The House of Twenty Thousand Books (12 page)

Unlike Mimi, Chimen did not love the sea. In fact, he had
never learned to swim. At the beach he would sit in a deck chair, or on the ground, his legs splayed in front of him, as often as not wearing a full suit, with a handkerchief, its four corners knotted, atop his balding head, his eyes protected by dark glasses, reading Marxist history. As a concession to the summer, on a particularly hot day he would take off his jacket. British summers being generally on the tepid side, however, the jacket usually stayed on. In the late 1950s, after the Morris finally packed up, Mimi and Chimen bought a small, second-hand Hillman Minx. From then on, Chimen would drive from Hillway to Wentworth Street. His back was starting to play him up – at times he could only sleep by lying flat on the hard, wooden floor – and the car, which he would park behind Shapiro, Valentine & Co, made the lugging of books to and from the shop that much easier.

Inside the claustrophobic, dark confines of 81 Wentworth Street, its dark street-front façade still looking the same as it had in the Edwardian period, Chimen would always wear either a velvet velour hat or a cloth cap. He did so not because his head was cold, but, I suspect, because he did not want his religious clients and the friends of his parents who used the shop to see that he was not wearing a yarmulke atop his head. He had stopped wearing a yarmulke as he went about his daily business years earlier, but he would still put one on when visiting his father. Even though he told his Party comrades that his parents were ‘reactionary’, he went out of his way to avoid offending them gratuitously. His parents knew that he was not a believer; but that did not mean that their friends had to know as well.

When it came to people who wavered in their faith or who sought to assimilate into the secular culture, Yehezkel could be scathing in his criticism. In 1934, when Yehezkel was appointed
Dayan
, or senior judge, of the London Beth Din, the
Jewish
Chronicle
had editorialised that Anglo-Jewry was being ‘hijacked’ by religious extremists from afar, by men who spoke little or no
English, cared little or nothing about the broader culture and sought only to impose rigid rituals on their brethren. One commentator wrote that men like Yehezkel Abramsky were promoting an ‘alien dogma, custom and superstition which had never before been any part of Judaism except in dark corners deep inside the ghettoes of Eastern Europe’. The rabbi responded that ‘My aim is to strengthen
Yiddishkeit
both in the practice and knowledge of Judaism’. He was, noted the Oxford historian Miri Freud-Kandel in 2006, a polarising force in British Jewry.

Much as the US Constitution is continuously held up to interpretation by succeeding generations of legal scholars as a way to decide everything from the legitimacy of gay marriage to the right to bear arms, so, for religious Jews, the Talmud sets a theoretical framework within which later texts – the
Shulhan Arukh
and other codes – can be read, to lay down the rules for contemporary modes of conduct. For the Orthodox of London, many of the practices of everyday life – from the rituals of birth, marriage and death, to the food that they ate – were filtered through the rulings of the Beth Din. And thus its leading interpreters of the Talmud, and the various commentaries on it written over the millennia, acquired tremendous influence. Yehezkel had, for his Orthodox followers, a similar status to that held by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes among aficionados of the Constitution in the United States. He had the power to make or break the country’s Chief Rabbi, his approval being a necessary pre-requisite for anyone wanting the job; his word could, and on occasion did, destroy the careers of young rabbis with whose interpretations of Torah he disagreed. In 1948, almost three years after the long-serving Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz had died, Yehezkel helped install Israel Brodie in the job, but only after Brodie had, writes Freud-Kandel, ‘unequivocally relinquished authority over religious matters to Dayan Abramsky’. Chief rabbis were convenient figureheads, but, as Freud-Kandel
explains, it was Yehezkel Abramsky who would shape how the community interpreted religious law. He was, she concluded, an extraordinarily effective political manipulator, but all his machinations were to two ends only: to increase the religiosity of, and the hold of conservative religious authority figures over Britain’s Jewish population.

So Chimen had good reasons to avoid his parents’ friends reporting back to Yehezkel that their third son was flaunting his atheism in public. He did not want his father’s private disapproval of Chimen and Mimi’s world view to be expressed in public. It was a double life that Chimen would keep up for decades. The Beth Din offices were three streets away from the shop, on Hanbury Street; and the Machzikei Hadath synagogue, where Yehezkel had been the rabbi before becoming head of the Beth Din, was even closer, on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street; when Yehezkel or one of his rabbinic friends visited the shop, Chimen would immediately be able to launch into a conversation about the Talmud. When his Communist Party friends, such as the local tailor Mick Mindel, dropped by, he was equally at his ease talking about Marx’s dialectic over a cup of tea.

During the run-up to the great religious festivals, Shapiro, Valentine & Co bustled with shoppers looking to purchase Haggadot (books used at the Passover Seder), Jewish calendars, almanacs, prayer books, or the lemon-like etrog fruit and palm fronds to be used in the rituals of Sukkot (the Feast of Tabernacles). In the days leading up to Rosh-Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and to Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the whole extended family would be brought in to help cater to the rush of customers buying New Year’s cards and the religious equipment associated with the holidays. When the store closed at the end of a long day, Jenny, a young child at the time, would be entrusted with counting the money brought in since that morning.

On Friday afternoon, the shop’s doors were shut and locked,
and its customers disappeared into their homes to prepare for the Sabbath meal and then, on Saturday, to attend synagogue. On Sunday, however, those doors opened once more, with people drawn to the area not only by the goods on offer inside Shapiro, Valentine & Co and the other shops lining Wentworth Street, but also by the stalls of the Petticoat Lane street market, which ran along the centre of Wentworth Street, literally past the front door of the old book shop. On market days, well into the 1960s, the area became as noisy, as vibrant, as crowded, as the great London markets and fairs of an earlier era. In those years, now firmly middle-aged, Mimi would leave the book shop and head off with her bags into the maelstrom of Petticoat Lane, there to shop for her week’s supply of fruit and vegetables. She would make a point of asking where the produce was from, and if a stallholder was rash enough to mention South Africa, Mimi would simply stalk away; her refusal to put money into buying food grown in the Apartheid state probably earned her the undying enmity of the stall-keepers, but, in the years after her Communist faith was utterly destroyed, supporting the Boycott movement launched against Apartheid South Africa in 1959 made her feel that she was still on the side of the (secular) angels.

At lunchtime, Chimen would slip out to Ostwind’s, a nearby workers’ café-cum-Jewish deli on Wentworth Street just the other side of Commercial Street from the book shop, for a change of pace. All around the neighbourhood, on Wentworth Street itself, on Commercial Street, on Middlesex Street, on Toynbee Street (home to the nineteenth-century centre of social reform, Toynbee Hall) for decades after the war ended, were craters left by the high explosive bombs that had fallen on the area during the Blitz.

One day, these streets would be rebuilt, and, like so much of the East End, its character would shift: the buildings would look different, the businesses that had made the district their home for generations would die off, the old immigrant groupings would be
replaced by new ones. Walking through Chimen and Mimi’s old neighbourhood in 2013, I found that where Shapiro, Valentine & Co had stood, a four-storey brick block of flats, its upper-floor windows sporting small balconies with green-painted railings and colourful flowers in pots, had taken its place. Next door, Goide’s bakery had been replaced by a Turkish-Lebanese restaurant. The synagogue at which Yehezkel had been rabbi was now the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid mosque. And along the nearby side streets halal butchers had replaced kosher ones, and Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurants had opened in place of the old Jewish delis. Only a few scattered mementoes of the Jewish East End were left for the eye to see: the building façade on Brune Street announcing the presence of a soup kitchen ‘for the Jewish poor’; a small Star of David visible under the black paint on a gutter coming down from the steepled roof of what was now a Church of England school; a historic shop-front left with the lettering ‘S. Schwartz’. The scars of the war themselves had largely vanished, the holes in the fabric of the streets patched with boutique cafes, fashionable restaurants and expensive new residential dwellings.

In the meantime, though, as Chimen navigated the complicated religious and political terrain of the Jewish East End, Ostwind’s served a surprisingly good fried egg sandwich, with chips and beans; and, while the noise inside mirrored the kaleidoscopic chaos of the East End markets outside, it let Chimen escape the cares of his business for a few minutes each day.

When Chimen turned the lock on the shop door early on Sunday afternoon, the family would decamp to Golders Green, to visit Chimen’s older, Orthodox brother Moshe, who was working at that time as a supervisor in a kosher slaughterhouse, and his wife Chaya Sara and their two young children. Chimen and Moshe, both at the house and over the phone, would natter away in Yiddish, talking for hours about politics, gossiping about mutual friends. Chimen would, perennially, disparage the gossip
as ‘rubbish’. Equally perennially, he would file it away in his mind for subsequent retelling, and, quite likely, embellishment. Later on Sunday afternoon, the family would make the short hop across Golders Green for a mid-afternoon tea with Mimi’s sister Sara and her family. Finally, they would return home in time for Mimi to cook Sunday dinner for Chimen’s first cousin Golda Zimmerman, a journalist who had helped Chimen find work at the book shop back in the early days of the war, and who was thus seen as having brought my grandparents together; Mimi felt she owed it to her cousin-in-law, a somewhat isolated spinster, to invite her to Hillway at least weekly.

Despite their break with formal religion, theirs was, in many ways, a world bound by ritual and the densely woven fabric of family ties.

All the while, Chimen obsessively hunted for books. Shelf by shelf, he began creating his House of Books.

Walking from the front door at 5 Hillway into the house, you saw the hallway and its contents reflected back at you from an oval mirror hanging next to the staircase. It added a modicum of light, an illusion of scale, to what was otherwise a dark, narrow passage. Here, in this overcrowded hallway, was the evidence of Chimen’s fascination with the arcane disputes and almost Talmudic reasoning of the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century
revolutionaries. The sprawling political and philosophical battles in which these book-writing men and women had immersed themselves in the years before he was born were not abstract arguments for Chimen; it was by these disputes, by their earnestly footnoted essays and manifestos, that my grandfather measured much of his life. He had done so since he was a teenager.

After arriving in London, Chimen learned English at Pitman Central College and later, while on holiday from his studies in Jerusalem, he worked for the publisher Bela Horovitz, on the East-West Library, a series devoted to Jewish philosophy. For his labour, he was paid in books instead of in cash. He was as determined to imbibe the written word as Yehezkel had been ten years before the First World War, when, as a penniless yeshiva student in Vilna, in Lithuania, he would wander into book shops and spend hours in a corner reading volumes which he could not afford to buy, from cover to cover. And, increasingly, the written words that Chimen cared most about were on socialism. From the family’s first days in London, while his father was at the synagogue on Brick Lane, Chimen had begun surreptitiously attending classes at Marx House, the home of the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School in Clerkenwell. When his landlord’s son walked in on him in his attic bedroom one evening, he found Chimen absorbed in Marxist literature. Guiltily, as if he had been caught reading smut, the teenager hid the book and quickly replaced it with a more respectable religious text.

Stuffed into many of the volumes in the hallway were letters that Chimen had written to, and received from, some of the country’s leading left-wing scholars as his fascination with Marxism grew. Of most interest to my grandfather as he grew older was his correspondence with Piero Sraffa. Eighteen years Chimen’s senior, the Italian-born Sraffa had ended up on Mussolini’s wrong side in 1927 and had fled to England, where, a few years later, he was befriended by John Maynard Keynes. By the time the Second World War broke out, he was a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge and had made a reputation as one of the country’s top economists. He was also busily building up a collection of socialist literature that would have been unparalleled had Chimen not also been on the scene. In the post-war decades, Sraffa was the only other collector in England with a similar love
of, and knowledge about, the arcane socialist volumes that the rabbi’s son so cherished.

Over the decades, they swapped rare books, and shared with each other the joy of the hunt, the unspeakable pleasure – that only a fellow connoisseur could understand – of finding a particular edition of a particular book or pamphlet, and of getting it for a lower-than-anticipated price. Chimen visited Sraffa at Trinity College numerous times, dining with him in the long hall, at the north end of which was an oil painting of the college founder, King Henry VIII, attributed to either Hans Holbein or one of his disciples. In turn, Sraffa was frequently pressed upon by his friend to come and dine at Hillway. The art was less illustrious; I am fairly certain, however, that the cuisine at my grandparents’ house was somewhat more adventurous. Many of Chimen’s most valuable books were documented in this correspondence with Sraffa, which might well have been why he obsessed over this particular collection as he aged, repeatedly asking my brother or me to show him the letters, as if he were pinching himself, making sure that both he, and the world of books that he had so painstakingly created around him, were still alive.