The House of Twenty Thousand Books (18 page)

Even many of the anarchist groups that sympathised with the bomb-throwers who had targeted Alexander’s carriage opportunistically rode the anti-Semitic wave, seeking to marshal support in the countryside by ‘out-pogroming’ the pogromists. As a result, during the period of Yehezkel’s childhood and early adulthood Jews in the Russian Empire were caught in an increasingly brutal vice, targeted not just by government propaganda and organised nationalist mobs responding to the drumbeat of hate tapped out by groups with names such as the League of the Russian People (of which Tsar Nicholas II was an honorary member) and the Black Hundreds; but also, frequently, by radical anarchists as well.

In April 1903, a particularly deadly pogrom in the city of
Kishinev (now Chisinau, the capital of Moldova) took the lives of at least forty-five Jews and left many hundreds more injured. Hundreds of homes and businesses were looted or burned. The event garnered international attention: a reporter for the
New York Times
wrote that the Jews were ‘slaughtered like sheep’. The anti-Semitic atmosphere worsened. The text of a purported Jewish conspiracy, global in its aspirations, began circulating in Russian nationalist circles. It would become known as
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, and its distributors claimed that they were exposing a conspiracy between Zionists, Freemasons and the British foreign office to sow the seeds of anti-Tsarist revolt in Russia. Stories based on the age-old ‘Blood Libel’, the story of Jews killing Christian children, passed from one ear to the next in Kiev and other cities, adding fuel to an already blazing fire. Only years later, after much investigative work, did it emerge that the
Protocols
had been concocted by the Russian secret service. But by then they had become part of the staple anti-Semitic arsenal, quoted to justify suspicion of Jews, quoted to justify atrocities against Jews.

Two years after the Kishinev outrage, more than six hundred Jewish communities were subjected to pogroms in a single lethal week at the end of October and beginning of November 1905. In Odessa alone, according to Chimen’s Columbia University historian friend Salo Baron, in his book
The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets
, ‘no less than 300 victims lost their lives, thousands more were wounded and crippled, while 40,000 were economically ruined. In all, this pogrom wave cost the Russian Jews about 1,000 dead, 7,000 to 8,000 wounded (many of them permanently crippled), and property losses of 62,700,000 rubles (ca. $31,000,000)’. Hundreds of thousands of Jews who had escaped the killings left their homes and, uncertain of their welcome, headed west; to England, to South America and to the United States. They left on foot, by wagon, by train, by boat. They
left any way they could, often leaving all their worldly possessions behind. Even as some of his siblings – his younger brother and an older sister – and cousins migrated to America during these violence-filled years, and others left for Palestine, Yehezkel, who was just starting out on what promised to be an extraordinary rabbinic odyssey, chose, for the moment at any rate, to stay.

Russia had been riven by revolution since January 1905, when a workers’ demonstration was fired on by troops guarding the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The pogroms of November 1905 were a product of the unrest, largely nationalist-led, opposed by leftist revolutionaries, and resisted by armed Jews organised into self-defence units. 1906 saw a last great spasm of ferocity; thereafter, the intensity and frequency of the pogroms started to decline dramatically. The anti-Semitic vice which squeezed Jews from both the left and right of the Russian Empire’s political spectrum started to loosen once Marxist revolutionaries, who opposed the pogroms and also opposed the use of religion and nationalism as a way of dividing one man from the next, began to out-perform their anarchist rivals in attracting the support of workers and peasants.

In the meantime, however, the twenty-five years of pogroms and reaction in the countryside, of revolution and intellectual ferment in the cities had made it all but impossible for young Jews in Russia who engaged with the secular world to support the status quo. Three responses came to dominate their thinking. Firstly, there was Zionism, either of the literal variety, embracing the idea of migration to Palestine, or in a territorial guise, with supporters advocating setting up some other protected political and territorial space for Jews. The second response was to support organised migration to an assimilationist culture and country, leading to the waves of emigration to the USA and to a lesser extent Britain. The third response was to promote revolution to change Russia from within by sweeping away the old anti-Semitic autocracy and
nationalist movements and replacing them by an
internationalist-minded
revolutionary government. Hence the increasing embrace of Marxism, and of the non-anti-Semitic anarchist groupings, by young Russian secular Jews. It was neither accident nor happenstance; rather, it was a perfectly logical reaction to the events unfolding in Russia. After the Kishinev pogrom, increasing numbers of Jews in Russia armed themselves to fight back against the
pogromchiki
. Others prepared to fight against the Tsarist government which they saw as pulling the strings of the mob. They joined the Bolsheviks and other groups calling for the overthrow of the Tsar and the creation of a workers’ state.

A religious Jew could believe in
Eretz Israel
(the Land of Israel), or could seek, as did the young Yehezkel Abramsky, to obliterate the pain and fear of the present by burrowing ever deeper into Talmudic scholarship. Yehezkel – who was discovered as an
illui
, or prodigy, as a young child; anointed a
gaon
, or genius, as a young adult; termed a
gadol
, or great one, as an old man; and posthumously referred to by his biographer Aaron Sorsky as a ‘king’ watched over by angels – would routinely spend more than ten hours a day locked in his yeshiva’s study room, burning candles late into the night as he read ever-more obscure Aramaic and Hebrew commentaries. He wanted nothing to do with the secular world: until the all-consuming fires unleashed by the First World War rendered it impossible, for many years he succeeded in largely shutting out the cacophony around him. He was, after all, a product of the code of discipline that ruled the yeshivas – fines, slaps from the rabbi, even expulsion for such sins as ‘
time-wasting
’, playing card games for example, or reading trivial, non-religious texts. ‘Students’, wrote Shaul Stampfer, in
Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century
, ‘were meant to devote every possible moment to study’. Mostly, their studies were unstructured; they attended a few hours a week of
shiurim
(expository lectures) from the rabbinic scholars in residence, but
the rest of the time they were simply expected to organise their own time. Many, Stampfer found, spent upwards of eighteen hours a day working on their understanding of important texts. They were known, simply, as
matmidim
, or perpetual students. Yehezkel, with his ability to memorise extraordinary amounts of text, was just such a figure – a young man utterly absorbed in his studies, entirely disinterested in the great events in the broader world beyond the yeshiva walls.

Nearly a century after these events, Chimen, by then a very old man, remembered the suspicion with which Yehezkel viewed secular education: ‘For him, science was more or less permissible. What was not permissible was the humanities, because with the humanities you became less religious.’ When my father, Jack, got into Trinity College, Cambridge, to study physics, Yehezkel would quiz him on the theory of relativity. But when Chimen himself had travelled to Jerusalem in 1935 to study philosophy and history, Yehezkel had been underwhelmed. ‘I went as a rebel against his wishes,’ Chimen remembered. ‘I went to a university. He was not very happy about that. He wanted people to go to Yeshiva. He and I disagreed.’

In the yeshivas of his youth, Yehezkel had felt protected from the often-savage realities of life outside of their walls. Many secular Jews, however, who witnessed the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were pushed into political activity. History was, quite simply, a politicising agent, one that made it ever harder for the Jews of Russia to sit it out on the sidelines. ‘We demand civil equality and equal submission to general laws as men who, despite everything, are conscious of their human dignity, and as conscientious citizens of a modern state’, wrote the authors of the 1905 ‘Declaration of Jewish Citizens’, which was signed by six thousand politically active Russian Jews, men and women who had joined a variety of political clubs, parties and clandestine organisations in the previous few years.

In many ways, those Jews who combined a vigorous intellectualism with revolutionary political beliefs were
matmidim
by another name. Chimen, born in the autumn of 1916, in the dying months of Tsarist rule, was just such a figure. His and Mimi’s house, by the 1950s, was a sort of secular yeshiva, a place where students came to study great texts; to hear great masters exploring their ideas; but, above all, a place where people would be expected to think about difficult moral and political topics for many hours at a time. Chimen might have been a dyed-in-the-wool Communist at this point in his life – but even then he was an intellectual snob. He valued not status per se but intelligence. And he could be more brutal in his verbal responses to a Communist he considered stupid than he would be to a clever person who happened to be a member of the hated bourgeoisie. For my father’s lifelong friend Krishan Kumar, who went on to become a sociologist and an expert on utopias, Hillway, which he started visiting at the age of eleven, with its endless political discussions and its spiralling columns of books, was the greatest university he could have ever attended: ‘I remember being very struck by the books in the downstairs room. Great fat tomes in the front room where you sat. From the moment you opened the door, it was a house of books. The front room was a room of learning and talk. You’d sit there and everybody was so close to each other. Everybody talked. It was a galaxy of talent’.

Opposite the door of the front room coming in from the hallway, on the wall of shelves to the left of the fireplace at about eye level, was a row of books on the Holocaust. Among these was a large volume, by a historian named Lucy Dawidowicz, titled
The War Against The Jews 1933–1945
. When I was about ten, I began asking Chimen questions about the Holocaust. It was, after all,
one of the great elephants in the room at Hillway, an omnipresent reality that would be hinted at in ghastly, sometimes coded, references around the dinner table. Periodically, survivors would come to the house for dinner. Frequently, friends who had escaped from continental Europe prior to the Second World War would tell their stories. Fred Barber, the bald, genteel doctor who lived around the corner from Hillway, would drop remarks about life in pre-war Czechoslovakia; the cousins from France – Irene and her daughters, Jeanette and Michel and their children – many of whose family members had been corralled off to the death camps, would come to visit.

Rather than fob me off with half-truths, modified to dull the scale of the atrocity for my young ears, instead of trying to comfort me with explanations that hid more than they revealed, Chimen, always the historian took this book – its jacket cover white at the top, with jagged, burnt edges blending into a red bottom, an abstract image redolent of blood and fire and carnage, of ghettos burned and corpses cast into furnaces – off of the shelf, gave it to me and told me to read it. I still remember my horror as Auschwitz was described; and, in case I ever need reminding, I still possess the book. On my own bookshelves, it sits next to Art Spiegelman’s
Maus
and just a few tomes along from William Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. Its cover, suggestive of burned, ragged paper, looks similar to the sheets of burning paper that fluttered down over Brooklyn, where I was living at the time, from the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, sheets that I gathered up that horrifying day and put into a beige folder as reminders, however inadequate, of the capacity for evil to rain down suddenly out of a clear blue sky.

Chimen had gone through the book meticulously, underlining passages in pencil that he found particularly powerful. Hitler’s Final Solution programme, Dawidowicz wrote, ‘was part of a salvational ideology that envisaged the attainment of Heaven by
bringing Hell on earth. “The Devil is loose”, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen noted in his diary on 30 October 1942. The most important event of our time, André Malraux said, was “le retour de Satan”, citing the German system of terror’. Chimen had underlined both the English and French references to the devil. It was, as far as I could tell, the only time he highlighted such allegorical imagery to describe a historical event. And it spoke, I think, to the paucity of words that he felt were available to explain such an epic atrocity. My grandfather, never otherwise at a loss for words, was frequently tongue-tied when it came to discussing the Holocaust. All the tools of the historian’s trade, the understanding of Marxist dialectic, the belief that history moved in a generally progressive arc, all fell mute before such organised psychopathy. When Chimen watched documentaries on, say, the Warsaw Ghetto, I would turn to him and see him silently sobbing.

Chimen’s erstwhile friend Itzik Manger wrote, in the opening stanza of his poem ‘Ballad of the Times’:

It is such a simple image, yet so utterly horrifying – the orchestrators of mass murder sitting back and enjoying their domestic bliss as all around them was drowned in blood.

In his University College office, Chimen kept a copy of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf.
As carefully as with Dawidowicz’s text, so with
Mein Kampf
he had underlined key passages in red ink, and had scribbled precise little notes in the margins. ‘He [the Jew] lacks completely the most essential requirement for a cultured people, the idealistic attitude’, Hitler had written; they were
stateless wanderers who corrupted whatever cultures they inhabited. Chimen wrote on this page that the Nazi leader’s idea was that ‘the Jews had never had a territorial limit and were worse than nomads’. Forcing himself to carefully read the bile-filled screed, the historian had underlined Hitler’s description of the Jews as parasites and bacilli, of Marxism as being a Jewish idea, of Germany’s defeat in the First World War as being caused by Jews. In a letter that he wrote to Dr John P. Fox, in 1978, as Fox prepared a BBC lecture on the Jewish Councils in occupied Europe, Chimen made reference to that passage: ‘Hitler, in his
Mein Kampf
, portrays the Jews as a dangerous bacillus – a parasite in the body politic of Germany, which must be destroyed to save the German nation. Whether this finally led to the Final Solution is a separate question, but there is little doubt that the germ of the extermination of the Jews is contained already in
Mein Kampf
’.