The House of Twenty Thousand Books (29 page)

Staring compulsory retirement in the face, and not liking what he saw, in 1983 he spent some months as a visiting professor at the Taube Institute at Brandeis University in Boston, giving a series of thirteen lectures on Jewish political movements and involvement in socialist and Zionist causes from the 1860s to the Second World War. He was housed in an expensive, but empty, apartment that, he reported to Mimi in one of his almost-daily letters, must have been owned by ‘an eccentric bachelor; it is empty of anything, no kettle, no telephone, full of empty cupboards. I feel, at the moment, cut off from the world’. Cut off he might have felt, but he was happy too. He was in demand,
travelling back and forth across the Atlantic. The strident anti-Americanism of his Communist years was by now a distant memory.

In 1982, Chimen retired formally from his professorship at University College London. The university threw him a dinner party. Salmon, peas, and salad; followed by a choice of strawberries and cream or apple strudel; topped off with coffee and petits fours. Then, after toasts had been raised to the Queen, to ‘Professor and Mrs. Abramsky’, and to the college, Chimen got up to speak. He repeated the formula that he had first penned to Isaiah Berlin several years earlier, stressing the importance of ‘freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement to other men – all other senses of freedom are an extension of this’. And, he now continued, ‘Men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them’. Without choice, he told his audience, people’s ‘lives will lack purpose, and, in the end, they will lose all that makes them human’.

Chimen’s retirement was merely fictive, the result of college rules on mandatory retirement at the age of sixty-five rather than any desire or intention to sever his ties to academia. Now officially an old age pensioner, he promptly negotiated a part-time teaching position at the university for several more years. He spent months more teaching at Stanford in California, first in the early 1980s, then again in 1990. He travelled from Stanford to Israel, and back to Stanford, and then sent Mimi a plaintive letter saying that I [Sasha] was the only family member who had written to him since his return. ‘The rest of the family, including yourself’, he wrote in reproach, ‘have ignored me as if I do not, or hardly, exist’. Not surprisingly, Mimi sent an annoyed response explaining that she
had always supported him as he went on his peregrinations around the world and, essentially, telling him to stop whining. She knew how important those journeys were to Chimen. Each trip served as a shot of adrenalin for him, making him ever more energetic, ever more enthusiastic for the academic world into which he had landed, late in life, with such a splash.

By now, Chimen regarded himself as a repository for all things Jewish, as a Jack of all trades when it came to understanding and interpreting Jewish life down the centuries in Europe and beyond. He bought and sold rare coins dating back to the Jewish Revolt against Rome that began in 66 AD, as well as coins issued by King Herod a generation earlier. He bought ancient prayer books. He even bought an original ‘petition against the Jews’ published in London in 1661. Straddling the secular and religious worlds as he had his whole adult life – ‘I am very much more able to embrace and comprehend all sorts’, he explained, at a conference in which he jousted with England’s Chief Rabbi over the role of secularism in Jewish culture – he travelled frequently to Israel; corresponded with leading academics and political figures about how Israel should present itself to the world; and had meetings with London’s leading religious figures. In private conversations and correspondence, from the mid-1970s onward, he frequently criticised Israeli government policy towards its Muslim population and its Arab neighbours. As he aged, so he felt increasingly proprietorial toward Israel: he was proud of its accomplishments, embarrassed and shamed by its failures and appalled by its increasingly heavy-handed response to Palestinian opposition to Israel’s presence in the Occupied Territories. On 22 June 1982, he wrote, in pencil, an anguished letter to his friend Isaiah Berlin, about the policies of the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, towards the country’s Arab population, and on the war in Lebanon. ‘I am off to Israel to take part in the President’s Conference on Zionist ideology’, he concluded, ‘and I do hope to
criticise some aspects of this policy which I find totally opposed to moral principles’.

One after another, Chimen’s utopias were breaking down: forced to abandon Communism, he had put his faith in a socialist form of Zionism. Watching Israel swing politically to the right, he feared losing that anchor too. His
Eretz Israel
, he was starting to see, would never be realised in a political community. It was, truly, a utopia, a nowhere-land. From the 1960s onwards, he had sought solace for his political disillusionment in academia, the rituals of the university setting replacing political activism in his daily life, the culture of scholarship replacing the grand dreams of political transformation.

At a time when the world of English academia was still hidebound by tradition, he would hold graduate seminars in his book-lined office, ask the students to call him by his first name, and afterwards, in a startling breakdown of academic hierarchy, invite the most promising back to Hillway to meet historians such as Shmuel Ettinger, Hayim Ben-Sasson, James Joll, the classical historian Arnaldo Momigliano, and others, ‘all the great luminaries of Hebrew University, and the emergent Tel Aviv university’, recalled his one-time student and future colleague Ada Rapoport-Albert, who had come to London from Israel to study. At Hanukkah, Chimen would encourage his acolytes to come back to Hillway to drink red wine and sample Mimi’s deliciously greasy potato latkes. For Ada, who was adopted into Hillway almost as a member of the family, ‘the way students like me were accepted and integrated in the crowd was extremely unusual. It was an awe-inspiring cocktail you got hooked onto’. Hillway served as an incubator, fostering love of knowledge and backing up that knowledge with human warmth. Many of these young
men and women from UCL were adopted into the ever-expanding Hillway tribe, and subsequently enjoyed glittering academic careers in major Jewish history departments around the world. Decades later, Ada herself would become head of the department that Chimen had dominated for so many years.

Hillway was always overflowing with people, with students and with friends and family from around the world. Elliott Medrich, the son of one of Mimi’s first cousins, arrived from America in the summer of 1966: ‘I went alone, had an unusual experience – one of my travelling mates, who happened to be a female, her place to stay fell through; I arrived at Hillway and had her in tow, and Miriam wouldn’t just find her a place to stay – she insisted she stay there – and we weren’t a couple by any means. But we stayed together in the front room for two weeks. There weren’t short stays. You were sucked into the life of the place. You thought of yourself as a member of the family. I thought of myself as totally belonging there’. For Elliott, the table was the central meeting point at Hillway: ‘The endless hours spent round the table had something for everyone. The orchestration, the conduct of time, making sure everyone was comfortable, well-fed, and participated in the life of the evening’.

The culinary arts of Mimi’s kitchen and dining room cast a long shadow. Even at the height of his academic career, Chimen remained uncomfortable using University College’s catering facilities. Or maybe, wisely, he just trusted Mimi’s culinary instincts more. Whatever the reason, on days when he was presiding over a conference or had a guest speaker, he would arrive in Bloomsbury early in the day, find a parking space, open the boot of his car (his vehicles were always well-worn, and frequently sported the dings collected during his creative driving
ventures along London’s increasingly clogged streets) and start unloading platter after platter of Mimi’s home-cooked delicacies – doing his utmost to recreate the aura of the Hillway salon in the heavy wood-panelled nineteenth-century conference rooms of University College. On occasion, he took this to a ludicrous extreme. There was the time, for example, when the Prince Mikasa, a younger brother of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito, and a man who had made a name for himself as a specialist in Aramaic, came to lecture. He was surrounded by bodyguards who had the physique of sumo wrestlers, colleagues recall. After the lecture was over, Chimen ceremoniously ushered the Emperor’s brother into the eating area and then proceeded to offer him Mimi’s fishcakes and sandwiches. The archives are silent as to the royal personage’s reaction.

Back at Hillway, Chimen would talk smilingly about High Table at St. Antony’s, or Senate faculty proceedings at University College – in his head still astonished that the ‘little man’, as he called himself, had made it to the big time. His three closest friends from Hebrew University, Jacob Talmon, Shmuel Ettinger, and Abby Robinson, had become renowned academics decades earlier –Talmon was described by the Dutch historian of ideas, Frank Ankersmit, as being among the twenty most important historians of the century; Ettinger, who had written his dissertation on the massacre of Ukrainian Jews in 1648, was widely hailed as Israel’s leading modern Jewish historian; and Robinson, one of the world’s most prominent mathematicians, ended his career as Sterling Professor of Mathematics at Yale. Now, at last, Chimen was gaining similar recognition. To Mimi and the family, he would lovingly recall his conversations with Isaiah Berlin at the mahogany dining tables in the Athenaeum; and on the occasions he received a letter from the chancellor of University College, Lord Annan, he would almost caress the paper as he revealed its contents to his dining room audience. That Annan, a peer of the
realm, would communicate with the little man from Minsk, the ex-Communist without a formal degree, tickled Chimen pink.

What he would not,
could
not do, was to talk about his own books. For, while he edited several volumes and contributed essays to many others, on subjects ranging from Polish Jewry to Jews and chess, after the massive tome that he had written with Henry Collins on Karl Marx and the First International he never wrote another book himself. The biography of Marx that he had planned withered once Henry died. The memoirs that others prodded him to embark on never made it past a few rough scribbles. Several other projects, either proposed by him to publishers, or vice versa, in the latter decades of his life, somehow never made it beyond the drawing board. He was, observed his former student Steve Zipperstein, ‘blessed and cursed by his inheriting the fabled capacity to actually have a mental photograph of a page when he read it. Chimen could actually do that’. To Zipperstein, it appeared that that clutter of words in Chimen’s head had an almost paralysing impact. Like Funes the Memorious, the central character in one of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories, ‘he remembered everything. Chimen never forgot. And that was responsible for his writer’s block. He was a master without a masterpiece’. Eric Hobsbawm put it more prosaically: ‘He was enormously erudite and certainly not good at shaping it’.

As Chimen and Miriam aged, the dining room grew hotter. With Mimi in poor health, she would crank up the central heating, sometimes to over eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and, every few hours, she retreated to a couch against the dividing wall with the kitchen to snatch a few minutes of quiet time and rest. While she lay there, sometimes recuperating from falls which she seemed to suffer with increasing frequency and which left her legs swollen
and horribly bruised, other times just exhausted from all her duties as a hostess, the conversation around her would continue. So crowded was the room – with chairs, with books, with people, with a large television and with the broken-down old piano – that the couch almost faded into the background.

Those few spaces of the walls in this room that were not covered with books were festooned with artwork and photos. Coming into the dining room from the hallway and looking out towards the garden, on the right hand wall were two large pictures: the first was an oil painting, by an artist named Sandra Pepys, on an elongated, rectangular canvas, showing a panorama of Jerusalem’s old city. It was a view similar to that which Chimen would have seen as a young student at Hebrew University, when looking down from the high slopes of Mount Scopus. The second, by Mordecai Ardon – a well-known artist and the father of Chimen and Mimi’s good friend Mike – was ink on paper, framed and glazed. It was titled
Creation of the World
, and portrayed the letters of the Hebrew alphabet extending outward from a core, spiralling away from the viewer. The effect, deliberately conjured up, was to present an image of energy rushing away at warp speed from the origin point. Next to these two pictures was a framed antique map of the eastern Mediterranean. In the top left corner of the map was a lion, perched atop a tiny island, a tree with a snake coiled around its trunk to his left. It was, the note under the lion explained, ‘A Map, shewing Situation of Paradice and Country Inhabited by Patriarchs’. Under these paintings was a heavy wooden bureau, with a roll-up top and dozens of little
pull-out
drawers. Cluttered to the point of overflow, it served as Mimi’s desk, the place she sat to write cheques, and, on occasion, letters; and, simultaneously, it functioned as a sort of stationery storage site – for rolls of old Green Shield Stamps; for half-century-old receipts and fading letterhead paper from Shapiro, Valentine & Co, which had closed in 1969 once Chimen’s academic career
gathered steam; all intermingled with yet more personal correspondence. It was one more hoarder’s corner within a hoarder’s house.

In the final years of Chimen’s life, a huge original poster from the Paris Commune – issued during the heady days of revolution, before the army regained control of Paris and containing the black and white text of one of the Commune decrees – given to him on his ninetieth birthday by my brother, Kolya, hung in an imposing black frame with red borders on the wall opposite, above where Mimi’s couch had formerly been placed. It was the one intrusion of radical political imagery remaining in a room that, otherwise, had banished such symbols of Chimen’s past passions. He would sit in a reclining armchair, a large, heavy, old-fashioned television and video player perched on a table in front of him, and he would crank the volume up to full to watch the news. If all worked well, he would catch what the newscaster was reporting. But if his hearing aid was malfunctioning, or if his ears were particularly clogged up, he would look around in discomfort, his eyes glancing over toward the Communard poster, seeking solace in visual stimulation to make up for the fact that he could no longer hear what was being said around him. He would sit there, exhausted, his eyes flickering between the poster and the loud but unheard television. Frequently, he would doze off in that chair, lying completely still, his quiet breathing the only indication that he was still alive.