In July 1920, when my grandfather Chimen was nearly four years old, the town of Smalyavichy, in which his father Yehezkel was the rabbi, was besieged. It had changed hands several times during the ...

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue. There is no sound on earth like that of a quiet man, a dignified man, exploding in primal grief. Nothing compares to ...

In Joseph Roth’s haunting novel Job, a devout Jew named Mendel Singer flees the unremitting hardship of life in Tsarist Russia for the relative freedom of turn-of-the-century New York. However ...

It is difficult to think of a private house with 20,000 books. But this is what Chimen Abramsky's house was in north London. Chimen's life was as remarkable as his collection. He was born in Minsk in ...

Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), 336 pp., $27.95. In his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Walter Benjamin observed, “ownership is the most ...