Sunday, June 23, 2019

CHIMEN ABRAMSKY’S HOUSE OF TWENTY THOUSAND BOOKS

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/189017/chimen-abramsky

The narrative of the heretical son and the pious father engaged in a titanic patricidal clash on behalf of tradition and modernity is a stock cliché of Jewish storytelling. Yet the case of the Abramskys, the gap between the arch-conservative rabbi father and the eminent radical son was clearly in a league of its own. Chimen’s father Yehezkel Abramsky was a savant of Torah scholarship in his native Belarus. The scion of a grand rabbinical line, he was possessed of a photographic memory, incredible powers of memorization (which he bequeathed to his bibliographer son) and a genius for biblical exegesis. Groomed from childhood for a major career in the Litvak Orthodox world, he became a rabbi at the age of 17. Yehezkel, was also actively outspoken in his anti-Communism. For this crime he was prevented by the Soviet authorities from taking up a rabbinic post offered to him in late-1920s Palestine. Assuming the editorship of an anti-Communist journal got him arrested and sentenced to five years in a Siberian labor camp.

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