"The House of Twenty Thousand Books" is many things: a look at early 20th century publishing; an exploration of the joys of book collecting, especially rare and antique works; a loving but clear-eyed personal memoir of Abramsky's grandparents; and an elegy to the intellectual salon they hosted in their home in north London for more than 40 years. The Abramskys drew a constant crowd that included great writers, historians, and thinkers who hotly debated the most pressing issues of their time. The author shows how the idealistic Communism of the Abramskys, their friends and colleagues during the 1930s and 1940s gave way to terrible disillusionment in the 1950s and eventual re-direction for many. I found it to be an engrossing story of one family and their milieu during an uncertain but exciting period of history. ( )

I enjoyed this book with its interweaving of Jewish history and books. ( )

This was a great idea for framing an overview of Jewish/socialist physical and cultural history, family lore, and musings on the power of the written word—not so much a tour through a library as a series of Venn diagrams highlighting the macro and micro worlds of Abramsky's grandfather. I'm using it as an anchor for an essay I'm writing on dealing with my mother's library when I had to pack it up, and it was definitely the right choice—a lot to think about in terms of family, aspiration, and Jewishness.

I thought the first part of this was a bit on the recursive side, circling back heavy-handedly to the emphasize the political, cultural, and family history more than Abramsky really needed to (or maybe just more than I needed him to). I do understand how much he wanted to establish that base of knowledge in the reader, and I think once he hit what he imagined that point to be, the book hit its groove and was a really fascinating intersection of all those histories, and a great ode to bookishness in a non-precious or readers-are-superior-beings way, which always bothers me when it crops up. This is a very Jewish book, in an entirely good and holistic way, and definitely recommended for anyone with an interest in that side of 20th-century arts and letters. ( )

God, I loved this book. Loved it. But not because, or not only because of the books. In fact, I think I would have liked to hear more about the books, believe it or not, but this is not exactly a book about books. It is a book about a man, of whom the best record of his life is to be found not in photographs, or journals, or even letters, but in the books he kept close to him. In this, it is very familiar -- I look at the over-full shelves of my own library, which like his spills into every room in the house (unlike his, even the bathroom) and I see not a book collection, but a record of a life as I go from passion to passion. Thus it is with the Abramsky home at Hillway House, a structure that grew increasingly more dilapidated as the books and people within seemed to become more and more alive.

Sasha Abramsky's...well, tribute is really the only word for it, to his grandfather Chimon Abramsky is structured around this house the author practically grew up in. He steps in the front foyer, with all the books of early socialist literature to be found there (only one small cupboard grudgingly given over as a place for people's coats), to talk about his great grandfather and his family's suffering under the late tsarist (pogroms) and then the new soviet (Siberian labor camps for dissidents) regimes, and to explore how Chimon became committed to socialism, and even to Stalinism, despite what his family endured, what friends reported when they escaped.

He guides the reader to the kitchen to remember his grandmother Mimi, an Communist activist and psychologist who for years was the head of the Psychiatric Social Work Department of the Royal Free Hospital, as well as the social hostess of Hillway, who fed political and philosophical debates that would coalesce in the impromptu salons with an apparently endless supply of kosher food.

He takes the reader to the Master Bedroom, where Chimon kept his most valuable and historic works of Socialist and Jewish literature -- a complete collection of William Morris's The Commonweal, books with notes handwritten by Karl Marx, annotated by Lenin, manuscripts by Trotsky. We are then guided into the Front Parlor -- where his rising interest in Judaica makes itself known, into the Dining Room, where Jewish history vied for space with prints by Russian Jewish artists, works about revolution, about the need for a Jewish state. Tradition met modernity in this room.

And finally the reader is taken upstairs, perhaps the most mysterious rooms in the house to Sasha as a child -- the books often written in mysterious languages, on old parchment. First edition Spinoza. A manuscript with notes handwritten by Rashi (the great Talmudic scholar), illuminated Hebrew Bibles and copies of the Talmud from the Renaissance.

As the reader is guided into each room they are given not a bibliography of books, exactly, but the author's own thoughts about what the books meant to their owner, to Chimon. The house is a portrait in books, a record of a passionate intellectual life full of great energy, great joy, and also great grief.

The whole account is worth it just for the portrait it gives of leftist and communist activism on the eve of WWII and in the years that immediately followed. And also for its account of how the community tore itself apart following the revelations of Stalin's atrocities. And also for the way it documents the struggles of a conservative and orthodox Jewish community to adapt to a modern, humanistic, and even atheistic time.

And while the account is not without its flaws -- Sasha Abramsky has many questions about his grandfather for which he can only speculate answers, and there is a staggering amount of name dropping since Hillway was the kind of house intellectuals of the era made a point of dropping in to visit, in the end these are minor quibbles compared to the picture the author creates of the man, the family, the house, the movement, the era.

El net d'un fill ateu d'un dels rabins més importants del segle, explica la seva història. aquest sent jueu rus emigra a Londres on casa seva es converteix en un lloc de discussió i estudi de la cultura jueva i també de Karl Marx. ( )