The House of Twenty Thousand Books (31 page)

While the reading progressed, my mother, Vavi and other guests would start talking – whispering among themselves, telling jokes, laughing at, or with, the children. Predictably, Chimen would unleash a volley of orders to be quiet; as predictably, he would be ignored. It was a game that everyone happily played along with. I am sure that, had he actually had to conduct an entire Seder before a quiescent, silent, respectful audience, he would have been bored out of his mind. For, while he took the ritual seriously, he enjoyed tweaking the traditions to meet the humours of his guests. In earlier years, that had meant Henry Collins singing the
Yiddischa Toreador
. Now it meant adding in songs such as
Three Crows Sitting on a Wall
, sung, to general acclaim, in an impossibly Scottish accent by Al and his children. Yet Chimen’s frustration was not all for show. Paradoxically, compared to the Communist days, now the participants (the younger ones anyway) knew far less about Jewish ritual life, were less familiar with both Yiddish and Hebrew, and were less patient of the eight days of dietary restrictions around Passover. And, in reaction, Chimen did get genuinely annoyed. At times his requests for silence sounded like screams of anguish. He would stop the reading mid-sentence, and, looking up severely, would order people by name to shut up. Then, without a pause for breath, he would resume his recitation. After Mimi died in 1997, Chimen kept up the ritual for more than a decade, even as his voice began to fail him. Now, my parents, Jenny, and the cousins all came over to do the cooking. Now, if Chimen’s voice grew so hoarse that he
could not continue, Vavi was ready to step in and read the Hebrew text. As he read now, a respectful silence fell: the effort it took him to get the pages of words out of his mouth was Herculean, like climbing a mountain, like running a marathon.

The size of the Seder crowd dwindled. Chimen did not seem to mind. Fast going deaf, he was far more comfortable surrounded by a smaller group – which might have been one of the reasons he took such happiness in hosting his ‘ladies’ lunch club’ each weekend. They would arrive like clockwork: his nieces Eve and Julia, his widowed sisters-in-law Minna and, after Steve died, Sara; his widowed cousin Phyllis, a couple of old friends, including Alec Waterman’s widow, Ray, and Raph’s widow, the author Alison Light – Raph had died of cancer in late 1996 (a few months before Mimi’s death) at the age of only sixty-one, nine years after his and Alison’s wedding. Occasionally, my brother Kolya would be allowed in to this ladies’ club on sufferance. ‘Chimen was experimenting with cooking’, Alison remembered, with a smile, more than fifteen years later. ‘He’d make a very nice aubergine dip; there was a soup he’d make; and he would do lemon sole with butter. He’d do all the courses. That was the thing that was impressive’. Gently, my recently widowed grandfather (who had been taught to cook by Mimi in the last years of her life, when she realised that he would outlive her and would need a way to keep the salon going) played the role of ladies’ man to his gathering of widows. They would talk about politics, about old friends, about old quarrels. They would rehash the day’s news, gossip mildly, and, most importantly, tend to each other’s emotions. ‘He was looking after us’, Alison explained. ‘And looking after himself at the same time. We were all bereaved. There was quite a lot of talk about people who had died. It was a way of bonding because of that. You could talk about anything. An amazing amount of frankness. There’s a particular kind of warmth or sadness in an embrace. And I remember sharing that a lot at that time’.

As a very old man, Chimen would sit on a simple wooden chair at his dining room table, a pile of books and papers next to him. The effort it took, by then, to move himself from one room to another meant that once he was settled in a spot he would often stay there for hours on end, largely cocooned within the world of silence experienced by the elderly deaf. His eyes, watery and red, behind ever-thicker lenses, were his lifeline; his one remaining, largely functional link to the external world. He would take a book, lean upon it, hunch forward slightly. His glasses would slide maybe a quarter of an inch down his nose; his left hand, fingers slightly splayed, would hold down the open pages. His right elbow would rest on the corner of the book, his right hand, fingers also splayed, would rest against his temple. In the biography of Yehezkel Abramsky,
A King in His Beauty
, there’s a photo of Yehezkel. His beard is so fine that’s it almost invisible, a vague shadow over his shirt and tie. In this photo, I see Chimen. It is the same pose, the same utter absorption in the Word. Both men were
talmid khokhem
, wise scholars.

I
N THE LATE
1950s, Mimi’s mother, Bellafeigel Nirenstein, had often sat stony-faced and angry-looking in the front room of Hillway. Her health spiralling downward, she had had to move out of her own home and she spent the last few years of her life living with Mimi and Chimen. The solemnity of my
great-grandmother
’s features in photographs from those years is almost a metaphor for the front room itself. This was, I think, an austere chamber, a room lacking whimsy. Whereas the dining room, gorgeously lit by the sun coming in off of the garden and through the glass rear-wall, was frivolous enough for Chimen, in his old
age, to dance around with plastic cups balanced atop his head, and whereas the kitchen was a place for endless gossip and informal chatter, the front room was in general a serious place. It became weighed down by its own contents: by its overstuffed armchairs and its books – volumes cascaded off of the shelves and onto the coffee table, the floor, onto every available surface and ultimately, in combination with a collection of heavy potted plants, blocked off access to the fireplace. From the early 1990s onwards, it served as a sickroom, first for Mimi and later for Chimen himself, its air poisoned by the smells of their medicines and ointments, by the odours of sickness and old age. Mirroring the physical decline of its owners, the basic infrastructure of the room (like the rest of the house) fell into greater disrepair. The built-in curved chest of drawers, which hugged the inside line of the windows overlooking the street, started to crack under the weight of generations of guests who used it as an extra seat. Its white paint started to fleck, as did the paint on the windowsills. The armchairs leaked stuffing. The lighting seemed to grow dimmer by the year as the lampshades grew dirtier. The couch-cum-bed that rested against the far wall seemed to sag a little more each year.

I remember the conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, during his sojourn at the London Symphony Orchestra, sitting on the window seat, his tall, thin body silhouetted against the window, singing songs and telling stories. In memory I see the conductor sharing the perch with a number of potted plants, their leaves drooping, under-watered but never quite dead.

As a young man, Raph Samuel spent endless hours in the front room, chatting with friends and fellow historians. Or arguing with Chimen – whom he viewed both as a second father and as his intellectual mentor, and with whom he ended up fighting as only
close relatives can. By the time I came on the scene, he was no longer calling Mimi and Chimen ‘Comrade’, but I have a peculiarly vivid recollection of him frequently bestowing that honorific on me. As a young woman, my aunt Jenny had loathed being reduced to ‘Comrade’ by her elder, adored cousin. But it struck me as a membership ticket to a club; it meant that he was taking me seriously. He would say it in a slightly nasal way, his circular glasses slipping down his nose, an ironic smile creeping up the corner of his mouth. I loved the frisson I felt as he sallied into the dining room or the living room – depending on the time of day – in his tan suede jacket, said ‘Hello, Comrade’ to me, and watched for his now-anti-Communist uncle to flinch.

There was an almost unrelentingly high cultural tone to the front room. Even though the house was fashioned in the 1940s and 1950s as something of a bohemian salon, what that meant sartorially was that the jackets were rumpled and the shirts occasionally went un-ironed, that ties were optional rather than mandatory. As the broader culture adopted the more casual, frequently flamboyant, dress codes of the 1960s, the older habitués of Hillway never dressed more informally than in tweeds and corduroys.

Freethinking in theory, in practice Mimi and Chimen were remarkably traditional in demeanour. When they wanted to take Jack and Jenny on a childhood outing in the 1950s, it would be to a cultural event such as a screening of the film version of Laurence Olivier’s
Henry V
; or to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the bard’s plays on stage. Decades later, Jack and Jenny recalled once going to Stratford to see
Coriolanus
and driving back in a pea-soup fog so dense that Mimi had to get out of the car to feel where the road was.

When the family bought a television in the early 1960s, Jenny, seeking entertainment other than the classics, would watch
Bonanza
and other cowboy programmes. Chimen lambasted her for wasting her time on non-academic pursuits. ‘He couldn’t understand’, Jenny said, ‘how anything could be enjoyed that didn’t have a basis in absolute reality’. When, as a guitar-playing student in the late 1960s, Jenny decided to introduce the music of The Beatles to Chimen forcibly, by locking him into the front room and playing
Sergeant Pepper
at full volume, the result was not a success. Chimen, who was at the time busily trying to prepare a series of very learned, very earnest lectures that he was to give at Sussex University to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, listened, but was distinctly underwhelmed. Too old, too bruised by his earlier political experiences, the social revolutions of the 1960s and the changing enthusiasms of the young did not inspire Chimen with any renewed revolutionary fervour. As students took to the barricades in 1968, Chimen watched from the sidelines, or, at most, talked over events with some of the graduate students at UCL. This was not his revolt; it was not his utopia that was being stumbled towards. And its music and slogans and cultural priorities were not ones that he understood. When forced to confront modern popular culture, his nose wrinkled in disgust, and he looked as if he was being tormented by a particularly nasty odour. There was something
treif
, dirty, un-kosher about the rhythms and sounds and colours of this new world. One year, after a particularly gluttonous Christmas feast – my grandparents had, over the years, reluctantly made their peace with the fact that the younger generations, not brought up religiously, enjoyed the festivities and the gift-giving of Christmas – my brother decided to put on a video of the vomiting scene from the Monty Python film,
The Meaning of Life
. There we were, stuffed to the gills, watching a waiter sporting an absurdly faux French accent, asking
an overstuffed and projectile-vomiting diner if he wanted ‘a
wafer-thin
mint’. The diner says he could not eat another thing; but the waiter presses and presses. Finally he concedes, eats the mint and explodes. It is a vile scene, so disgusting, so over-the-top, that it forces anxious laughter out of most viewers. Not Chimen. He looked at the scene; wrinkled his nose; and gave his verdict. ‘It has no aesthetic value whatsoever’, he proclaimed, and turned back to continue his conversation about more serious matters.

About the only thing good that he saw in the myriad revolutions in personal behaviour and artistic expression unleashed by the 1960s was that they broke down the boundaries of formality to the extent that it allowed him to call people like Isaiah Berlin by their first names. In their correspondence at this period each asked the other the gleeful question: ‘Do you mind if I call you by your first name?’ and there followed a series of missives in which they experimented with just how to do so. Dear Isaiah, Sir Isaiah, Isaiah.

There
was
, however, one exception to the overwhelmingly high-culture rules of Hillway, and that was Mimi’s addiction to the BBC radio soap opera
The Archers
. It had been running since 1951, and it was entirely possible that Mimi knew its plotlines better than those of any piece of great literature and understood its complex family relationships as well she did those of the extended Nirenstein–Abramsky clan. Like a religious ritual, every afternoon when the programme came on air, Mimi would retire to the front room, lie down on her sofa-bed and listen to the radio. For a woman who never stopped cooking, hosting, counselling her numerous psychiatric patients from the Royal Free Hospital, and solving other people’s problems, it was the one meditative moment in her busy day. No one was allowed to disturb her. If you telephoned at that time, Chimen would curtly tell you that Mimi could not talk, that it was ‘Archer’s Hour’. If one of the grandchildren made the mistake of barging into the front room
during those minutes, they would be shooed away by Mimi; it was the only time when she showed impatience.

The wall against which Mimi’s Archer’s Hour sofa rested was the only wall in that room with no books on it. From the time of his death in 1976 onwards, an intimidating black and white sketch of Yehezkel Abramsky hung there instead. It was drawn by the artist Hendel Lieberman in London in 1950, the year before Yehezkel retired from the Beth Din and, seen off by thousands of his followers at the railway station, moved to Jerusalem. The lines of Yehezkel’s face were firmly inked, the long rabbinic beard pulling the head slightly downward, the eyes piercing in their intensity. Everything about that image was intended to bear witness: this was a portrait of a man who was used both to observing the world around him and to having a crowd hang on his every word. This was a
Gedolem
, a great sage. While Chimen and Mimi were not religious, the placing of the portrait in their front room spoke to the fact that Yehezkel’s influence over the inhabitants of Hillway was, until the day Chimen died, extraordinarily strong.

After the Second World War and the destruction of millions of Jews, the head of the Beth Din in London could lay claim to being one of the most – perhaps even
the
most – influential figures in European religious Jewry: Chimen certainly averred that his father had been recognised as the foremost contemporary scholar of the Talmud. It was a role in which the conservative Yehezkel excelled and one for which his followers would come to venerate him. Three-quarters of a century after he was made a
dayan
, and nearly forty years after his death, as I write this, Yehezkel’s letters still turn up at auction houses; he regularly appears on lists of the most important rabbis of the last two and a half thousand years; and a Facebook page has even been set up for him by his
admirers. Yehezkel’s fame was quite a shadow for his sons to live under.

In religious Jewish circles, stories continue to circulate about my great-grandfather. One goes like this: Yehezkel was called to court to defend the practice of ritual slaughter. The judge looked at the deposition in front of him, and then asked, ‘Rabbi Abramsky, it says here that you are the foremost authority of Jewish Law in the British Empire. Is that true?’ Yehezkel answered, ‘That is true, Your Honour’. The judge continued, ‘And that you are the most eloquent spokesman for Jewish Law in the British Empire?’ ‘That is also true, Your Honour.’ Probing more deeply, the judge threw out another question: ‘It also says here that you are the most senior rabbi in the British Empire. Is that correct?’ Once more, Yehezkel replied ‘That is correct, Your Honour’. At that point, the judge apparently got a bit flustered. ‘Rabbi Abramsky, how do you resolve your answers with the Talmudic teachings of humility?’ Yehezkel looked at the judge, and, presumably with a twinkle in his eye, said, ‘It is indeed a problem, Your Honour, but I’m under oath’.

When Yehezkel died in September 1976, Chimen immediately flew to Jerusalem and arrived in time to join the more than forty thousand mourners who accompanied his father’s bier to its burial in the Har HaMenuchot cemetery, on the hilltops on the western edge of Jerusalem. It was one of the largest funerals ever to take place in Israel. According to instructions that Yehezkel left for those in charge of his funeral, two students walked behind his bier carrying all twenty-four volumes of the
Chazon Yehezkel
, his monumental commentary on the
Tosefta
, which had won the first Israel Prize for rabbinic literature. Yehezkel Abramsky, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter assigned to cover the funeral noted, was the ‘dean of Israel’s rabbis and [was] widely considered the foremost Talmud scholar of the age’. In a tribute written for the
Jewish Chronicle
, England’s
former Chief Rabbi, Sir Israel Brodie, described him as ‘a Prince of the Torah’. There is, today, a square named after Yehezkel in Jerusalem.

Wherever a person sat in the front room at 5 Hillway throughout the last three decades of the salon’s existence, Rabbi Abramsky stood watch. The sketch weighed heavily on Chimen as he grew older, his father’s presence almost as powerful in death as it had been during his long life. Chimen often looked at that portrait during those decades in which he tried so hard to distance himself from his earlier support for Stalin’s world vision. He would stare at the stern black and white sketch of his father’s face, and, I believe, silently apologise for the Communist Party autobiography that he had penned in which he had insulted his father’s character. Fascinated by Tolstoy’s novel
Resurrection,
with its themes of sin and redemption, he was, I think, performing his own, very personal, version of
Teshuvah
, the atonement for past wrongs that plays a central role in Jewish ritual life. It was why God did not punish Cain for killing Abel. It was a way to come back from moral death. It was how one could make oneself anew.

In 1971, Chimen attempted (successfully) to convince Isaiah Berlin to write an essay for the collection that he was editing in honour of the left-wing historian E.H. Carr, who had long been a close personal friend of Chimen’s. Berlin expressed reservations and asked about the political leanings of other contributors. On 1 June, Chimen wrote back that he did not know how to describe the contributors, ‘except for yours truly who could, possibly, be classified as an ex-communist, ex-Marxist, a mixture today of a radical-liberal-conservative-cum-counter-revolutionary; one who has lost his faith and has not yet found a new one, in a word a person who searches, gropes, doubts, constantly making “
post-mortems
” on his own thinking…and somehow still believes in humanistic values’. It was the most introspective note that Chimen ever hit. And it summed up the philosophical and political
dilemma that he would be caught within for the rest of his life: all of the easy solutions, the formulaic responses to the messiness of life, had failed. Chimen knew this, knew that he could no longer subscribe to utopian beliefs; yet he could never quite set aside the dreams of his youth.