This is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and
Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the
corner from Hampstead Heath. In their semi-detached house, so
deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a
remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's
collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and
other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his
journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and
ethical debates that have shaped the western world. Chimen Abramsky
was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested
by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour
in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London.
Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath,
always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the
meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts
and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a
Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and
astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and
memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising
the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed
himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his
socialist library was added a vast trove of Jewish history volumes.
Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies
at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's. With his
wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing
intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers,
from Isaiah Berlin to Eric Hobsbawm, dined at their table. The
House of Twenty Thousand Books brings alive this latter-day salon
by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas
and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a
hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by
idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals,
autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected. In this
extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate
narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but
the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings
that animated it.
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