The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky

Author:Sasha Abramsky [Sasha Abramsky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781905559657
Publisher: Halban
Published: 2014-09-04T04:00:00+00:00

Behind the Everyman volumes were still more books: these were cheap paperback political texts, worth little monetarily, but cumulatively providing an understanding of the day-to-day political debates of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

Roaming this world of ideas, especially on the fireplace side of this room, one was increasingly struck by a sense of time warp. This was a story ‘rent out of Eastern Europe and landed in London’, the American historian Steve Zipperstein marvelled, when he visited the house from Oxford, and, later, from his position at Stanford University, in California. It was, he felt, in many ways a Russian saga from the nineteenth century that was playing itself out decades later in English suburbia, a scene, say, from Bialik’s poem about Talmudic scholarship, HaMatmid.

In this room, the different sides of Chimen’s intellectual personality most visibly warred for influence: the religious scholar versus the Marxist; the polymath interested in art, philosophy, sociology, in all the great ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment versus the ideological dogmatist; the Zionist against the socialist internationalist. It was in this cluttered space that the massed ghosts of the pogroms and then of the Holocaust and of the shattered Jewish communities of Eastern Europe most assertively overlooked everything he did and believed. It was here that ancient Jewish teachings met the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. It was here that a specifically Jewish take on modernity could be encountered, one that engaged with liberalism, anarchism, socialism and nationalism. There were books on the rise of Zionism, on the quest for a Jewish homeland not just in Palestine, but also via the Soviet attempt to create a Jewish, Yiddish-speaking state in the Siberian region of Birobidzhan, and on abortive plans to carve out part of Uganda for displaced Jewish refugees; there were other books on proposals to earmark large swathes of American territory for a Jewish homeland.

It was, in sum, the room where the greatest debates within Eastern European Jewry, during the decades in which Chimen’s grandparents, parents, and he himself had come of age, were on display.

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