The House of Twenty Thousand Books
by Sasha Abramsky
(New York, New York Review Books, 2017)
Like a man who punches himself to make sure he still has feeling, Chimen read to reassure himself that he was still alive.
Page 3.
One could not refuse her food; she simply would not accept an unwillingness to eat.
Page 5.
Life is to a large degree a lottery, whose fate is decided by forces frequently by chance, outside our will, but to whose decisions we contribute, willy-nilly.
Page 8.
In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artists, nor a statesman - it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely to desire to tell it but at least have some little ability to do so.
Page 8.
For Chimen … his mansion of ideas, his House of Books, was more a journey, a never-ending voyage of discover, than a physical abode.
Page 10.
His home was to be experienced like a trip to far-off lands - difficult, challenging, unpredictable - rather than to be reveled in like a luxurious penthouse apartment.
Page 11.
By the end of his life, every single room in the hose, except the bathroom and kitchen, was lined form floor to ceiling with shelves double-stacked with books, with only a few bare spots left in which paintings and photographs hung. If you pulled a few bricks out of the wall of books, you found a second, hidden wall behind it. And when the shelves were filled, first the floors and then the tables succumbed to great, twisting piles of tomes.
Page 11.
With some knowledge of the subject, however, and with a bit of deductive effort one could actually work out, through the architecture of the library, how Chimen’s interests had evolved.
Page 15.
As the number of books expanded, the order became more tenuous, more precarious.
Page 16.
He believed that intellectual favors ought to be reciprocal. He was more than happy to show visitors documents that in some casers they could see nowhere else on earth, but he would do so only in exchange for meaningful questions and thoughtful comments, or t the very least an expression of admiration and awe in response to the ideas and documents at hand.
Page 19.
We are, in large part, defined by our pasts - both our individual pasts and our collective histories. We are the aggregate of generations of experiences lived by our ancestors; but we are also, inevitably, products of our times, influenced by wars and revolutions, by social upheavals, by economic turmoil, by scientific advances and so on and so forth.
Page 21.
When the Jewish doctors were freed after Stalin’s death, and their confessions voided - they had been tortured into admitting to nonexistent crimes - it became all but impossible for communists in the West to continue to deny that anti-Semitism had flourished in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Pages 28-29.
Children take the environments they are familiar with f or granted.
Page 36.
Where Talmudic scholars were preoccupied with interpreting God’s will in the aftermath of Creation, Chimen was obsessed with the interpretation of history’s will.
Page 37.
Chimen spent a lifetime insulating himself from the flames, surrounding himself with so many books and so much knowledge, that something could be guaranteed to survive out of the ashes, out of the chaos of history.
Page 41.
The revolutionary ghosts of hundreds of years of revolutionary struggle lay in Chimen’s tomes, waiting, waiting for someone to open the volumes; waiting, waiting for the chance to leap into the light once more.
Pages 48-49.
When he read a book, he read it not simply for the main text but for the footnotes, the name of the publisher, and the location of the printer. All were clues; all helped him to understand the milieu in which the book was crafted. … The bibliographies enabled him to chart an intellectual odyssey.
Page 49.
The collection remained insured only as general contents; had disaster struck and the House of books burned to the ground, Chemen would have found, to his horror, that his inability to provide a catalog was a costly oversight.
Page 51.
Almost as important as the words were the ways the books felt and smelled.
Page 55.
In the cloying smells, released when ancient volumes were opened up, one could sniff out hints of lost printing techniques and paper-making methods, o finks manufactured centuries ago.
Page 56.
Like so many of Europe’s young intellectuals during the 1930s, he looked to communism as a counterpoint to Fascism and also to the values and political systems that had led the Continent’s great nations to throw themselves into the slaughter.
Page 64.
During the years of appeasement, when one German and Italian outrage after another was tolerated by the British and French political leaderships, it was the communists who fought back most forcefully against Fascism. It was the Communists who intervened in an ill-starred attempt to safe the Spanish Republic. And it was the communists who took the lead in many labor conflicts during years of mass unemployment and plummeting wages.
Page 100.
Hillway was a unique salon because the two obsessions of these obsessive people gelled there in a most unusual way: Chimen’s passion for his books and the ideas they contained, Mimi’s for nurturing and nourishing an endless stream of people.
Page 127.
Collecting people was as important to Mimi as collecting books was to Chimen. She simply always had to be a hostess, and once she invited you into her Yiddish hoyz, she had to feed you.
Pages 128-129.
At the end-of-week dinner, which celebrates the Sabbath, a Jewish table is filled with good food, ritual wine is drunk, prayers are said, and, of course, strangers are welcomed and hosted. Around that table, community is renewed.
Page 129.
It was through her hospitality and the energy and wisdom that she put into making Hillway a gathering place that Mimi sought to manifest the ideal virtues of Jewish women described in the book of Proverbs.
Page 132.
It was in the kitchen that the true melting-pot nature of Hillway unfolded. Sleepy-eyed guests, who had bedded down on sofas, spare beds, even chairs when the house was particularly busy, would wander into the kitchen in the morning, only to find other temporary residents or passersby who had not been there the night before.
Page 132.
When I was younger, it frustrated me. As I grew up, however, I realized that the confusion grew not out of carelessness but an excess of love.
Page 133.
Despite their lack of religious sentiment, my grandparents, throughout the more than half a century of their marriage, kept a strictly kosher kitchen.
Page 135.
To the intellectually agile, witty, and cultured, the doors were thrown open in succession: first to the kitchen, then the dining room, then the front sitting room - where it was entirely likely that the conversation, begun over a cup of tea in the kitchen early that afternoon, would continue well into the small hours of the night.
Page 136.
All her life, from her youthful Communist years to her post-Communist old age, Mimi craved community: If she could not find it in politics or religion, she would re-create it in her own home and in her work.
Page 138.
It was in the kitchen - more than in any other room of the house - that tradition refused to die.
Page 139.
If my grandparents wanted to sweep the past away and create a new world, set on new foundations, at the same time they also believed deeply in family, and in the obligations that generations owed to each other.
Page 141.
Marx felt, Engels explained, at this funeral in 1881, that he was the Darwin of the social world, having unlocked the scientific secrets explaining how societies and economies evolved and transformed over time, why some were successful and other withered.
Page 145.
In the postwar period, many of the British, struggling to accustom themselves to the United Kingdom’s diminished status in the world, were deeply hostile to America, whatever their political persuasion.
Page 147.
America’s global aspirations were neither more obnoxious than those of Britain during the recently faded glory days of empire nor more all-encompassing.
Page 147.
In prewar England, anti-Americanism was the acceptable bigotry of the times.
Page 147.
Party members … “never tired of proclaiming their faith in the masses, even when it seemed that their arguments were spurned.”
Page 156.
By the later part of the nineteenth century, large numbers of young Jews, in reaction to government-supported pogroms in Russia and violent repression against political activists in countries across the continent, were attracted to a more explicitly socialist vision.
Page 159.
By 1905, a third of political arrestees in the Russian Empire were Jewish.
Page 165.
Chimen was both a creature of modernity and a man utterly repelled by the mechanization of modern life.
Page 168.
In place of Maimonides’s ethics, Chimen substituted the Marxist idea of class consciousness.
Page 172.
It was here that a specifically Jewish take on modernity could be encountered, one that engaged with liberalism, anarchism, Socialism, and nationalism.
Page 173.
The anti-Semitic vise that squeezed Jews from both the left and the 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 outperform their anarchist rivals in attracting the support of workers and peasants.
Page 177.
Many secular Jews however, who witnessed the pogroms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were pushed into political activity.
Page 179.
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.
Page 180.
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.
Page 180.
Chimen was always more comfortable in exploring the impact of historical events on countries and economic systems than he was in detailing the lies of individuals trapped within that historical web.
Page 184.
Despite their many other crimes, before and during the Second World War the Soviets were not actively anti-Semitic; Their imprisonment of religious proselytizers such as Yehezkel in the 1920s and ‘30s had been antireligious, not anti-Semitic per se. They did not tar all Jews as enemies nor, as had the Nazis, declare that the Jewish race as a whole was inherently foreign, inherently apart from the broader society. Wholesale, across-the-board hostility to Jews was not part of Stalin’s calculus until the postwar period, when opposition to the State of Israel (which had been welcomed initially by the Soviets, who were eager to take potshots at the crumbling British Empire) morphed into a more explicit anti-Jewish rhetoric and then a series of lethal actions against the Jewish intelligentsia in the Soviet Union.
Pages 186-187.
After Hitler unleashed his vast armies against the Soviet Union in 1941, the fight to defeat him became intertwined with the fight to protect Stalin’s Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union could withstand the German onslaught, in the long run Hitler’s empire was doomed.
Page 188.
He believed that to understand the Holocaust, you had to explore the gigantic systems - political, economic, bureaucratic - that underpinned it. These systems did not, could not explain why the Holocaust had been unleashed; but they did help to explain why Germany had slipped into the sort of chaos that had paved the way for a monster like Hitler to assume power, and why, once in power, he was able to use Germany’s formidable bureaucratic institutions to turn Europe into an abattoir. The mechanisms of the Holocaust were, Chimen felt, rationalism, turned in on itself, science perverted, philosophy hijacked.
Pages 193-194.
He worked, ever more feverishly, on trying to understand how to secure safety for Jews in a world of mechanized killing. He concluded, in the war’s immediate aftermath, that the answer was not a Jewish state but a Socialist world. He put his faith in a universalist ideology and hoped that the new economic relationships he wanted to see created would be powerful enough to counter Fascism.
Page 198.
Rigid political beliefs led to a willingness to defend the show trials, purges, and other arbitrary brutalities of the Stalin regime.
Page 199.
Bit by bit, at first subconsciously, later quite explicitly, the ground was being laid for a new political perspective, for a new, less utopian understanding of the human condition.
Page 215.
Remaining in the Party demanded too many intellectual contortions.
Page 221.
The events of 1956 had corroded Chimen’s sympathy for the Soviet Union; yet the invasion of Hungary did not trigger his immediate exit from the Party. Rather, the trigger was the discovery that everything he had believed about the Soviet Union as a place where anti-Semitism no longer existed was wrong.
Page 221.
Working full-time, and with two young children to take care of, and quite possibly also having to cope with Chimen’s post-Communist blues, Mimi nevertheless maintained her kitchen and dining room as something akin to t full-service restaurant for roving intellectuals, family members, friends, and friends of friends from around the world.
Page 226.
As the focus of his interest shifted form Socialism to Judaica, so the center of his library moved form the bedroom, down the landing, and into the upstairs front room.
Page 235.
The shift in emphasis was not purely caused by his changing political philosophy; the market for Socialist books and memorabilia had taken off and he could no longer afford the few Socialist items he did not already own.
Page 235.
For Chimen, expertise in modern |Jewish history meant having an intimate knowledge of at least five hundred years of history, from the time of the expulsion of the Jewish population form Spain under the Inquisition onward.
Page 241.
What fascinated him was the texture of communal life, the ways in which individuals intersected with their u the mechanisms by which the wheels of history turned. And, overwhelmingly, he was obsessed by the written evidence left by past centuries: books, Torah scrolls, manuscript fragments, letters, diaries, edicts, newspapers, poems, and songs.
Page 241.
Throughout his life, Chimen, a nonbeliever, was averse to stepping into controversies within England’s Jewish religious community.
Page 245.
What most interested him about the great Jewish religious commentaries was how they related to the march to modernity.
Page 246.
You cannot understand the Enlightenment without understanding how Descartes and Spinoza broke down medieval certainties.
Page 247.
Bomber was as far ahead of Gutenberg in style and technique, in the way he could manipulate space and play around with imagery, as the iPod was ahead of vinyl records half a millennia later. In the space of a few decades, printing had emerged from infancy into the full splendor of adulthood.
Page 249.
Gutenberg had printed the first books in Germany, but Jews within the Holy Roman Empire were not allowed to print Hebrew volumes. As a result, it had been in Italy that the first such books were printed, in 1475, thirty years after the German printing revolution. The Soncino family had been among the earliest of these printers.
Page 250.
Only the very gest volumes were printed on vellum. The ink on these pages was as clear five hundred years later as the day they were printed.
Page 251.
Unlike wood-pulp paper, which came to be the norm from the mid-nineteenth century on, and which allowed for cheaper, mass-produced books to be printed, Renaissance paper had no acid content. As a result, instead of fading to brown after a few years and losing the integrity of its structure, as most modern paper does, the pates of a book printed four or five hundred years ago often survive intact and readable, even if kept in a place as climatologically unsuited to the storage of rare materials as Hillway.
Pages 252-253.
Being in demand suited his temperament and gratified the ego that had been frustrated for so long by his lack of academic recognition.
Page 260.
If it was his fate to outlive his contemporaries, then he would refill his well of friends with younger people.
Pages 261-262.
As he aged, a subtle shift occurred. Increasingly he looked not to Marx but to Spinoza for moral guidance. “To be is to do, and to know is to do,” Spinoza had written at his desk in Amsterdam in the late seventeenth century. It was also a call to action, but it was no longer an explicit call to revolution.
Page 264.
To stay within the party culture while critiquing its policy positions was impossible. The Communist Party could b rook no dissent. Its very raison d’ être was orthodoxy, requiring the rigid, unquestioning submission of the individual to the needs of the organization.
Pages 269-270.
As Hillway began a long march to becoming liberal salon its formerly Red hues led down to a more muted pink. Where once the house counted among its most frequent guests the |Marxist historians of the communist Party Historians’ Group, their place was filled by rising stars in the world of Jewish studies, American academics and civil liberties advocates, and European liberals and intellectuals.
Page 271.
From the 1960s onward, 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.
Page 286.
Hillway served as an incubator, fostering love of knowledge and backing up that knowledge with human warmth.
Pages 286-287.
The people of Hillway, in the salon’s earlier incarnation, had not been debating esoterica: They were - or at least they believed they were - discussing the future, coming to an understanding of how the world was changing and of how society would be organized in the future.
Page 295.
When Chimen died in 2010, in a post-Marxist world, many of the volumes that he had so prized had been reduced to curiosity items. The inflated monetary value assigned to them at the height of Soviet power was now as hard to comprehend as the six-figure prices accorded tulips in the flower markets of Amsterdam for a brief period in the seventeenth century.
Page 296.
Freethinking in theory, in practice Mimi and Chimen were remarkably traditional in demeanor.
Page 305.
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 him with any renewed revolutionary fervor.
Page 306.
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 odor.
Page 306.
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.
Page 308.
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.
Page 310.
He tried to retain some control over the rhythms of his life by committing things to the written word.
Page 318.
The memorialization of events on the page seemed to give comfort to a man whose whole life had been devoted to the written word.
Page 318.
In the 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.
Page 320.
He came to believe that homage to the past was a guarantee of a future.
Page 321.
Chimen sought to impose t 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 return to dust that is our destiny.
Page 326.
One doesn’t throw away words. They might, someday, be useful.
Page 327.