Chimen Abramsky, the son of a renowned Orthodox rabbi, became one of the leading Jewish historians of the 20th century. He was also an avid, perhaps obsessive, collector of books—which, as his biographer grandson Sasha has described, crammed every corner of his grandparents’ house in London. Vladislav Davidzon reviews the historian’s intellectual journey:
Born in the last year of the Russian empire and educated by private tutors at home in Russia in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, Abramsky, who died five years ago, left the world of Jewish Orthodoxy to become a Communist and finally a liberal. He read voraciously and became a self-taught genius obsessed with the work of Karl Marx. Along the way, he amassed what one commentator described as “probably the most complete privately owned collection of socialist literature and Jewish history anywhere in the world.” The house he shared with his wife Miriam . . . was crammed with thousands of books and precious curios, such as the original typescript of Rosa Luxemburg’s doctoral thesis and Karl Marx’s own annotated copy of the Communist Manifesto. . . .
The peculiarity of . . . Chimen’s conversion to Communism (he would not leave the British Communist party until 1958, eighteen months after the Soviet invasion of Budapest), despite his father’s experience [as a prisoner in] the Gulag, is a running theme of his grandson’s book. . . In his old age it filled Chimen with shame as well: the only papers that this majestic hoarder hastened to discard were the early pamphlets written in dreary Stalinoid jargon.
Read more on Tablet: http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/189017/chimen-abramsky