The House of Twenty Thousand Books (26 page)

Chimen’s most valuable possession – valued for its rarity, its sheer beauty, and for the name of the artist who had crafted it, and unknown to the rest of the book dealing community – was nowhere near his oldest. It was a gorgeous, twenty-five leaf illuminated manuscript Haggadah, complete with marble endpapers, lovingly designed in Hamburg – in 1829 according to Chimen’s notes, in 1831 according to other scholars – by the scribe Eliezer Zussman Meseritch.

In an era of mass-production printing, Meseritch was a fish out of water, a connoisseur of the fine art of calligraphy, and a gloriously powerful artist. Several generations earlier, a few
influential Court Jews in Germanic lands had commissioned manuscripts as status symbols, as signs of both their wealth and their culture. But by the time Meseritch came of age, the fashion had largely dissipated. Meseritch was determined to resurrect the dying art: he used three different types of calligraphy: flowing, semi-cursive Rashi script;
mashket
, which was used in Yiddish and Judeo-German handwriting; and square Hebrew lettering. Within the manuscript were seven text illustrations, including miniatures of the four sons referred to in the Torah: the wise, wicked, and simple children who ask questions of their father during the Seder ritual, and the child who does not know to ask. At the end of Meseritch’s manuscript was a striking image of the Temple in Jerusalem. Bound in thick red leather by the bookbinder Abraham Jacobson, Meseritch’s Haggadah was, quite simply, extraordinary. How he had acquired it, Chimen never divulged. Nor did he explain its presence in his house on any of the myriad three-by-five index cards that were scattered in different drawers and shelves around Hillway, evidence of his stuttering
half-attempts
to catalogue his own possessions. As with so much else in the House of Books, the story of the Hagaddah’s journey from Hamburg to Hillway was destined to die with my grandfather.

In a nod to practicality, for many years Chimen kept this Haggadah not in his home but in a bank vault. He could not see it unless he made a special trip to get it out of the vault, which must have offended his deepest scholarly instincts, imbued as he was with the idea that what he had in his house were his academic fields’ greatest working libraries. But at least it was safe from flood and fire and all the other risks that came from living in an increasingly dilapidated old house. Later on, however, he brought it back to Hillway and carefully placed it in a green metal filing cabinet in his bedroom, the key to which he kept with him at all times. Meseritch’s masterpiece now resides at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, where, one can only assume, it
receives somewhat more delicate treatment than that afforded the manuscripts in Hillway.

While he was still a professor, luxuriating in his improbably late rush up the academic ladder, from adjunct lecturer to tutor to chair of a newly created department at University College London, Chimen proposed a book to several publishers on the great Hebrew manuscript collections of the world. Many of those publishers were interested. After all, the little man from Smalyevichy’s knowledge was unrivalled. His involvement in the Prague Scrolls saga, his triumphant connection with the sale of the Sassoon library, his acknowledged role in creating the global market for rare Hebraica, had proved it. Chimen explained, in great detail, that he would need grant money to visit libraries in Paris, Copenhagen, the Vatican, Israel, the United States and several other countries; and he carefully laid out his vision for the book. But then, there followed silence. After getting the publishers interested, he simply failed to follow through. When it came to actually completing the work, this project, like so many of his other large-scale writing ideas – the biography of Marx, his own autobiography – just fizzled out. He could not find uninterrupted time for the research; he would not set aside the hours needed to fill in grant applications; he had too many conferences to attend and too many lectures to prepare. Eventually it became clear that the book would never be written; and, gradually, his correspondence with the publishers on the project dried up. Nobody doubted that he knew more about his field than any of his peers; but, at the same time, nobody – himself included – really believed that he would sit down for long enough to write the definitive book of scholarship.

For, as he neared the age of retirement, Chimen kept up a
schedule that would have been impossible for most men half his age. Having only received the academic recognition he had long felt was his due in his fifties, he was loath to curtail his career now simply because he had five grandchildren and had reached the age where he could claim a state pension. He was having the time of his life. He wrote more articles than ever, edited a book on Polish Jewry, and, most lucratively, spent an increasing amount of time evaluating manuscripts for Sotheby’s, and, later, also for Bloomsbury Book Auctions, a new auction-house set up in 1983 by Lord John Kerr, who had previously been head of the book department at Sotheby’s. The materials that Chimen pored over and evaluated were almost like his progeny, said Nabil Saidi, an expert on Oriental manuscripts who worked with Chimen for many years at Sotheby’s, helping to rearrange the older man’s chaotic index cards into a format suitable for publication as catalogues. ‘Everything you catalogue becomes part of you. For him, it was his life. It was not just making money. It wasn’t just purely a job. It was his life, day and night. I don’t think he ever stopped thinking of manuscripts and books and pamphlets’. In his handwritten reports to Kerr, there is an intimacy to Chimen’s words, a sense of private worlds hidden behind public facades. ‘On Friday I went to Great Yarmouth and examined at the Vicarage the Scroll of Esther, which is Dutch mid 17th century’, he wrote in late November 1988. ‘It’s an important scroll, illustrated, though not in too good a state. My estimate is between three thousand pounds to four thousand pounds. In case the church will decide to sell it will require a careful description. I promised that you will write a report to the vicar.’

The excitement that Chimen experienced when he encountered a printed jewel was utterly contagious. Friends would share his joy, at, say, discovering a volume from the town of Shklov – an area of
Medinat Russiya
(The Land of Russia) that had been a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with a thriving
Rabbinic culture and a Jewish population of 65,000, until the partition of Poland had delivered the land to Russia in 1772. There, geographically cut off from the bulk of the regional Jewish population, a Polish-Jewish island in a Russian sea, an autonomous Jewish culture began to thrive, which generated a number of important Hebrew language scientific and artistic works. As a result of this historical accident, wrote the historian David Fishman, the Jews of Shklov became ‘Russia’s first modern Jews’. ‘This book is extremely rare!’ Brad Hill remembers Chimen shouting out, his Eastern European accent accentuated with his joy, his right forefinger wagging, when, as a young scholar, Hill visited the House of Books to study bibliography with Chimen in the 1980s. Hill, who went on to become the librarian in charge of George Washington University’s Judaica collection, pictured the five feet one inch tall Chimen practically jumping out of his seat in his attempt to convey the importance of the moment. ‘All books from Shklov are rare! Extremely rare!’ Or, as he pronounced it,
Ehksh-treemlee hr-ayre
. It was, thought Hill, a world view as much as a bibliographic statement. What it meant was something like ‘I have in front of me an artefact from a vanished moment in time, a glimpse into the lives lived by a fascinating group of people, who helped, in a peculiarly important way, to shape the Eastern European Jewish world. And if you’re not as bowled over by that as I am, well I’m not sure we can go on with our conversation’.

Chimen continued to globetrot, going to conferences, evaluating libraries, searching for rare pieces that he could add to his collection. He visited Belgrade to deliver a series of lectures on the British Chartists, went to Switzerland, to Frankfurt, to Canada. He lectured in Oxford and London. Being in demand suited his temperament and gratified the ego that had been
frustrated for so long by his lack of academic recognition. Several times a year, he travelled to Israel. Frequently, Sotheby’s flew him to New York. He was acknowledged in the world of the auction houses as the ranking expert on rare Jewish manuscripts, with encyclopaedic knowledge and phenomenal powers of instant recall, as the Cambridge historian Christopher de Hamel discovered, when, as a young man newly hired by Sotheby’s, he consulted Chimen about a photograph that he had been sent of a fifteenth-century Hebrew Psalter. ‘Chimen glanced in the direction of the photograph I was clutching’, wrote de Hamel decades later, in a ninetieth birthday tribute to my grandfather. Chimen told him ‘“It was sold at Parke-Bernet, July 17th, 1956, lot 14, $18,000. It was previously in the Siegfried collection, Frankfurt, Baer sale, January 1922, lot 3, 90 marks. It is missing two leaves after folio 17, leaf 61 is a modern replacement, and the prayer at the end is unique. And it is now worth sixty three thousand pounds to sixty seven thousand five hundred pounds”. My whole visit had taken, on a generous estimate, about four seconds’.

He reminded Nabil Saidi of a ‘bumblebee, going from one place to the other. He couldn’t bear not being in the centre of things. If he didn’t know about a book [coming up for sale] he would be absolutely beside himself. He wasn’t laid back at all. It would have been very difficult for Miriam to keep him under control. He was doing a lot of things at the same time. He was everywhere at the same time’. I picture my turbo-charged grandfather, buzzing from place to place and from book to book. As an audio accompaniment, I hear the last few minutes of Dmitri Kabalevsky’s manic orchestral suite,
The Comedians
, the string and brass sections racing against each other in a frenzy of explosive energy. Faster and faster, round and round, the notes conjuring up all of the chaos and wonder of modernity.

If there were mists of time at 5 Hillway, they bubbled up out
of this spare room in which the most prized Hebrew manuscripts and books were kept. They were the mists out of which had emerged centuries of rich, if now obscure, Talmudic scholarship; out of which had germinated the great yeshivas that had shaped Yehezkel; out of which, finally, had emerged the Haskalah – the Jewish enlightenment that sought to root Eastern European Jews in the secular world, the secular history, that was reshaping human society so radically from the eighteenth century onward. There were elements of all of these ideas in Chimen.

It was in the upstairs front room at Hillway that Shmuel Ettinger died one night in 1988, from a massive heart attack, while visiting from Israel. I remember the look of absolute devastation on Chimen’s face the next day, as he talked about what had happened. For the first time, Chimen looked like a very old man. Dazed. Overwhelmed. Shrunken into himself. Shmuel was like a brother to him, an intellectual soulmate for over half a century, ever since they had met at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, back before the war.

To a man more prone to self-pity, such a loss could have been shattering. But Chimen did not let it destroy him. He mourned Shmuel, wrote about him, but then he managed to move on. If it was his fate to outlive his contemporaries, then he would restock his well of friends with younger people, with scholars such as Dovid Katz and the journalist David Mazower, who increasingly turned up on Hillway’s doorstep to learn from the master.

Quite consciously, Chimen now used his books, his vast, unique knowledge, to bring fresh blood into his life, to introduce to Hillway people with whom he could once again discourse and debate. ‘What a gust of fresh air it was for me to study with a master of the bibliography of my field, with a man who was the
master of bibliography of many fields. He not only knew all the Yiddish academic books and journals of pre-Holocaust East European Yiddish studies (particularly philology), but he had most of them’, recalled Katz, an Oxford-based New Yorker who subsequently moved to Vilnius, Lithuania, to study the history of the Yiddish language and culture
in situ
. Whenever he came through London, Katz spent hours at Hillway debating with Chimen. Katz argued that Yiddish was a vibrant, living language while Chimen averred that it was, essentially, dead. Katz was one of those few to whom Chimen willingly granted at least partial access to the inner sanctum, to some of the books in the upstairs front room. ‘One of the first [books] he showed me’, Katz wrote, ‘was a 1592 book,
Mysterium
, by the Christian (and missionary) author Elias Schade (or Schadeus) which included a description of Yiddish that has remained important for Yiddish linguists to this day. I nearly fainted when he said he would gladly allow me to photocopy the pages I need and return it to him. He saw that too, and said, “You see, I trust you”’.

Like so many others over the decades, Katz and the other young scholars who began attending the salon in the 1970s and 1980s, were irresistibly drawn into all aspects of the Hillway experience – which meant not just handling rare books, but also staying to dinner. And, so, like flickering candles that do not go out, Mimi’s kitchen and dining room, denuded of so many of their original guests by political dispute, by dispersal over the world, and by the passage of time, once more roared to life. They came to learn, and, after Chimen gave them little porcelain cups of coffee and slices of strudel or coffee cake, they stayed to talk. Soon, they were regular visitors, as welcomed into the house as Shmuel Ettinger or Abby Robinson had been in years gone by. Mimi, now increasingly crippled by her diabetes, would cook them dinner, as she had for generations of scholars. It was a gargantuan effort; but she simply could not bear the thought of
not being a hostess. And, when the grandchildren came around to visit, they would be absorbed into these conversations just as they had been in earlier years with older groups of friends.