For many Seforim blog readers, the name ‘Abramsky’
will instantly be associated with the personality of Rav Yechezkel Abramsky
(1886-1976), the author of Hazon
Yechezkel on the Tosefta. Born in
Russia, imprisoned by the Soviets, released in the 1930’s after diplomatic
intervention by the U.S. and Britain, he was for years the head of the London
Beth Din before his retirement to Israel.

But other readers will also know his son, Chimen (1916-2010),
whose life followed a very different path, and was, simultaneously, one of the
leading bibliophiles of the Jewish world – and of the Socialist-Marxist
world.  One of his grandsons, Sasha
Abramsky, has written a memoir of his grandfather centred on 5, Hillway – Chimen’s
house close to London’s Hampstead Heath (and to Highgate Cemetery, burial place
of Karl Marx).  Chimen was a bibliophile
and scholar, but also an obsessive collector of books, of which 5, Hillway
contained an estimated twenty thousand. 
This book describes the house room by room, and the significance of the
books in each one, piled high and crammed into every nook and cranny.

Chimen left the Soviet Union with his father.  Soon after arrival in London, he made his
way to Mandatory (or, Mandatary[1])
Palestine, where he took courses in Jewish history at the Hebrew University.[2]
He was already a committed Communist. 
Returning to London at the outbreak of war, he became a hugely
influential member of the Communist party in London. To his grandson’s
bewilderment, he was a convinced Stalinist, attributing such anti-Jewish
excesses as he was prepared to recognise to Soviet anti-religious, rather than
anti-Semitic, sentiment.

At the same time, on marriage to Miriam Nirenstein,
he entered the family business – ‘Shapiro, Vallentine’, a small Jewish bookshop
and publishing company in the East End of London.  Over successive years he turned it into a center of rare book
dealing, while simultaneously serving the London Jewish community with
siddurim, machzorim, barmitzvah presents and other ritual paraphernalia[3].

Chimen, together with other Jewish communists, left
the party after 1956 – although, inexplicably, he was one of the last to
leave.  He turned his energy into an
academic career; first as Sotheby’s consultant on Judaica[4],
then as a fellow of St Antony’s College Oxford (on the strength of his
co-authored book on ‘Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement’, and on the
personal recommendation of Isaiah Berlin) and shortly thereafter, at the age of
51, as Reader in Jewish Studies at University College, London.  He was appointed Professor at UCL in 1974. In
the 1970’s he was one of the first visiting Fellows at the Oxford Institute of
Postgraduate Hebrew Studies[5],
where he was my teacher of early medieval Jewish history.  Chimen was a world-class polymath, with a
totally encyclopedic knowledge of manuscripts, books, footnotes, scholars and
libraries. 

His grandson has recorded the history and topography
of his household, which functioned as research library, international salon for
streams of visitors, and a family home. 
Every room had its subject area – Judaica, European socialism, Marxiana,
art history, philosophy and social studies. 
Chimen and Miriam had two children – Jenny, later famous as the most
senior female executive at the BBC, and Jack (Sasha’s father)[6].  Chimen’s relationship to his Judaism was
complex; despite his veneration of his father, he does not appear to have given
his own children much of a Jewish education, even though they grew up in a
house full of some of the rarest Judaica in private hands. Sasha describes the
historians[7],
politicians, thinkers and scholars who came to sit at the table of this
diminutive, engaging personality with his thick Russian accent, which he never
lost.  His later years were affected by
deteriorating health, and he finally passed away at the age of 93 in 2010.

‘The House of Twenty Thousand Books” is an unusual,
affectionate, and admiring memoir[8].  Booklovers will love it, as will anyone who
knew the enigmatic subject at the centre of the story. The book is not perfect;
far more attention – perhaps a little repetitively – is paid to Chimen’s
socialism (and its abandonment) than to his Jewish involvement and
scholarship.  The author is clearly not
on such familiar ground in this latter area, and makes a few mistakes.  But it is a labour of love, and a good one
at that.

Finally, let me leave a bibliographic tantalizer for
the readers of the Seforim blog.  In
1974, Chimen told me with pride that Gershom Scholem had visited him, and that
he had shown Scholem a ‘Hassidic siddur’ from his, Chimen’s collection, “which
was earlier than any previously known Hassidic book. Scholem was very excited
by this. He demanded that I must publish it!” 
Did he ever do so?  Where is the
book now?  I have no idea.