In his new book The House of Twenty Thousand Books, journalist and writer Sasha Abramsky weaves together a moving family story of radical politics, passionate book collecting, and the eclectic mind of a Jewish intellectual. Join us for a lively discussion with Abramsky about the ways books have shaped Jewish lives and culture in the modern world.

Review from The Wall Street Journal:
by Jeremy Dauber (09/25/2015)

Books Do Furnish a Home: Chimen Abramsky replaced one totalizing faith—Orthodox Judaism—for another: leftist politics.

Intellectualism - the practice of being and living in the world as an intellectual, rather than simply using one’s intellect—poses a set of diametrically opposed challenges. On the one hand, there’s the magpie-like drive of intellectual curiosity, the desire to winkle out everything one can about an endlessly complex world. On the other, there’s the rigorously analytical drive of systematization, of trying to fit all that everything into clearly explicable channels.

Any public intellectual’s posterity depends in no small part on how well they navigate the tensions between the two. A chronicle of intellectual life like “The House of Twenty Thousand Books,” Sasha Abramsky’s tale of his brilliant grandfather, must measure its success in how well it lives up to the challenges of addressing those disparities.

Before you ask: The house in question is the externally unprepossessing 5 Hillway, Highgate, London. Though there’s no list or catalog, Mr. Abramsky’s depiction of the treasures stacked, heaped and hoarded inside its walls renders the number 20,000 utterly persuasive. But Mr. Abramsky’s book ultimately revolves around not the house, nor the books, but their reader; structured like an architectural floor plan, the book presents each room’s holdings (like a library, except they’re all reading rooms) as a jumping-off point to discuss the different interests, drives, intellectual obsessions, and emotional and psychological pulls of their occupant.

Mr. Abramsky’s grandfather Chimen Abramsky was by all accounts a remarkable man of prodigious intellect and enormous energy. (He died at age 93 in 2010.) Chimen himself was the heir to a familial tradition of intellectual achievement: His father, Yehezkel Abramsky, was considered one of the great intellects of the 20th-century rabbinate and arguably the most important Orthodox rabbi in Britain during his lifetime, having immigrated after spending time in Stalin’s Siberia for refusing to lie about the maltreatment of religious Jewry there. Chimen’s photographic recall and his voracious love of reading and scholarship could easily, had he followed in that path, suggested a similar destiny.

But the transformations of modernity had their effect on Chimen, as they did on numberless Jewish men and women born in Europe in the early part of the 20th century. By his teenage years, Chimen switched his allegiances from the Talmud to Marx, and, as the decades went on, became one of the truly great collectors of books, letters and other archival documents related to the history of socialism in Europe, earning much of his living cataloging and evaluating similar materials for auction houses.