandson of another famous rabbi, Moshe Nahum Jerusalimsky and the great-grandson of yet a third renowned rabbi, Yaakov David Willowski (known affectionately as ‘The Ridbaz’, a nickname built around the acronym of his title and initials), Chimen was like a character out of an Isaac Bashevis Singer or a Saul Bellow novel, or an antiquarian out of a Dickens book, or an eccentric eighteenth-century salon host, or, more
likely, a chimera of them all. It was impossible to pigeonhole him: too many stories flowed through his person simultaneously. While his father was head of London’s Beth Din, the chief religious court for Jews in Britain, Chimen – who, at the time was running, with my grandmother, a Jewish bookstore and publishing house named Shapiro, Valentine & Co, around the corner from Yehezkel’s office – was a leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Later on, he became an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and came to count the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin among his closest friends and champions. Lacking a university degree, Chimen nevertheless, in middle age, became acknowledged as one of the world’s great experts both in socialist history and in Jewish history. After decades buying and selling books for a living, he spent the latter part of his career as an academic; first lecturing on Marxism at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and then as chair of the Jewish and Hebrew Studies Department at University College London; he also spent time as a visiting professor at Brandeis and at Stanford – and he lectured at many other prestitious institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Rounding out his career, Chimen became a leading consultant on manuscripts for Sotheby’s auction house.

He was, across all of these incarnations, one of England’s most extraordinary book collectors and one of the great letter-writers of his age, penning letters in English, Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, sometimes as many as ten, and even twenty in a day, to a vast array of acquaintances.

Chimen was a diminutive figure, five feet one inch tall, with great, sturdy arms and a bullish neck, quite possibly the legacy of his years in charge of Shapiro, Valentine & Co, years during which he had regularly
schlepped
heavy boxes of books around the great metropolis. One of my father’s oldest friends, writing about his childhood memories of post-war London, described Chimen, with great affection, as a ‘little Russian gnome’. He would, in his later
years, almost always wear a ready-made charcoal grey suit and tie; if he was feeling particularly casual, on a rare visit to the beach, perhaps, he might replace the jacket with a woollen sweater. When he was outdoors, his head, bald on top, adorned with a ring of unruly white hair around the back, always hosted either a cloth cap or a tweed homburg. He had a wonderful Eastern European accent, an accent somehow almost as musty, as imbued with echoes from the past, as the books that he collected; and he spoke a patois of English, Hebrew, Russian and Yiddish, sometimes reserving particular languages for specific friends or acquaintances, and on other occasions blending the languages in one extraordinary conversation.

In notes that he had sketched out in his mid-eighties, for an autobiography that he ultimately found himself entirely unable to write, he asked himself the question: ‘Why should a person feel the need to write about his own life?’ Part of his answer was that his life covered ‘a long period in our turbulent century of Revolution, civil war, pogroms, ruthless dictatorship, World War Two with its terrible tragedies, culminating in the genocidal destruction of six million Jews… Life is to a large degree a lottery, whose fate is decided by forces frequently by chance, outside our will, but to whose decisions we contribute, willy-nilly’. He would, he averred, ‘endeavour to write on days gone, on a past which was colourful, full of contradictions, conflicts, and, in a word, some ordinary and some startlingly original and colourful personalities’. It was an echo of the words of one of the thinkers he most admired, the great nineteenth-century Russian radical journalist, letter writer and revolutionary Alexander Herzen, who had given a similar rationale for writing his own memoirs nearly a century and a half earlier. In 1855, in exile in London, Herzen had begun publishing a series of essays about his life in
The Pole Star
, a Russian-language journal that he ran. (The essays were later reprinted in book form, under the title
My Past and Thoughts
.)
‘Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?’ the exiled writer asked his readers. He answered, ‘Everyone. Because no one is obliged to read them. In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman – it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely to desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so’. In his old age, Chimen concluded that he lacked the ability to tell his own story; yet that story, as he knew, as I knew, as all who were close to Chimen knew, was one that needed to be told.

Several months after Chimen’s death, his library was sold. My family kept back only a few volumes – those of sentimental value to my father and his sister, and those specifically requested by my brother and myself. A couple of months later, the mailman drove up to my house in California, and unloaded a large, heavy cardboard box. In it were my books, the ones I had asked for from the House of Books. A set of ‘Past Masters’ pocket paperbacks, published by Oxford University Press, outlining in brief form the philosophies of great thinkers from Blaise Pascal and Thomas More to Herbert Marcuse and Che Guevara. They had occupied perhaps a foot of shelf space about five shelves up, in the hallway just by the front door, next to a rather austere oil painting of my grandmother’s father. And a set of crumbling old Everyman Classics, made up of all the great political philosophy texts: from Plato’s
Republic
and Aristotle’s
Ethics and Politics
to Ernest Renans’
The Life of Jesus
and the great religious writings of St. Thomas Aquinas; from Machiavelli’s
The Prince
to classic texts by Rousseau and Voltaire; More’s
Utopia
; Spinoza’s
Ethics
; Immanuel Kant’s great philosophical works; Hobbes’s political treatises; Hume’s philosophical musings; Adam Smith’s economics;
Hamilton’s
Federalist Papers
; Marx’s
Das Kapital
; and Macaulay’s
Historical Essays
. These had lived on one of the shelves in the front living room, halfway up the wall backing onto the hallway.