[MUSIC]
Five Hillway, the house that my grandparents lived in was one of
the most important places in my life.
Every weekend I would go there.
My granddad would open the door.
He'd kiss me on both cheeks.
He spoke his patois of English and Russian and
Yiddish and Hebrew and he would bring me in,
and he just absorbed me into the conversations and how he would do.
[LAUGH] After my granddad died in 2010, I tried to piece together their lives.
The result is my book, The House of Twenty Thousand Books.
It's a detective journey, a story that takes readers from
the 1880s in the Russian Empire where my great grandfather,
Yehezkel Abramsky, became one of the great Rabbinic figures of the modern world.
I imagine it was quite similar to the journey that Edmund deval
took when he wrote the Hare with Amber Eyes.
But this voyage going back into my own ancestry,
trying to understand their lives.
My grandfather was born in Minsk in 1916, just before the Russian Revolution.
93 years later he died in London.
In the nearly 100 years that he lived he built up one of England's finest
collections of old books.
He was a historian of socialist literature and of modern Jewish history.
In middle age, my grandfather was discovered by the great philosopher,
Isaiah Berlin, and ended up teaching, first at Oxford, and
then as a professor of Modern Jewish studies at University College, London.
He roamed the world.
He was looking for all of the epicenters of the Jewish story,
Israel, Russia, England, Spain.
Later in life he went back and forth across the Atlantic.
He became one of Sotheby's great manuscripts experts.
Chimen was absolutely a polymath.
Anything to do with the world of ideas fascinated him.
I found photographs of my grandmother leading demonstrations in the east end of
London in the 1930s, calling for more benefits to be paid to the unemployed.
She was an extraordinary hostess.
While my granddad used words to create a fabric of existence for
his life, so my grandmother used cooking.
She opened up their house to thousands of people, and
it was that combination of obsessive book collecting and obsessive people
collecting that made Five Hillway one of the most unique houses in London.
>> This is very, extremely rare.
>> Oh, wow.
>> This is book biography of Marx, 1870, five years before he died.
Extremely rare, not even in the British Library.
>> The house looked totally nondescript from the outside.
It just looked like an ordinary suburban house.
And you'd step inside this wonderland.
And it was literally floor to ceiling of books,
every room a part from the bathrooms had books.
The errand closets had books.
The floors were piled with books and manuscripts.
You could find Carl Marx's membership card of the First International.
You could find handwritten documents with Lenin's handwriting or
Karl Marx's handwriting on it.
You could go into another room and find first edition Rene Descartes.
You'd find this wondrous set of posters and
artwork bound into series of volumes from the Paris Commune from 1871.
>> Oh my God, this is just brilliant.
This is obviously the Kaiser.
Bismarck is taking the Republic's flag to the Kaiser,
who is bathing in blood, having crushed the French.
>> The thing is, when I was a kid, I took all of this for granted,
it just seemed normal, and then as I got older,
I realized how extraordinarily rare this was.
And that my granddad had actually amassed a collection
that wasn't just large, but the quality of the collection.
This really was a lifelong project.
>> You've got more than the British Library.
>> Yes. >> Yeah.
>> The first editions.
When I was a student in Jerusalem,
there were cheap editions of Marx and I had not much money,
so whatever money I had, I already began to buy books, especially of Marx.
He opened my eyes on how to understand history.
His sharpness of style, writing in English, in German, in French,
brilliant, absolutely brilliant in all the three languages, captured my imagination.
>> Of the 20,000 books in my granddad's house,
I'm sure he had read almost every single one of them.
He was like a human Google.
One of his favorite interlites of all time was Spinoza.
He'd read passages from it, and he would use them as morality tales.
I must have been the only kid in London who was being quoted
Spinoza as a morality tale.
When my dad was a child, back when my grandparents were communists,
all the top communist historians would come through.
Eric Hobsbawn, Christopher Hill, and
they would debate issues into the small hours of the night.
How do we find meaning in our lives?
Do we find it in the printed work?
Do we find it in the great gatherings, that bring family and
friends of all generations together.
As I wrote The House of 20,000 Books, I wanted to convey all of that majesty and
all of that mystery to my readers.
I wanted to invite them into that house.
I wanted them to feel what it was like.
To sit at that dining room table and to engage in those conversations.
And, I hope that as you read this book, you feel that at least in some small way,
you have become a part.
A guest of
Five Hillway.