The House of Twenty Thousand Books (33 page)

Not content simply to attend conferences as one among many participants, Chimen also resumed his participation on the international lecture circuit. His old protégés at Stanford convinced him to fly out to California for one more series of lectures. He did so, and was received with acclaim. He was, members of the audience felt, still on top of his game: his lectures, presented in a series of workshops to faculty and graduate students, were packed with facts, his memory as extraordinary as ever. There was, though, a poignancy to these meetings: his audience knew, as did Chimen, that it was almost certainly the last time he would have the stamina to travel so far for work.

Despite his public resilience, in private he was now a deeply lonely man. There was, he wrote to me, ‘little to report from an empty house. Empty, i.e. without Miri’. But even without its hostess, the House of Books continued to exert its magnetic attraction for scholars and bibliophiles. Young scholars would make what was now effectively a pilgrimage to 5 Hillway, to the legendary house and its legendary occupant. ‘Pretty much any query I had to do with Jewish circles in London, Jewish books, Yiddish culture, he’d more often than not know the answers to’, David Mazower remembered. ‘He sent me postcards occasionally, would ring up, say “Why haven’t I seen you? Come over.” He and the house were a time capsule that embodied everything I valued most about the Ashkenazi civilisation’.

In these last years of his life, Chimen returned more and more to the religious texts of his youth. He did not pray, did not go to synagogue on the Sabbath; but he looked to the great traditional texts for inspiration. Perhaps, even though he would never have admitted it even to himself, he began looking for a spiritual truth in these writings. On 10 March 1998, slightly less than a year after Mimi had died, Chimen wrote to his good friend John Felstiner, at Stanford. ‘As to prayer, there is a superb piece in the pseudo-Josephus – the Josippon. The anonymous author wrote: “And Daniel prayed three time a day. He who prays to God he, man, speaks, but who reads the Torah God speaks to him”. An interesting comment on prayer’.

Chimen did not believe that prayer brought one any closer to the sublime – nor that God, if He existed, responded to pleas by mortals. A few months before his death, I visited him. Well into his nineties now, he sat in his kitchen, stony-faced, every action a challenge, staring out onto the late summer foliage in his back garden. ‘Every day that I wake up and do not feel too bad’, he suddenly said, his raspy, faint voice fierce, his desire to impart some more words of wisdom to his oldest grandson painful in its intensity. He stopped, and I waited for him to say, ‘I thank God’. But instead he balled up his face, and, with a superhuman effort, almost shouted the words, ‘I feel that
I
have
won
another day’. To the end, Chimen clung to his personal autonomy.

Nevertheless, while he did not believe in prayer, as mortality hemmed him in he did come to feel that the great religious traditions going back thousands of years that held his ancestors in their web of rituals, beliefs and shared experiences, were as close as he could get to touching immortality; he came to believe that homage to the past was a guarantee of a future. Perhaps, inside his head, he began hedging his bets. As a young man he had read works by Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher. Pascal had formulated a famous
wager in favour of the existence of God: if you bet there is no God and you are wrong, a wrathful deity is likely to condemn your eternal soul to hellfire; but if you gamble that there is a God and there is not, your consciousness will cease to exist upon your death and you will never know that you were wrong. Much better, therefore, argued Pascal, to believe in God. A little over two millennia earlier, Plato had crafted a similar argument. Recreating a conversation between Socrates and an old man named Cephalus in
The Republic
, he put the following words into Cephalus’s mouth: ‘But you know, Socrates, when a man faces the thought that he must die, there come upon him fear and foreboding about things that have not troubled him before. Once he laughed at the tales about those in Hades, of punishment to be suffered there by him who has done injustice. But now his soul is tormented by the thought that these may be true’. In precise Hebrew lettering, in the margins of the Everyman classic that had sat for so long on the front-room shelves, Chimen (always eager to draw connections from one seminal text to the next) had written: ‘This recalls the beginning of the
Phaedo
, where Socrates says almost the same thing’.

In that dialogue, in which Plato reconstructs Socrates’s last day on earth, the great teacher discusses with his students the possibility of an afterlife. ‘I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of this I am as certain as I can be of anything of the sort) and to men departed (though I am not so certain of this), who are better than those whom I leave behind’, explains Socrates, as he waits for the hemlock that he has swallowed to take effect. ‘And therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, and, as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good than for the evil’.

Death was cutting a swathe through Chimen’s contemporaries. In November 1997, seven months after Mimi’s death, Isaiah Berlin died. In 1999, Chimen’s sister-in-law Minna died. Sara lived on after the death of her husband Steve in 1998, but as her health deteriorated she became a captive in her own home. When he could, Chimen would cut up a fresh mango for his beloved
sister-in
-law and, if he could convince someone to drive him over, would deliver it to her house. Later, as his own health declined, he could no longer make the journey over to visit Sara. Barely a ten-minute drive from Chimen, she might as well have lived on the moon. He almost never saw her, instead checking in on her in short daily phone calls, unsatisfying minutes in which neither could hear what the other one was saying. Chimen’s younger brother Menachem became too sick to travel from Israel and died in 2006. One after the other, almost all of Chimen’s cousins, in England, in America, in Israel, died. Rose Uren was felled by cancer in 2005. Most of the other remaining close friends from his generation also died.

Time had finally caught up with Chimen. And, as it did, as his eighties gave way to his nineties, the front room became my grandfather’s last redoubt; his bedroom, his retreat from the pain of his waking hours. It was where physical therapists tried to coax him to walk a few steps, where his night nurses helped him undress, where he lay in the dark, a small bell next to him in case he needed to ring for assistance, and thought about eternity. As his world grew smaller and smaller, these few cubic feet, surrounded by his books, became the epicentre of his tenuous existence. ‘As regards my family here’, Chimen wrote to John Felstiner in 2006, his handwriting larger and less precise now as his neurological problems mounted, ‘I have Parkinson’s, my movements are very slow, and one has to live with it. Walking is a problem. My children are as busy as ever. My grandchildren are
divided between USA and England’. Jack and Jenny
were
certainly busy, but, as Chimen himself would have been the first to admit, they spent many hours a week at Hillway – frequently many hours each day – talking with Chimen, organising his
home-help
, taking him to the doctors’ appointments that seemed to multiply by the week. As Chimen aged (exponentially, it seemed to me) so his children came to perform for him the roles that Chimen had earlier taken on in caring for Mimi. They became their father’s lifeline; their ministrations allowed Chimen to remain in his home, and, for a startlingly long time, to continue in his post as master of ceremonies at the now-diminished salon.

Of course, all of the family love on earth could not reverse the clock, the endless drone of the second-hand ticking away towards the end. Lonely, in pain, and daily staring death in the face, as he neared ninety Chimen had spilled his heart to Felstiner. ‘A huge biography, in Hebrew, was published of my father, in Jerusalem, full of documents and of photos of many rabbis. Two large volumes. And I remain a kind of bridge between the Rabbinic world and the world of Marx’. He knew that these worlds out of which he had emerged and in which he had been shaped were vanishing; that much of the younger generations neither understood nor cared for the events, the great political and philosophical arguments, and ways of thought that had so defined his nine decades. And he knew that when he died his extraordinary mental universe would vanish with him.

Chimen’s letter to Felstiner continued: ‘In September I shall be ninety, if I reach that date… My only pleasure is I read voraciously.’ He read, and when people gave him books, he added them to his piles. But he no longer actively sought out particular items to add to his vast collection. ‘Collectors’ collections are like jigsaws’, his Sotheby’s friend Camilla Prévité believed. ‘They’re always looking for pieces to fill in. Five-million piece jigsaws. Most collectors, their collections are near completion and they’re
looking for just a few more pieces’. Sitting or lying in his front room, surrounded by books, Chimen knew that his life’s puzzle, his House of Books, was almost complete.

On 14 March 2010, one hundred and twenty seven years after Karl Marx’s death, Chimen retired to that room one last time, was put into his bed, and did not get up. As he had requested months earlier when discussing death with my father, as he faded away Jack brought him a tiny Hebrew Bible, bound in cracked black leather, the pages adjoining the front and back covers water damaged, to hold in his emaciated hands. He had, over the years, kept it in his jacket pocket as he travelled the world. It was not an expensive volume, nor one of his rare possessions; but it must have meant something extraordinary to him. Maybe it had been owned by Yehezkel before him.

Perhaps, as he held the Bible, the words of the
Vidui
, the prayer of confession to be chanted by the dying floated before his inner eye. Perhaps,
in extremis
, he called up from his remarkable memory the words of the Psalms of Ascent or of the
Adon Olam
and
Ane BeKoach
prayers. ‘You who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, Who abides in the shadow of the Omnipotent’, begins Psalm 91, ‘I say to you of the Lord Who is my refuge and my stronghold, my God in Whom I trust, that He will save you from the ensnaring trap, from the destructive pestilence. He will cover you with His pinions and you will find refuge under His wings; His truth is a shield and an armour’. In the last moments, as infinity closes in, the dying person is supposed to make a supreme effort to declare as their final words: ‘Master of the universe, may it be Your will that my passing be in peace’. It is the ultimate surrender of will when one can fight no more.

Or perhaps, a materialist atheist to the last, dying on the anniversary of Marx’s death, he brought to mind the words of his former hero: ‘all that is solid melts into air’. It is possible that both the religious and the materialist words flittered through his
dimming consciousness. Or that, at the end, he saw and heard no words at all. There is, of course, no way to know.

I can still see Jack Lunzer, Chimen’s confrère in the esoteric world of rare books, standing and quietly reciting
Kaddish
for Chimen in the little prayer hall in Hoop Lane where Chimen’s body lay, in a coffin so small that it could have been a child’s, before being moved to the gravesite, to lie next to Mimi once more. Jack Lunzer intoned the Hebrew words with infinite sadness, his large frame suddenly, somehow, grown small. Sick himself, he did not know if he could walk the distance along the pathway to the back of the cemetery where the newly dug grave lay waiting.

‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’, went the fuller version of Marx’s aphorism, penned in 1848, in a famous passage from the first chapter of the
Communist Manifesto
, as he sought to explain the creative and yet destructive forces unleashed by capitalism, the emergence of a world that never stood still. Chimen, by his own estimation, had at least forty editions of the Manifesto in his house, in most of the major European languages. He had volumes, he confided to those who knew enough to ask the right questions about his collection, which even the British Library lacked. Over the near-century of his life, Chimen sought to impose at least a modicum of stability and predictability on his ever-changing world through the collecting of books, building his House of Books as a repository of words. Collecting, preserving, reading and transmitting the knowledge contained in books stopped, just for a moment, the onward march of time, the returning into dust that is our destiny. Seven hundred years before Marx wrote his Manifesto, Maimonides had had a more optimistic
philosophy: ‘Though the Sages state the Throne of Glory to be created they never say that it will cease to exist’, Maimonides wrote in
The Guide of the Perplexed
. ‘Similarly the souls of the righteous are in our opinion created but will never cease to exist.’ Chimen had idolised both men; he had, I think, come to believe that both were somehow right.

The many hundreds of mourners, spanning four generations, walked to the gravesite. And, the family members at the front of the silent crowd, we took it in turns to shovel dirt atop my grandfather’s coffin. The earth was soft, and made a gentle thudding sound as it landed on the wood several feet below. And then I returned home, back to my parents’ house, back to a bottomless well of grief. To the blooming silence that says a life is over.

Within days, the experts would be at Hillway, poring over the thousands of books – books that, in the end, Chimen had never managed to catalogue, had never decided what he wanted done with after he died. Books that could no longer stay in the empty house, endangered by fire and flood and theft. Like a dream that flies away upon waking, the library, so lovingly collected over seventy-five years, was about to be dissipated to the four winds. Atlantis was submerged, so thoroughly that at moments I doubted it ever had existed. The salon’s doors were shut for the last time. The House of Books was no more.