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.
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.
_________________
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. . .
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. . .
_________________
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.]
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.]
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