Chimen Abramsky

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Chimen Abramsky (born September 12, 1916 in Minsk , Russian Empire ; died March 14, 2010 in London , England ) was a British Judaist and Marxist .

Life

Shimon Abramsky was born in Belarus as the son of rabbi Yehezkel Abramsky . His father was persecuted as a Jew in the Soviet Union and so the family emigrated to Great Britain in 1932 and lived in London. In 1936 he went to Palestine and studied history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem . While staying with his parents in 1939, the outbreak of World War II prevented him from returning to Palestine. Since then he has worked in the Jewish bookstore "Shapiro, Valentine & Co" in the East End of London and in 1940 married the daughter of the owner, Miriam Nirenstein (1917–1997). Both joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1941 after the Soviet Union entered the war on the side of the Allies . In 1958, two years after the crackdown on the Hungarian uprising , he left the party again. In the 1940s Abramsky published a translation of Georg Lukács ' essays on realism in his own small publishing house .

He dealt in Hebrew books and manuscripts in the second-hand bookstore, and the auction house Sotheby’s relied on his expertise. In the 1960s he made a lifelong friendship with Isaiah Berlin and was encouraged by this and a larger circle, which also included EH Carr , to scientific and academic activity. When his work on the British labor movement in the 19th century, written with Henry Collins, appeared, he was appointed a Fellow at St Antony's College in Oxford in 1965 and a lecturer at University College London the following year . In order to meet the formal qualifications, he has only now taken his MA exam in Jerusalem. Abramsky was appointed Head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College in 1974 and received a Goldsmid Professorship. The drawing room in his house crammed with books was a meeting place for the British Marxist left. In 1989 the commemorative publication Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky was dedicated to him; Salo Baron , Isaiah Berlin, Shmuel Ettinger and Arnaldo Momigliano acted as consultants for the edition .

He had two children with his wife.

His grandson, the journalist and non-fiction author Sasha Abramsky , who lives in the USA , wrote an obituary for Chimen Abramsky in 2011. This was followed in 2014 by his book The House of Twenty Thousand Books , in which he tells Chimen Abramsky's career, his bibliophile collectibles and the function of his house as an intellectual meeting place in London. It was published in translation also in German with an afterword by Philipp Blom . The questions of the reviewer Hannes Hintermeier , how Chimen Abramsky financed his passion for collecting and how the collection was sold after his death, remain unanswered in the biography.

Fonts

  • with Henry Collins: Karl Marx and the British labor movement: Years of the first International . London: Macmillan 1965

literature

  • Ada Rapoport-Albert; Stephen J. Zipperstein (Ed.): Jewish History. Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky . Festschrift. London: Halban 1988.
  • Sasha Abramsky : The House of Twenty Thousand Books . London: Halban, 2014, ISBN 978-1-905559-64-0 , German translation: The house of twenty thousand books . Translated from the English by Bernd Rullkötter. With an afterword by Philipp Blom. Munich: dtv 2015, ISBN 978-3-423-28062-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Ada Rapoport-Albert: Chimen Abramsky obituary , in: The Guardian , March 18, 2010
  2. ^ Sasha Abramsky: Lives & letters: house of books , in: The Guardian , January 1, 2011
  3. ↑ Peter Dreier : The Leftwing Bibliophile: The Extraordinary Chimen Abramsky ( Memento of the original from August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: Jewish Currents , June 19, 2014 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / jewishcurrents.org
  4. ↑ Sasha Abramsky website http://www.sashaabramsky.com/index.php/the-house-of-twenty-thousand-books/
  5. ↑ Hannes Hintermeier: Salon for ideologies of all kinds . Review, in: FAZ , November 25, 2015, p. L17
personal data
SURNAME Abramsky, Chimen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Abramsky, Shimon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Judaist
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Minsk , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 2010
Place of death London , England , UK