Chimen Abramsky (1916 - 2010) was 94 years old when he died at his north London home. He was a scholar, writer, and reader who had surrounded himself with 20,000 books. Born the son of a long-line of rabbis, this self-educated Renaissance man was also a book-dealer, cataloguer, collector, publisher, salonist, and university professor. This portrait of him was written by his grandson Sasha.
Many volumes in his large collection were rare books purchased over the better part of a century. The house contained upward of ten tons of books, the weight of at least five cars. Although once descried as a "little Russian gnome," he was in many ways larger than life. In addition to being one of England's most prominent book collectors, he was one of the greatest letter-writers of his times, sometimes sending out 10 – 20 twenty missives a day to an incredible circle of illustrious friends and acquaintances; he wrote tens of thousands of letters. By middle-age, Chimen was heralded as one of the great experts both in Socialist history and in Jewish history.
Sasha Abramsky describes her grandfather's books as being "like a seed bank out of which his world could be resurrected, or shards from an archeological dig – the older layers buried underneath newer, fresher levels – allowing vanished histories to come back to life." His mansion of books was more a never-ending voyage of discovery than a physical abode. His home was "to be experienced like a trip to far-off lands -- difficult, challenging, unpredictable." Some rooms functioned more like a treasury vault rather than an active library. He had a "jungle room" adjacent to the room containing his rarest Judaica volumes. The door to this study was usually locked; some viewed it as the intellectual epicenter of his library. Moving from room to room, you could see how Chimen's interests and priorities had changed over the years.
Sasha Abramsky not only pays tribute to the extraordinary life and work of his grandfather but lifts our spirits with its celebration of personal libraries and the pivotal role they can play in the lives of writers, teachers, philosophers, and scholars of all types. We relate to this. Our own 16,000 volume of spiritual and religious books not only serves as a working library for the Center for Spirituality & Practice but functions as a sacred place in our lives and ministries as a constant source of wisdom, light, meaning, and inspiration.
