Yehezkel and Chimen Abramsky by Sasha Abramsky

Yehezkel was a strong man who built up his reputation during unfathomably difficult times. During the civil war years, the area of White Russia in which the family lived repeatedly changed hands among troops loyal to the old tsarist regime, Polish nationalists and Bolsheviks. Yehezkel had been widely written about in the European and American Jewish press after he ought back against pogromisti who killed some Jews and attempted to shave of the beards of others, an act widely regarded as a peculiarly vicious insult, a desecration, since the Torah and several passages in the Talmud specifically prohibited the shaving of beards. Yehezkel had not only managed to preserve his beard but, according to reports in American Yiddish newspapers, he even convinced a local Polish commander to sign a proclamation protecting the integrity of Rabbi Abramsky’s facial hair. This was the first time the international press paid attention to my great-grandfather.

Then, in Moscow in 1929, Yehezkel, along with a rabbinic colleague named Shlomo Yosef Zervin, was arrested in the wake of his co-editing a Hebrew journal of Torah commentary titled Yagdil Torah (bound volumes of which Chimen  kept all his life) and for refusing to tell an American human rights commission that life for religious Jews in the Soviet Union was entirely satisfactory. Yehezkel, then in his early forties, was seized on the street one evening by the secret police, while he and Raizl were taking an evening walk. He was interrogated in the notorious Lubyanka prison and then in Butirki, the city’s central jail. During those interrogations, he was beaten, screamed at, and threatened with unspeakable torture in attempts to get him to confess having conspired to overthrow the Soviet government. He refused. Finally, he was sentenced to five years’ hard labor in Siberia – a sentence the severity of which was mitigated in the family’s mind only by the knowledge that he could easily have been executed. In fact, he had been sentenced to death initially, but the punishment had been commuted, probably because even then Yehezkel was known internationally among religious Jews, and men like the writer Maxim Gorky and the poet Chaim Naschman Bialik (who had been born a little more than a decade before Yehezkel, and had studied in many of the same yeshivas, before becoming the first renowned modern Hebrew poet) had urged Stalin’s judges to show mercy on their illustrious victim.

In Siberia, Yehezkel recalled later in life, he was forced to run barefoot in minus forty degree temperatures; he was fed near-starvation rations, only occasionally enhanced by care packages sent to him by Raizl, and he was made to sleep on a bed that was no more than a wooden plank, on which shivering bodes lay huddled next to one another. There, his guards made him the read frozen fish onto iron spits in the bitter cold – a torment so painful that he recited prayers for the dying every day before work, assuming that there was a better chance he would not live to see the morrow. He began his prayers with the Shema, the declaration of faith, muttering in Hebrew “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is one,’ before setting out into the inhuman cold of the Siberian winter dawn to begin hours of torment. Wear gloves and it was impossible to thread the fish; take off the gloves and one’s hands began to freeze.

But, despite the agony of daily life in Siberia, while in the labor camp he continued to compose his commentaries on the Tosefta. The Mishnah, the first part of the Talmud, set down in writing by Judah the Prince about two hundred years into the Christian era, detailed the religious rules that governed Jewish life in the era of the Temple, which the Romans  had razed more than a century earlier, and adapted those rules for a people whose central religious institution was, physically, no longer in existence. The Tosefta, by contrast, according to some scholars, possibly emerged out of an earlier Babylonian school of oral Jewish scholarship. Like the Mishnah, it was probably first organized into a coherent body of written work in the later Roman period.

Both the Mishnah and the Tosefta minutely document how Jews should behave: how they should pray, bathe, eat; when they ought to have sexual relations: how they should rest on the Sabbath and so on. Compilations of Halakha, or religious laws, they were worked out over centuries of discourse by the great sages; rabbis represented in this text are referred to as Tannaim. But the Tosefta is a longer, more involved body of work, filled with explanatory notes and comments, its aphorisms and sayings unedited, its attributions of legal rulings to individual rabbis more complete. It includes material by Tannaim that was not included in the Mishnah. Much of the time, according to religious scholars, its passages agree with those of the Mishnah. Sometimes, however, they contradict them. The Tosefta is a difficult work, its origins clouded in uncertainty, its correspondence to a difference with the Mishnah providing a wealth of material on the development of early Jewish religious law in different population centers and under as variety of political conditions.

As he slaved away in Siberia, Yehezkel developed his interpretation of this body of law, calling on his prodigious memory of religious texts to conjure up images of the passages that he would critique. Over the months, he memorized thousands of lines of his commentary, scribbling them down when he had a chance, late at night or early in the morning, on whatever paper he could find. Usually it was the translucent cigarette papers that the convict laborers could occasionally lay their hands on. One he had written these additions to his growing commentary, he would carefully hide the papers among his personal effects.

After months of international pressure from Jewish organizations in the United States and Western Europe, Yehezkel was finally released in 1931, and he arrived back at his apartment in Moscow on the eve of Yom Kippur. He greeted his family and then, putting all thought of celebration aside, immediately began his fast. The family, Chimen recalled three-quarter of a century later, avoided going to the synagogue that evening, fearing that if they showed themselves in public his father would be arrested again. Yehezkel spent the next day teaching his sons the commentaries exploring the significance of the Day of Atonement. Compromise was apparently not in his vocabulary.

Given a month to leave the Soviet Union, but with his passport confiscated by the Soviet authorities, Yehezkel traveled to the west, to Riga, Vilna, and Berlin, and arrived in London at the end of 1932. He became a refugee. Raizl and their two youngest sons, Chimen and Menachem, were allowed to follow him out of the country shortly afterward; but their two oldest sons, Moshe and Yaakov David, were kept behind on the Soviet Union as hostages, to deter the rabbi from speaking too vocally against his erstwhile country. In London, Yehezke and Raizl fasted twice weekly as an offering for their children’s freedom, and rallied an international  movement to secure their sons’ release. With Europe sliding ever closer to war Britain’s foreign minister Anthony Eden, who had taken an interest in Yehezkel Abramsky’s fate since the international campaign to save the rabbi’s life after his arrest, found the time to craft a personal appeal to the Soviets to release the Abramsky boys – Yaakov David, at the time, was in internal exile in Tashkent, in Ubekistan, where he had married and had a son; Moshe was in Moscow. The appeal worked, and in late 1936 Moshe was allowed to join the rest of the family in London. Yaakov David and his family arrived a month later, spending a few months in London, where Yaakov apparently quarreled with Yehezkel and Raizl about his lack of religious belief before moving on to Palestine. Twelve years later, his son Jonathan, Yehezkel and Raizl’s eldest grandson, was shot dead on as Jerusalem street by a Palestinian sniper during the Arab uprising that followed Israel’s declaration of independence.

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Yehezkel’s imprisonment and exile did not, however, lead Chimen to embrace his religion. To the contrary; in rebellion against his father and the unquestioning, ultra-Orthodox religious world that Rabbi Abramsky represented, Chimen started imbibing Bolshevik ideas in Russia while working as an apprentice to an artisanal suitcase maker to support his mother and brothers during these dark years,. He had, at the age of fourteen, begun attending Communist clubs frequented by well-known figures in Mosco’s Yiddish cultural scene, By the time he was sixteen- a lonely exile living in London’s East End, in an apartment at  Ia St Mark Street, Aldgate, which was owned by an immigrant boot maker named Nathan Mitzelmacher; and with two older brothers still stuck in the Soviet Union, to whom Yehezkel sent money each week so that they would not starve- he was writing in Hebrew to his cousin Shimon Berlin, whose family lived in Palestine, declaring that he was a Marxist. “ I live here alone, lonely, unable to associate with such people,” he reported to his cousin in describing his surroundings. “ I read ‘a tot’ in these three languages: Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, and a little English,” he wrote, his words precisely penned, each word equally spaced from the next. “I read especially historical and political-economy books, written from a Marxist point of view, because I consider myself a Marxist.”

As a young man Chimen wanted, desperately, to stand up and be counted in his own right. Myopic, stunted in height, flat-footed, averse to physical exercise and sports, he knew that he was never destined to be a hero on the battlefield. But he wanted to make up for it in the arena of ideas. By the time he was fifteen or sixteen, while he still kept kosher and , for the sake of family peace, observed the daily rituals of an Orthodox existence, in his own mind he had rejected the religious strictures that governed very aspect of his parent’s lives.  Instead he found intellectual stimulation in the great  political and philosophical tracts of the Enlightenment and Romantic eras: he started befriending secular, left-wing intellectuals, and increasingly, despite the horror stories his father had told him about the prison and labor camps, he had come to see the Soviet Union as representing a new, beneficent force in human history.

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 of what was optimistically referred to as the war to end all wars. His, like so many others, was an existential search for moral purpose in a post-God world, a hunt for new ways of organizing human society in the wake of the Great War in which  millions had died, and, increasingly in the 1920s, in the face of the impending threat of Fascism. It was search that brought in its wake one of the twentieth century’s greatest paradoxes: How could so many people, believing so passionately in the language of universalism, make such appalling political choices regarding whom they trusted and what political institutions they supported? How could so many utopians end up supporting Stalin’s intolerant and blood thirsty project?

At least in part, the answer must remain somewhat metaphysical. It was the zeitgeist, the atmosphere of the times, the immediacy of history –a time when history was seen as a living, breathing, pulsating entity, a thing that was pressing in on individuals caught within its vise. It was part of a search for certainty, unfathomable with hindsight [perhaps] but at the time too easy to fall into. In America, many film makers and artists join the ranks of the Communist Party. In Britain, the Party struck deep roots in London, Glascow, and other urban centers. For the writer Arthur Koestler, embracing Marxism allowed him to think that ‘the while universe falls into a pattern like stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke . . .Faith is a wondrous thing; it is not only capable of moving mountains, but also of making you believe that a herring is a race horse.”


Did Chimen sympathize with the tormentors of his father? Highly doubtful. But did he come to think that his father had been misguided, that his father’s trial represented an aberration rather than the norm, or that the urgency of opposing a rising Fascist wave by aligning oneself with revolutionary workers’ politics outweighed all other arguments? Certainly by the late 1930s it seemed that way. Stalin had notoriously argued that one could not make an omelet without breaking eggs, and the young Chimen, to his latter bitter shame, entirely accepted the violent implications of this logic. Where Yehezkel, according to his biographer Aaron Sorsky, wrote of a Soviet Union that was a “land of blood that eats its inhabitants,’ Chimen  wrote that it was a place where anti-Semitism had ended and where the workers were freer than anywhere else on earth. Chimen and his wife Mimi  (who joined and left the Party earlier than Chimen must have reasoned as follows:

‘ Yes, Rabbi Abramsky is a good man, but he is entirely wrong about religion. And if he’s wrong about religion, in all likelihood he’s politically compromised. Yes, he’s a good man, a loving father, a caring father-in-law, but maybe the Soviet system had its reasons for arresting him; maybe without even realizing it, he was endangering the workers’ state. The human progress that Marxist revolution  represents is too important to be derailed by sentimental stories and personal sympathies.’

 Chimen denounced his father as a reactionary in the autobiography  he wrote for the Communist Party in 1950.’ In biographical notes and essays on Yehezkel published in religious journals and encyclopedias, Chimen is described as straying, having chosen to walk away from the light. .  .

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When it came to people who wavered in their faith or who sought to assimilate into secular culture Yehezkel could be scathing in his criticism. In 1934, when he was appointed the head of the rabbinic court of the London Beth Din, The Jewish Chronicle had editorialized that Anglo-Jewry was being ‘hijacked” by religious extremists from afar, by men who spoke little or no English, cared little or nothing about the broader culture, and sought only to impose rigid rituals on their brethren. One commentator wrote that men like Yehezkel Abramsky were promoting an ‘alien dogma, custom and superstition which had never before been any part of Judaism except in dark corners deep inside the ghettoes of Eastern Europe,.’ The rabbi responded: “My aim is to strengthen Yiddishkeit  both in practice and knowledge of Judaism.” He was, noted the Oxford historian Miri Freud-Kandel in 2006, a polarizing force in British Jewry.

Much as the U.S. Constitution is continuously held up to interpretation by succeeding generations of legal scholars as away to decide everything from the legitimacy of gay marriage to the right to bear arms, for religious Jews, the Talmud sets a theoretical framework within which later texts – the Shulhan Arukh and other codes- can be read, to lay down the rules for contemporary modes of conduct. For the Orthodox of London, many of the practices of everyday life – from the rituals of birth, marriage, and death, to the food that they ate –were filtered through the rulings of the Beth Din. And thus its leading interpreters of the Talmud, and the various commentaries on it written over the millennia, acquired tremendous influence. Yehezkel had, for his Orthodox followers, a status similar to that of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes among students of the U.S. Constitution. He had the power to make or break the country’s chief rabbi, his approval being a necessary prerequisite for anyone wanting the job; his word could, and on occasion did destroy the careers of young rabbis with whose interpretations of the Torah he disagreed. In 1948, almost three years after the long-serving rabbi J. H. Hertz died, Yehezkel helped install Israel Brodie in the job, but only after Brodie had ‘unequivocally relinquished authority over religious matter to Dayan Abramsky,’ wrote Freud-Kandel. Chief rabbis were convenient figureheads, but as Freud-Kandel explained it, it was Yehezkel Abramsky who would shape how the community interpreted religious law. He was, she concluded, an extraordinarily effective political manipulator, but all his machinations were to two ends only: to increase the religiosity of Britain’s Jewish population and the influence of conservative religious authority figures over them.

So, deep inside the claustrophobic dark confines of his 81 Wentworth Street bookshop, its façade still looking the same as it had in the Edwardian period, Chimen would always wear either a velvet velour hat or a cloth cap. He did not do so because his head was cold but because he did not want his religious clients and the friends of his parents who came to the hop to see that he was not wearing a yarmulke. Even though he told his Party comrades that his parents were reactionary, he went out of his way to avoid offending them gratuitously. His parents knew that he was not a believer; but that did not mean that their friends had to know as well. He didn’t want his parent’s friends reporting back to Yehezkel that their third son was flaunting his atheism in public. He did not want his father’s private disapproval of his and Mimi’s world view expressed in public. The Beth Din offices were on Hanbury Street, three blocks away from the shop; and the Machzikei  Hadath synagogue, where Yehezkel had been rabbi before becoming te head of the Beth Din, was even closer, on the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street. When Yehezkel or one of his rabbinic friends visited the shop, Chimen would immediately be able to launch into a conversation about the Talmud. When his Communist Party friends, such as the local tailor Mick Mindel, dropped by , he was equally at ease talking about Marx’s dialectic over a cup of tea.

During the run-up to the great religious festivals, Shapiro, Valentine & Co bustled with shoppers looking to purchase Haggadot (books used at the Passover Seder) Jewish calendars, almanacs, prayer books, or the lemon-like Etrog fruit and palm fronds to be used in the rituals of Sukkot  ( the Feast of Tabernacles). In the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah 9the Jewish New Year) and to Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the whole extended family would be brought into help cater to the rush of customers buying New Year’s cards and religious equipment associated with the holidays.

On Friday afternoon, the shop’s doors were shut and locked, and customers disappeared into their homes to prepare for the Sabbath meal and then, on Saturday, to attend synagogue. On Sunday, however, those doors opened once more, with people drawn to the area not only by goods on offer inside Shapro, Valentine & Co. and other shops lining Wentworth Street but also by the stalls of the Petticoat Lane street market, which ran along the center of Wentworth  Street, literally past the front door of the old bookshop. On market days, well into the 1960s, the area became as noisy, vibrant, and crowded as the great London markets and fairs of an earlier era. In those years, a now firmly middle-age Mimi would leave the bookshop and head off with her bags into the maelstrom of Petticoat Lane to shop for her weekly supply of fruit and vegetables. She would make a point of asking where the produce was from, an if a stall-keeper was rash enough to mention South  Africa, Mimi would simply stalk away; her refusal to put money into buying food grown in the apartheid state probably earned her  the undying enmity of the stall-keeper, but in the years after her Communist faith was utterly destroyed, supporting the boycott movement launched against South Africa in 1959 made her feel that she was still on the side of the (secular) angels.

At lunchtime, Chimen would slip out to Ostwind’s, a nearby workers café-cum-Jewish deli on Wentworth Street just the other side of Commercial Street from the bookshop for a change of pace. All around the neighborhood, decades after the war had ended, on Wentworth, Commercial , Middlesex  and Toynbee streets, were craters left by bombs that had fallen on the area during theBlitz

One day the streets would be rebuilt, and like so much of the East End, its character would shift: The buildings would look different, the businesses that made the district their home for generations would die off, the old immigrant groupings would be replaced by new ones. . .Today only a few scattered mementos of the Jewish East End are left forb the eye to see: the building façade on Brune Street announcing the presence of a soup kitchen “for the Jewish poor”; a small Star of David visible under the black paint on a gutter coming down from the steepled roof of what is  now a Church of England school; a historic shop front with the lettering ‘S. Schwartz.” The scars of the war have largely vanished, the holes in the fabric of the streets patched with boutique cafes, fashionable restaurants, and expensive new residential buildings.

In the meantime, though, a Chimen navigated the complicated religious and political terrain of the Jewish East End, Ostwind’s served a surprisingly good fried egg sandwich with chops and beans; and while the noise inside mirrored the kaleidoscopic chaos of the East End markets outside, it let Chimen escape the cares of his business for a few minutes each day.


When Chimen turned the lock on the shop early on Sunday afternoon, the family would decamp to Golders Green, to visit Chimen’s older, Orthodox brother Moshe, who was working at the that time as a supervisor in a kosher slaughterhouse, and his wife, Chaya Sara, and their two young children. Chimen and Moshe, both at the house and over the phone, would natter away in Yiddish, talking for hours about politics, gossiping about mutual friends. Chimen would perenially disparage gossip as “rubbish,” while at the same time filing it away in his mind for subsequent retelling and, quite likely, embellishment. Later on Sunday afternoon, the family would make the short hop across Golders Green for a midafternoon tea with Mimi’sister Sara and her family. Finally, they would return home in time for Mimi to cook Sunday dinner for Chimen’s first cousin Golda Zimmerman, a successful journalist who had helped Chimen find work at the bookshop back in the early days of the war and who was thus considered to have brought my grandparent’s  together; Mimi felt showed it to her cousin-in-law, who as she aged became a somewhat isolated lady, to invite her to the house at Hillway at least weekly.

Despite their break with formal religion, theirs was, in many ways, a world bound by ritual and the densely woven fabric of family ties.

All the while Chimen obsessively hunted for books. Shelf  by shelf, he began creating his House of Books.

[Abramsky began extensive research and collecting on Marx, Engels, and the history of the socialist movement, In this he was encouraged by some of Britain's most prominent Left-wing historians, including Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson and EH Carr. Isaiah Berlin also became a close friend.

Abramsky never neglected his studies of Jewish history and culture. He was much sought after for his expertise in rare Jewish books, many of which he had himself been collecting since the 1940s. From the 1960s to the 1990s he was a consultant to Sotheby's on Hebrew books and manuscripts. In 1966 he was invited to take up a newly created lectureship in modern Jewish history at University College London, becoming, in 1974, the Goldsmid Professor and head of the department of Hebrew and Jewish studies there, a position he held until his retirement in 1983.

Chimen Abramsky's reputation and influence from his personal impact on a large and varied group of scholars across the world. Many of these, young and old, beat a path to his home, which became a veritable salon presided over by his wife, who shared his passion for the intellectual life. She died in 1997 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.]

Inuits by Halldor Laxness

Now something must be said of the race called the Inuits, who make their abodes at the heads of Greenland’s  northernmost fjords, as well as on headlands, skerries, and islands. In Greenland, the land rises to from the sea only to be covered by high glaciers –all the way north to Scythia the Cold, some say- where there is no human life. It is also said that the name of this race has given itself means the same as or word for “men”.

 The Inuits are some of the most peaceable and prosperous people ever described in books. They have no herds, and use the land for neither hay nor other crops, but are such great hunters that their shots never go astray. They catch polar bears in stone traps, and drive reindeer either into pinfolds, where they fell them, or else into the sea, where they harpoon them from boats. These beasts they take mainly for their hides, as well as their tongues and loins. They hunt seabirds with darts, and drive fish onto shoals to spear them. Much of their time is spent on sleds, driving their dog-teams over sea ice – when they encounter an opening in the ice, they lay putrid swim bladders and seal livers at its rim, and when a shark comes to investigate they stab it with salmon spears.

They fit themselves out in skins, which the Norsemen find a contemptible habit, worthy of trolls, and wear undergarments made of bird skin. They use one-man boats, called kayaks, or “keiplar” in Norse, made with such ancient sorcery that no storm, skerry, or other dangerous obstacle can damage them. They have a second kind of boat, the umaik, made of skins and crewed by women in breeches, and none has ever been reported to have run aground or sunk. These things have given rise to the saying that the Inuit are ignorant of the art of drowning at sea.

It is also said that although the weather is harsher in that land than anywhere else in the world, the Inuits call all weather good, and are fully content with the weather as it is at any given moment. The cold in that land can be most piercing, yet no one freezes to death. Blizzards there blow long and hard, burying the earthy in snow and ice and preventing any vegetation from growing, yet we have never heard tell of an Inuit succumbing to the elements. Nor do the Inuit consider Earth to be one of the elements – yet they call fire their truest friend, second only to the gods in whom they put most faith, namely the man who rules the moon, the one-handed woman whose realm is the sea, mother of the monsters of the deep.

Reliable sources say that although the Inuit are great hunters, fowlers, and fishermen, expert with spear and bow, the sight of human blood can bring them to tears. They scarcely understand the forces and instincts that drive other peoples to manslaughter, and have no knowledge of the tools of the trade used by murderous folks in other land. The Inuit have thick black hair and rather large mouths. When some who had been hunting in the south brought tales of the manners of the Norsemen settled there and when the Norsemen slew their first Inuit, these people were so utterly baffled by the newcomers’ bizarre, depraved behavior that they named the Norsemen after this characteristic occupation of theirs, calling them “killermen” or “mankillers” to distinguish them from men- genuine men – the Inuit. Just as the Inuit are completely ignorant of warfare, so too are they ignorant of vengeance and other practices pertaining to justice.

The Inuit do not live separately, but in hunting bands. These hunting bands travel south to the same hunting and fishing grounds each spring, pitching their tents in temporary camps and seldom linger long in any one place, before returning north at the close of summer.

The Norsemen made a point of attacking the Inuit wherever they found them, whether in groups of whose movements they had gotten news, or as isolated individuals. If they came across their huts or skin tents on an island or a headland, they set those abodes aflame or destroyed them in some other way and slaughtered every person they found. Due to the Norsemen’s having far skin, colorless hair, and bright eyes, the Inuits lengthened the names they had given them to white or wan killermen, or pale mankillers.

It so happened that after a group of Norsemen reduced one of the Inuit hunting camps to cold embers, killing anyone who had not hidden in clefts in the rocks, and wrecking their gear as best they could, they were hit by a fierce storm, so that their boat capsized off a headland – something that would never happen to an Inuit. As the Norsemen in Greenland were unable to swim and thereby save their lives, all on board perished except one man who had come from Iceland - the skald Pormoour Bessason. He happened to be a good swimmer, and managed to say afloat until a wave washed him onto a bank  of seaweed, where he had no recourse but to shout for help.

A short time later, the storm abated. The remainder of the hunting band that the Norsemen had raided now fled northward with some of their dogs to safer haunts, using boats of theirs the Norsemen had overlooked when they burned the camp. As the woman rowed by the headland, they heard shouting from the bank of seaweed. There the Inuits found Skald Pormoour more dead than alive, freezing cold, drenched, bedraggled, with his good leg now broken too. Since the Inuits have no sense of retribution, they rescued their enemy, Skald Pormoour, from death and set his leg, singing all the while. They gave him warm seal’s blood to drink, and to eat, fermented seabird, still feathered and had their dogs sleep curled up against him.

A number of corpses had been washed onto the seaweed – Pormoour’s fellows – so the Inuits put seal-blubber into their mouths and carried the bodies up onto the rocks. Although the kind-heartedness of these people outweighed their wisdom or learning, they were well aware of the danger they faced having a pale mankiller in the midst of men, and despite his being sick and spent, they were fairly certain that as soon as he recovered, he would leap up and kill them. Every place they stopped for the night, they had him lie down with the dogs, and those in charge of the these animals watched over him. When night fell, however, the dogs barked noisily, and some bit fiercely – hardly pleasant company in those cheerless places.

Pormoour realized that he had little choice but to go along with his hosts no matter how far astray they led him, rather than be left behind, alone, a helpless man more dead than alive in the middle of a wasteland. Summer was drawing to a close. The Inuits broke camp, loading all their belongings onto the woman’s boats, including newborn infants and dogs, while any man capable of doing so paddled his own kayak. Quite often, the men rolled their kayaks over as a gesture of affection for the women, keeping them keel-up for long spells in a display of gallantry.

Pormoour was astonished at the sluggish pace of these people on their long journey. They paid no heed to the hours, but just trundled aliong, like folk that sometimes appear in dreams: no one was in a hurry; nothing spurred them on. Pormoour’s spirit grew numb watching people drift along without any urgency, as if playing children’s games rather than attending to their needs. It was often neat evening when they finally launched their boats and started out. They did, however, inch their way farther northward each day, putting even more distance between themselves and the Norsemen. Yet their day’s navigation often amounted to no more than paddling round the tip of a headland to the next fjord – that was far enough – where the women would paddle to land and unload their belongings, along with their children, dogs, and Pormoour Kolbrunarskald.. They would then drag their boats ashore, pitch their tents, and prepare and eat supper with great fuss, before lying down to sleep for the night. Or they would paddle up a fjord, close to shore, aiming for its heads, but then land and settle down for the night after only and short distance. They always hugged the coastline, never venturing out into the straits between headlands: and sailing was unknown to them.

Upon reaching the head of a fjord after several days padding, the od start paddling down the shore on the other side. If there was a promise of good prey, they would remain encamped for several days. At times they would drag or carry their boats and all their belongings over an isthmus behind a peak to the next fjord. Women would pitch the tents in the camps, using their paddles as tent poles, while some of the men would go hunting foxes and hares in the surrounding area, or try to track down musk-oxen; others would keep watch for sea-dwelling creatures: seals, whales, walruses, and bears. They stored food in various places, and always left behind whale meat and seal meat in their camps as provisions for when they returned, or for other hunting bands, but took tusks and hides with them, as well as large amounts of blubber. Whenever they crossed paths with other hunting bands, they celebrated merrily, staying together for several days, boiling seal-blubber, feasting, and singing “ay” and “ee.”

The news that one group that had gone south and returned with Pormoour Kolbrunarskald among their belongings aroused a great deal of curiosity in the hunting bands. Most men had never set eyes on a pale mankiller. Some asked what creature it was, and why it was being kept with the dogs. The others explained that Skald Pormoour belonged to a race of colorless Inuit who acknowledge no virtue but murder, and that pale killermen had come to their fishing grounds in the south and slaughtered everyone they could get their hands on, among them several men exceptionally skilled at driving their dogs and women expert at rendering blubber. All now praised their great fortune that the Moon Man and Mother of Sea Creatures had spared them from the acquaintance with these pallid folk, apart from what what their wise men might have related to them in song.

Pormoour now lay by night with the dogs, here and there near the northern boundary of the world, where death dwells. His life was quite dismal, and the killers of the warrior Porgeir Havarsson were as far away from his weapons as ever. Again and again, his heart ached with a single longing: to survive until the day, which now seemed so far away, when he could stand before the mighty king whom Porgeir had served and who now ruled the kingdom of Norway so honorably. Even if the vengeance that would make him worthy of coming before the king eluded him, he still yearned to extoll such a king in verses that would recall throughout the ages. And although he might never wreak his revenge, the skald hoped that in the eyes of the king, his journeying so far and so long to hunt down the warrior’s  slayers might be sufficient redress for this failure.

He tried to shut his ears to the relentless barking of dogs during the night by exalting King Olaf in his mind, lauding him for his champions, and envisioning in his mind’s eye the moment when he, a skald, would arrive at the king’s hall and enter and bow his head to his lord. As he pondered these things, timed passed and his broken leg healed, yet it was crooked and hardly fit for walking on, while the other one had been lame ever since the rocks had rained down on him  on the mountainside at Ogur.

After travelling northeastward for several weeks, the hunting band came to confined regions where glaciers descended to the sea between bare mountaintops. The weather worsened considerably and the group was often forced to wait for days, hindered by snowstorms, yet eventually they reached their home and dwellings: stone huts on promontories, some dome-shaped, others formed of whalebones with hides stretched over them. Awaiting then here were the stay-at-homes: old folks and children and a swarm of dogs. When they arrived, they hauled their boat ashore, greased them carefully and hung them on tall frames to keep the dogs from gnawing on them. Then they worked on patching up their dwellings and tents and sleds and other gear for the winter. It is the Inuit’s custom in winter, when the weather allows, to drive their dogs in the moonlight over ice-covered fjords, far out to sea, to hunt seals – and here more than elsewhere, they feasted on seal and walrus. Some of them worked on covering the huts with seaweed, then with snow, while others hung their insides with hides and arranged coking utensils and oil lamps in them, for there was no lack of fuel in blubber and oil.

In that land the moon shines in winter, but not the sun, which is why the Inuits honor the Moon Man above all. Little by little, the light of the sun vanished, until finally, folk could see only a faint outline of their hands before their faces for an hour at midday. By that time Pormoour Kolbrunarskald had earned the dogs trust, and those that had been fiercest toward him a first no longer seemed likely to tear him apart. At the same time, his esteem rose among men. They made him foremost among those creatures, just one rank below the dogs respected keepers. They dressed him  in good tunics and hose of sealskin and gave him hides to sleep on, and housed him in a shed reserved for pregnant bitches and sick old dogs that were so smarty and loyal that no one had the heart to kill them.

Snow shelters were built for healthy, vigorous dogs, or else they were left outside to be snowed over. The creatures were tied together with ropes of seaweed, these being the only ropes that they did not gnaw off. After snowstorms lasting several days, folk would have to dig their dogs out of the snow to feed them. The noble skald Pormoour, however, found his life tedious in the extreme, hearing nothing but the whine of the wind and the howling of dogs and hardly ever seeing any daylight. He felt that he would have died and descended to Niflheimur had he not kept the glorious image of King Olaf Haraldsson,  Porgir’s lord and that of both the sworn brothers, steadily in his mind’s eye, as well as his hope and dream of some day truly becoming one of the king’s men.

Gorky on Lenin by Victor Sebestyen

Lenin; The Man, The Dictator and The Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen Vintage Books, 2017

With respect to the Man, as presented by Mr. Sebestyen, Maxim Gorky’s testimony is by far the most interesting. Take  for  example, the question of Lenin’s attitude towards the Jews. According to the author Lenin was almost certainly unaware of his partially Jewish Ancestry though his sister Anna discovered it in Switzerland, researched the matter extensively after Lenin’s death and even wrote a paper for the Lenin Institute. “Absolutely not one word of this letter to anyone’, responded Stalin when  she presented with her work to him. Lenin, however, once told Gorky: “We do not have many intelligent people. Russians are a talented people but we are lazy. A bright Russian is nearly always a Jew or a person with an admixture of Jewish blood.”

Lenin never tried to conceal or fudge his roots, though the Soviets later created the myth that the founder of the world’s  first workers state ‘came from the people’ and was from ‘low social origins. To many of those who knew him, his manner and  bearing were revealing.  Gorky, a convinced socialist who was born into deep poverty and really did come from the people, said that Vladimir Ilyich had the self- belief of a leader, a Russian nobleman not without some of the psychological traits of that class.

Gorky wrote that one evening, when he and Lenin were listening to a sonata by Beethoven, Lenin said “ I know nothing greater than the Appassionata. I always think with pride that marvelous things human beings can do! But I can’t listen to it often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And you mustn’t stroke anyone’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to bit them over the head, without any mercy . . .Hm, Hm, our duty is infernally hard .  .  .’

When in London, partly to help with learning English, Lenin and his wife Nadya went often to the theatre  where Lenin became fascinated by the working-class music hall, which reached the height of its popularity in the Edwardian era. ‘It is the expression of a certain satirical attitude towards generally accepted ideas, to turn them inside out, to distort them, to show the arbitrariness of the usual,’ he wrote enthusiastically to Gorky after one performance in which he wrestled with the English sense of humor. ‘It is a little complicated but interesting.’

Gorky often remarked that ‘Lenin loved to laugh . . .and when he laughed it was with his whole body. On occasions he was overcome with laughter and would laugh sometimes until he cried. He could give to his short characteristic “hm, hm’ an infinite number of modifications, from biting sarcasm to noncommittal doubt. Often in his hm, hm one caught the sounds of the keen humor which a sharp-sighted man experiences who sees clearly through the stupidities of life.”

‘Rages’, however, came upon Lenin regularly and ‘seemingly from nowhere’. ‘The Tremendous expenditure of energy demanded by every campaign that Lenin undertook, driving himself  and relentlessly urging others onward, wore him out and drained his strength, one comrade in his clique said. ‘The engine of his will refused to work beyond a certain stage of frenzied tension . . .following an attack of his rage his energy would begin to ebb, and a reaction set in: dullness, loss of strength and fatigue which laid him out. He could neither eat nor sleep. Headaches tormented him. His face became sallow, the light died in his eyes . . .in such a state he was unrecognizable . . .then, what was most important, not to see anyone, not to talk to anyone.’ Gorky saw him in one of these fits of distemper and was frightened for him –‘he looked awful . . .even his tongue seemed to have turned grey.’

[Doctors who read the notes of Lenin’ post-mortem and examined his brain after his death were surprised that he lived as long as he did. Semashko reported ‘sclerosis of the blood vessels of Lenin’s brain had gone so far that they were calcified. When struck with a tweezer they sounded like stone. The walls of many blood vessels were so thickened and the blood vessel as so overgrown that not even a hair could be inserted into its openings. Thus, whole sections his brain were deprived of fresh blood.’]

Lenin often criticized ‘comrade doctors’ and generally advised his friends, including many Bolshevik activists, not to trust them. When he heard Gorky was being treated by an erstwhile Party member, he wrote suggesting – not in jest- that he should consult someone else. ‘The news that a Bolshevik is treating you, by a new method, even if he is only a former Bolshevik, upsets me . . . God save you from doctor comrades  in general and doctor Bolsheviks in particular. But really in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred doctor comrades are assess . . .I assure you, except in trivial  cases, one should only be treated by men of first-class reputation.”

As for literature, Lenin loathed most contemporary Russian writing. He was contemptuous of Alexander Blok but especially the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, though both had much praise for Lenin and the Communists, and despite their popularity among the workers. He told Gorky that Mayakovsky ‘shouts, invents words, and doesn’t go anywhere . . .its incomprehensible, difficult to reads, disconnected, drivel. Is he talented? Very talented even? Hmmm. We shall see.” He reacted similarly to modern painting and sculpture “Why turn away from real beauty, a discard it for good and all, just because its “old”? Why worship the new as the god to be obeyed, just because it is “new”. That is nonsense, sheer nonsense’ he told an old comrade two years after seizing power. ‘Art belongs to the people. It must have its roots in the broad mass of the workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their thoughts and feelings and desires. It must arouse and develop the artist in them. Are we to give cake and sugar to a minority, when the mass of workers and peasant still lack black bread?

 At first censorship under the Bolsheviks operated with a light hand but even before his illness, libraries, the institution beloved by Lenin, the places where he had spent so much of his life, came under attack.  From the start of 1920 his wife’s job at the Enlightenment Commissariat was to purge ‘unacceptable’ books from Russia’s public libraries ‘’an act of intellectual vampirism’, Gorky called it. She held the job until Lenin died. She performed the task with her customary zeal- and she had his blessing. Works by ninety-four authors including Kant, Descartes, William James, Pyotr Kropotkin and Ernst Mach were removed. ‘’ This tree of unknowledge was planted by Nadezhda Krupskaya under Lenin, with his direction and advice,’ acknowledge the chairman of the Central Libraries Commission later.

On 11 April 1910 Lenin wrote to Gorky from Geneva: “Life in exile and squabbling are inseparable. Living in the midst of these squabble as and scandals, this hell and ugly scum is sickening. To watch it all is sickening, too. Émigré life is now a hundred times worse than it was before 1905.”

The row this time was within Lenin’s own Bolshevik faction- a groupuscule within the group – but Lenin didn’t mind how small his band of followers was as long as he had someone to do his bidding. He saw a potential rival in Alexander Bogdanov, three years younger than he, tall, burly, ‘a gentle giant with a sweet nature, and with a sparklingly original mind’.

Bogdanov had trained as a physician and studied philosophy at Moscow university. He wrote some interesting science fiction. He was drawn to Marxism and joined a radical ‘reading circle’ allied to the RSDLP, which was enough to get him exiled to Siberia for three years. In the Party split of 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks. He started developing new ideas that tried to fuse Marxism with a kind of mystic spiritualism designed to appeal to Christians and other religious people. It regarded manual labor as a religious rite that turned the masses of workers into God-like beings. Lenin thought the theory was utter hocus-pocus, ‘dangerous garbage’, and had to be challenged ‘from a philosophical, a Marxist, point of view. Gorky was interested in Bogdanov’s theories and Lunacharsky, whom Lenin liked and valued, had been converted to Bogdanov’s ‘God-building’ notions. In reality, Bogdanov was never a serious threat to Lenin’s leadership: as a political tactician he was as hopeless, if not more so, than Martov, and though brilliant in his way he was a dilettante, never a plausible leader.

Gorky, had invited Lenin to stay for a few days in April 1908 at his villa in Capri. He told him that Bogdanov, ‘an extremely talented person with a mild character' , would also be there and he wanted the two of them to talk in a relaxed way and discuss their differences, At first he Lenin said he did not have time to go. But when Gorky asked again he grudgingly agreed, though warning his host that ‘listening to that Bogdanovite drivel makes me swear like a fishwife’.

Lenin was given a luxurious room with a magnificent sea view next to Gorky’s splendid library. The writer told friends later that he was appalled by Lenin’s rudest to Bogdanov.  ‘Vladimir Ilyich stood before me even more firm and more inflexible than he had been at the London Congress  . . .he was rather cold and in a mocking mood, stern in philosophical conversations and altogether on the alert. Gorky wanted to help start a school in Capri that taught Bogdanov’s spiritual/Marxist theories. He hoped Lenin would give lectures there and contribute to a book of essays in new interpretations of Marxism that he wanted to get published. Lenin would have nothing to do with this ‘total philosophical rubbish . . .this religious atheism’. He told Bogdanov and Gorky, ‘Why should we be offered this type of stuff as Marxist philosophy? I’d rather let myself be hanged and quartered than take part in any publication or in any group that preaches this kind of thing.’

Marxism was a ‘materialist’ philosophy and to Lenin religion insulted a rational person’s intelligence. ‘Those who live by the labor of others are taught by religion to practice charity on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters, and selling them at a moderate price to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze in which  the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of men.’ In a letter o Gorky after his stay on Capri, Lenin wrote: ‘Any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, even any flirtation with a God, is the most inexpressible foulness, a dangerous foulness . . . Isn’t God-building the worst form of self-humiliation? Everyone who sets about building up God, or who even tolerates such activity, humiliates himself in the worst possible way . . .because he is actually engaged in self-contemplation, self admiration. From the point of view not of the individual but of society, all God-building is the fond self-deception of the thick-witted, the philistine, the dreamy self-humiliation of the vulgar bourgeois.

 There was no room for compromise with Bogdanov. On the other hand there was plenty of time for relaxation on Capri. He swam and saw the sights. ‘The Blue Grotto is beautiful’, he wrote to his mother, though it is ‘dramatic’ in the sense that it could be scenery in a theater. On the way here I thought about the Volga all the time. The beauty there is of a different kind; it is simpler and dearer to me.’ He played chess with Bogdanov, who once managed to beat him. Gorky said that he took the loss badly and was in a foul mood afterwards. But this is the only record of Lenin being a bad loser at chess. Others said he was a perfect gentleman at the board, win or lose, and was always happy to talk in a friendly way afterwards about the game.

Lenin showed Gorky the other side of his nature. “At the same time there was in  Capri another Lenin – a wonderful companion and light-hearted person with a lively and inexhaustible interest in the world around him, and very gentle in his relations with people. He showed a lively interest in everything. Most days he was on the island he would go out with local fishermen. He would quiz them on their lives –how much they were paid, their families, their education, their beliefs. Maria Andreyeva would go with him to the nearby harbor and act as his interpreter. In this way Lenin possessed the common touch and became friendly with two elderly brothers, Giovanni and Francesco Sparado, who taught him how to fish without a rod, by using his finger and thumb along the line to feel if a fish had taken the bait. ‘Cosi, drin drin,’ they would say, ‘Like this, Understand? When after a few attempts he landed a mullet he laughed and continuously used the phrase ‘drin drin’ for six days. The name seemed to stick and locals on the island referred to him as ‘Signor Drin Drin’.

Gorky returned with Lenin to the mainland and together they climbed Vesuvius and visited Pompeii. Despite the author’s efforts, though, he could not persuade Lenin to tone down his invective against Bogdanov. He spent the best part of thye next year writing a long book, Materialsm and Empirio-Criticism, lambasting Bogdanov and mounting a campaign to ge him expelled from the Social Democratic Party.

Lenin wasn’t interested in the trappings of power. He disliked ostentatious display and lived modestly with Nadya in dull, bourgeois style in contrast to the others about whom Gorky wrote to his wife shortly after the Revolution: ‘Only the commissars lead a pleasant life these days. They steal as much as they can from the ordinary people to pay for their courtesans and their un-socialist luxuries’. Gorky once said that  simplicity, in such a dictatorial man, was an example of Lenin’s ‘narcissism’. Martov thought likewise, though at the same time he often said ‘there was no vanity in Lenin – a paradox apparent in few powerful men.

Vladimir Lenin was brilliant at explaining his ideas in simplified, direct ways. Never a man of the people himself, he learned how to speak effectively to an audience using the force of his intellect. Gorky often heard him speak but never forgot the first time. ‘His guttural “r” made him seem a poor speaker, but within a minute I was completely engrossed as everyone else. I had never known anyone who could talk of the most intricate political questions simply . . .no striving after eloquent phrases, but every word uttered distinctly and its meaning marvelously clear. I had not imagined him that way. I felt there was something missing in him . . .he was too plain. There was nothing of ‘the leader’ in him. But, with his arm  extended, hand slightly raised, and he seemed to weigh every word with it, and to sift out the remarks of his opponents . . .The unity, completeness, directness and strength of his speech, his whole appearance, was a veritable work of classic art; everything was there and yet there was nothing superfluous, and if there were any embellishments, they were not noticed as such, but were as natural and inevitable as two eyes in a face, or five fingers on a hand.”