Overview

Named one of Kirkus's Best Nonfiction Books of 2015 The House of Twenty Thousand Books is the story of Chimen Abramsky, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than fifty years Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers. The atheist son of one of the century’s most important rabbis, Chimen was born in 1916 near Minsk, spent his early teenage years in Moscow while his father served time in a Siberian labor camp for religious proselytizing, and then immigrated to London, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx and became involved in left-wing politics. He briefly attended the newly established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, until World War II interrupted his studies. Back in England, he married, and for many years he and Miriam ran a respected Jewish bookshop in London’s East End. When the Nazis invaded Russia in June 1941, Chimen joined the Communist Party, becoming a leading figure in the party’s National Jewish Committee. He remained a member until 1958, when, shockingly late in the day, he finally acknowledged the atrocities committed by Stalin. In middle age, Chimen reinvented himself once more, this time as a liberal thinker, humanist, professor, and manuscripts’ expert for Sotheby’s auction house.  Journalist Sasha Abramsky re-creates here a lost world, bringing to life the people, the books, and the ideas that filled his grandparents’ house, from gatherings that included Eric Hobsbawm and Isaiah Berlin to books with Marx’s handwritten notes, William Morris manuscripts and woodcuts, an early sixteenth-century Bomberg Bible, and a first edition of Descartes’s Meditations. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a wondrous journey through our times, from the vanished worlds of Eastern European Jewry to the cacophonous politics of modernity. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos.  

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9781590178881

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[T]ransformative journeys were undertaken by more than a million Russian Jews between the 1890s and 1920s, expelled by successive waves of pogroms, revolution, civil war and persecution. Sasha Abramsky's tender, intelligent, many-layered memoir of his grandparents, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, is a version of this same story, at once epic and intimate, rooted in family life but encompassing the sweep of history. At its heart are loss and renewal, tradition and reinvention, schism and continuity. --Rebecca Abram, Financial Times Memorialising an epoch in Jewish life, [Abramsky] mixes the visual with the instructive in a way that could inspire a television series. -- The Jewish Chronicle Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books. --Samuel Freedman I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection. --Jonathan Keates .. .wonderfully warm and evocative --Peter Dreier, Huffington Post The sheer richness of this marvellous book - in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec - amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family - in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi - about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal. --Simon Winchester The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents' house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions --- Jewish and Marxist - that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books. --Michael Ignatieff The story of Abramsky's house and of the collection assembled in it embodies a singular intellectual journey through the political, philosophical, and religious disputations of the Western world and of 20th-century intellectual history...The book succeeds marvelously in what could be said to be the primary function of a memoir: enveloping the reader in the proverbial lost or vanished world. Dozens of people would show up at the Abramsky home on any given evening, where one could find oneself eating and arguing in one evening with figures such as Steve Zipperstein, Isaiah Berlin, and Eric Hobsbawm....The descriptions of the atmosphere of the Abramsky house itself are ravishing, and Sasha telegraphs his childlike delight in cradling his patrimony. --Vladislav Davidzon, Tablet

[T]ransformative journeys were undertaken by more than a million Russian Jews between the 1890s and 1920s, expelled by successive waves of pogroms, revolution, civil war and persecution. Sasha Abramsky's tender, intelligent, many-layered memoir of his grandparents, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, is a version of this same story, at once epic and intimate, rooted in family life but encompassing the sweep of history. At its heart are loss and renewal, tradition and reinvention, schism and continuity. --Rebecca Abram, Financial Times Memorialising an epoch in Jewish life, [Abramsky] mixes the visual with the instructive in a way that could inspire a television series. -- The Jewish Chronicle Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books. --Samuel Freedman I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection. --Jonathan Keates .. .wonderfully warm and evocative --Peter Dreier, Huffington Post

Transformative journeys were undertaken by more than a million Russian Jews between the 1890s and 1920s, expelled by successive waves of pogroms, revolution, civil war and persecution. Sasha Abramsky's tender, intelligent, many-layered memoir of his grandparents, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, is a version of this same story, at once epic and intimate, rooted in family life but encompassing the sweep of history. At its heart are loss and renewal, tradition and reinvention, schism and continuity. --Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times Memorialising an epoch in Jewish life, [Abramsky] mixes the visual with the instructive in a way that could inspire a television series. -- The Jewish Chronicle Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books. --Samuel Freedman I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection. --Jonathan Keates .. .wonderfully warm and evocative --Peter Dreier, Huffington Post The sheer richness of this marvellous book in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal. Simon Winchester The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions - Jewish and Marxist that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books. Michael Ignatieff The story of Abramsky s house and of the collection assembled in it embodies a singular intellectual journey through the political, philosophical, and religious disputations of the Western world and of 20th-century intellectual history...The book succeeds marvelously in what could be said to be the primary function of a memoir: enveloping the reader in the proverbial lost or vanished world.Dozens of people would show up at the Abramsky home on any given evening, where one could find oneself eating and arguing in one evening with figures such as Steve Zipperstein, Isaiah Berlin, and Eric Hobsbawm .The descriptions of the atmosphere of the Abramsky house itself are ravishing, and Sasha telegraphs his childlike delight in cradling his patrimony. Vladislav Davidzon, Tablet Memoir of Jewish intellectual life and universal history alike, told through a houseful of books, their eccentric collectors, and the rooms in which they dwelled...In this entertaining, deeply learned book, Sasha Abramsky adds materially to Chimen and Mimi's 20,000 volumes. On another level, the book, like that grand library, is a narrative of the broad sweep of Jewish diaspora history...If you finish this brilliant, realized book thinking you need to own more books, you're to be forgiven. A wonderful celebration of the mind, history, and love. Kirkus starred review

[T]ransformative journeys were undertaken by more than a million Russian Jews between the 1890s and 1920s, expelled by successive waves of pogroms, revolution, civil war and persecution. Sasha Abramsky's tender, intelligent, many-layered memoir of his grandparents, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, is a version of this same story, at once epic and intimate, rooted in family life but encompassing the sweep of history. At its heart are loss and renewal, tradition and reinvention, schism and continuity. --Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times Memorialising an epoch in Jewish life, [Abramsky] mixes the visual with the instructive in a way that could inspire a television series. -- The Jewish Chronicle Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books. --Samuel Freedman I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection. --Jonathan Keates .. .wonderfully warm and evocative --Peter Dreier, Huffington Post The sheer richness of this marvellous book - in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec - amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family - in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi - about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal. --Simon Winchester The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents' house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions --- Jewish and Marxist - that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books. --Michael Ignatieff The story of Abramsky's house and of the collection assembled in it embodies a singular intellectual journey through the political, philosophical, and religious disputations of the Western world and of 20th-century intellectual history...The book succeeds marvelously in what could be said to be the primary function of a memoir: enveloping the reader in the proverbial lost or vanished world. Dozens of people would show up at the Abramsky home on any given evening, where one could find oneself eating and arguing in one evening with figures such as Steve Zipperstein, Isaiah Berlin, and Eric Hobsbawm....The descriptions of the atmosphere of the Abramsky house itself are ravishing, and Sasha telegraphs his childlike delight in cradling his patrimony. --Vladislav Davidzon, Tablet

Author Information

Sasha Abramsky was born in England, grew up in London, and attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics. Abramsky is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, The New Yorker online, and many other publications. His most recent book, The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives, was listed by The New York Times as among the one hundred notable books of 2013. He is a Senior Fellow at Demos think tank, and teaches writing at University of California, Davis. Abramsky lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and their two children.

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